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Prolegomena To Any Future Metaphysics By Immanul Kant

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In The Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, Immanuel Kant endeavors to refute Hume’s claim that all ideas have their origins in experience through his own transcendental idealism (Prolegomena, introduction, CoP pg. 819) . To do this, Kant progresses the view that it is possible to have a priori truths. To support this refutation, Kant develops a conceptual scheme that works to explain how a priori truths are synthesized in the mind, and gives an account of Kant’s “two-world view”. This view explores the relation and existence of the phenomenal world and the world of things-in-themselves. For the purpose of this paper I will explain this conceptual scheme in order to understand how it is that Kant reaches the conclusion that things-in-themselves are unknowable. From this I will offer a critique of Kant’s account of things-in-themselves and suggest that they are unknowable because the idea of such things is unintelligible.
In order to understand Kant’s claiming of things-in-themselves being unknowable can …show more content…

It is important here to understand Kant’s notion of space and time. This is because to Kant, space and time do not come from experience, but are the form of our apprehension of the world. He believes that space and time are both basic and necessary to form experiences. Our experiences take the form of space and time, but are not the content of our experiences. Everything that appears to us must have spatial properties. It is this idea of space and time that helps develop the conceptual scheme. Within the conceptual scheme, Kant claims that there are twelve universal categories that process any possible object of experience, and as such are necessary to experience the world. They are (I) Unity, Plurality, Totality; (II) Reality, Negation, Limitation; (III) Substance, Cause, Community; (IV) Possibility, Existence, Necessity (Prolegomena, sec. 21, CoP pg.

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Conclusion: The mind is substantively different from the body and indeed matter in general. Because in this conception the mind is substantively distinct from the body it becomes plausible for us to doubt the intuitive connection between mind and body. Indeed there are many aspects of the external world that do not appear to have minds and yet appear none the less real in spite of this for example mountains, sticks or lamps, given this we can begin to rationalize that perhaps minds can exist without bodies, and we only lack the capacity to perceive them.

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Immanuel Kant's Philosophy, Critique of Pure Reason, demonstrates the connection between the human mind and its various faculties that contribute to the production of experience. Kant's reasoning to the production of experience truly outweighs the reasoning of production explained by David Hume in Treatise. Kant is far more detailed to the point where you would truly get a grasp of what he is say To begin with, in Immanuel Kant’s Transcendental Doctrine of Elements he discusses two concepts, space and time in relation to the mind. For example, he claims, “The effect of an object upon the faculty a representation, so far as we are affected by it, is sensation”(A 20). He is expressing that in order to experience things within the world we

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Space is a necessary a priori representation which underlies all outer intuitions.” (Kant, I. 1781, A 24) It is not possible to represent the absence of space to ourselves, we can however show a lack of objects in a space, but never a lack of space itself. Kant says then that space should rather be seen as the ‘condition of the possibility of appearances’ of objects and not as a result depending on the object therefore space is a priori necessary. This is best illustrated through Geometry and how the absolute certainty of ‘all geometrical propositions and the possibility of their a priori construction is grounded in this a priori necessity of space.’

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