PHIL 250 Lecture 5: Things-in Themselves; Transcendental Idealism and Empirical Realism
10 Mar 2017
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Things-in themselves; transcendental idealism and empirical realism: there is a dialectical tension in kant"s conception of things-in-themselves. Kant refers to as things-in-themselves , and implies that they might be the causal origin of sensory data even if we cannot experience them. But to present noumena as things, and represent them as standing in causal relations, is to conceptualize them in terms of the categories, and this kant says, we cannot do. After all, even the concept of existence has application only to possible objects of experience. Kant does sometimes encourage us to think of noumena as entities. But perhaps it is wrong to think of noumena as shadowy things somehow behind or beyond experiences, as if every object that appears has a noumenal doppelganger. It is not that there are two objects the table-as-it-appears and the table- as-it-is and we can know the former and not the latter.
