Invited Papers: Kant's Transcendental Idealism

Author(s): Ralph Meerbote

Source: Nos, Vol. 20, No. 1, 1986 A. P. A. Central Division Meetings (Mar., 1986), pp. 67-69
Published by: Wiley
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2215283
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 ABSTRACTS OF INVITED PAPERS 67

Kant's Transcendental Idealism

RALPH MEERBOTE

UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER

Henry Allison's recent Kant's Transcendental Idealism, thoughtful,

stimulating, and rewarding, does not wholly succeed in characterizing
and in defending Kant's thesis of transcendental idealism. But such
are the merits of this work that it will serve as ground of depature
for many future efforts. (A) Allison's account of that transcenden-
tal ideality which is the result of a required subsumption of objects
of cognitive experience under categorial conditions is inadequate
in that it does not fully capture the transcendental ideality of the
categorial conditions themselves. In particular, Allison is largely silent
on the question of the truth-conditions which govern categorial prin-
ciples, his interpretation of the second half of the Transcendental
Deduction in B notwithstanding. According to Kant, only a
transcendental subjectivism can answer this question, and in this
lies the ideality of these principles. Allison's readiness to assign a
verificationist gloss to Kant's conditions gets in the way here. (B)
Allison's account of that transcendental ideality which is the result
of an indispensable requirement of intuition for human knowledge,
including a required schematization of categorial conditions, similarly
leaves something to be desired, despite his discussion of intuition
and imagination, in that it does not contain a full statement of the
transcendental ideality and subjectivity of space and time as forms
of empirical intuition. On the positive side, I believe Allison to be
correct in insisting on an epistemic rather than an ontological reading
of transcendental idealism, as long as it is realized that Kant is also
interested in ontological questions and that an epistemic reading
does not exclude (indeed requires) an account of the nature of space
and time.
The matters raised in criticism (A) and (B) are related to one
another, but it is instructive to consider them in separation from
each other as far as this is possible. The transcendental ideality of
categorial conditions and the resulting respect in which objects
necessarily, but non-analytically, subsumed under them share in
such ideality are according to Kant a necessary condition of an
empirical realism which he also adopts. Empirical realism is as
epistemic a doctrine as transcendental idealism in that it holds that
all objects and states properly subsumable under categorical prin-

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 68 NOUS

ciples are empirically knowable. Once certain ontological matters

have been properly incorporated into Kant's theory, this should be
understood to mean that for objects both existing and properly sub-
sumable under categories there are no truth-value gaps in the ap-
plication of categorically conditioned properties. Empirical realism
is at the same time also an existential realism, and the simultaneous
empirical reality and transcendental ideality of existing Kantian ob-
jects of cognitive experience consists in the fact that the factual ex-
istence of such objects and the factual instantiations by them of pro-
perties are not the result of mental acts of cognizing subjects while
the empirical knowability of such factual existence and of such fac-
tual instantiations requires that objects and their properties be ex-
pressed by terms governed by a transcendental, i.e., epistemic, logic
which contains transcendental-logical principles of measurability, re-
identification, and temporal and spatial orderability of objects. The
principles of such a logic are conditions of real possibility and are
a prior and true of possible objects which they jointly and non-
analytically constitute and hence (given Kant's theory of a priori
constitution) are true in the actual world only if presupposed (and
hence believed) by actual or possible rational subjects (of some kind)
and only if at least some of the really possible objects which they
make possible exist in that world. It is at least logically possible
for neither of these two conditions to obtain in the actual world.
Kant also believes these two necessary conditions to be jointly suffi-
cient for the truth of categorial principles. An account of the notion
of presupposition is required to appreciate the full force of Kantian
subjectivity for categories.
An account which limits itself to categorial conditions and their
ideality is severely incomplete, and it is here that matters alluded
to in (B) above come to the fore. Two related considerations lead
to these further matters. (i) Epistemic logic as characterized above
is incomplete in that according to Kant singularity and hence singular
reference have not yet been accounted for. Givenness of objects in
empirical intuition is required for both. (ii) Also according to Kant,
space and time are forms of empirical intuition and are transcenden-
tally subjective. In this specific subjectivity we find another respect
in which objects of cognitive experience are transcendentally ideal.
A priori principles of space and time and the principle of numerical
individuation and the a priori schematizability which space and time
make possible must be added to categorial principles. As is the case
for the latter, the former are presupposed and hold of really possi-
ble objects, and presupposition again is the key to subjectivity.
Allison correctly stresses intuitivity and schematization as
transcendentally ideal requirements of human knowledge and in this

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ABSTRACTS OF INVITED PAPERS 69

connection correctly assigns importance to the function performed

by the schematizing imagination. But his discussion of the an-
tinomies, where Kantian ideality of space and time are crucially
put to work both in Kant's descriptions of the problems and in their
solutions, can be improved upon by developing a non-vertificationist
and transcendentally subjectivist interpretation of the conditions on
real possibility furnished by space and time. With Allison, I want
to explore Kant's contrast between the infinity of space as a totum
and the finite character of a subregion as a compositum. More general-
ly, the contrast between unschematizeable principles of reason on
the one hand and intuition, schematization, and schematized
categorial principles on the other needs more exploration since the
non-intuitivity of principles of reason on the one hand and the
epistemically required restriction to what is intuitable on the other
will be seen to be the clues to understanding Kant's description
and resolution of the antinomies and thereby of his idealism.

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