Kant's Arguments In The Critique Of Pure Reason

The most central and perhaps most controversial thesis that Kant argues for in the Critique of Pure Reason is that of transcendental idealism, namely, the notions that there is a distinction between things as they appear to us and things as they are in themselves, that we do not and cannot have knowledge of things as they are in themselves, and that things as they appear to us are, in some sense and to some extent, mind-dependent. Interpretations of Kant’s arguments for this thesis have divided philosophers into two camps: one-worlders and two-worlders. In this paper, I reject the latter view and focus on three different one-world interpretations to show the strengths and weaknesses of each in order to find the most comprehensive and coherent

146). This a clear advantage of Langton’s interpretation, for methodological/epistemic one-world views are criticized for making Kant’s position trivial. What Kant sees as a revolutionary breakthrough, namely that we cannot know things in themselves and that we are missing something in not knowing things as they are in themselves, methodological/epistemic one-world views reduce transcendental idealism to “claims such as that knowledge of things is possible only under the conditions of knowledge, or that the human point of view is just the human point of view (Matthews 1982), or that ‘we build for ourselves a picture of the world’” (“Kant’s One World” 667). This, in effect, renders what Kant claims to be revolutionary as trivial and

When considering things as they appear, we are considering them in relation to our epistemic conditions, namely sensibility and understanding. Conversely, to consider things as they are in themselves is to consider them apart from our epistemic conditions. Thus, it is not the nature of the thing as it is in itself which must be reflected in order for us to experience something as an object, but the cognitive structure of the mind, or its method of representing. This, then, “practically makes transcendental idealism true by definition” (“Kant’s One World” 667), since it is obvious that we cannot have knowledge of such things considered apart from our epistemic conditions, and therefore renders Kant’s doctrine as