4 - The Transcendental Aesthetic

Summary

Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is divided into two sections, the “Transcendental Doctrine of Elements” and the “Transcendental Doctrine of Method”, the former of which is further divided into two parts, the “Transcendental Aesthetic” and the “Transcendental Logic.” Although it is comparatively very short, the Transcendental Aesthetic is a crucially important component of Kant's work, its stated aim being to present a “science of all principles of a priori sensibility” (A 21/B 35). Here, Kant articulates a theory of pure sensible intuition, and deploys arguments in support of the transcendental ideality of space and time. Taken together, the Transcendental Aesthetic and the Transcendental Logic (“which contains the principles of pure thinking”) are meant to provide an account of human cognition and judgment according to which sensibility and understanding - our capacities for being affected by and for thinking about objects, respectively - each play ineliminable roles. In what follows, I will identify and explain the terminology that Kant introduces in the Aesthetic; present and discuss the arguments Kant offers in the Metaphysical and Transcendental Expositions of Space and Time; and show how (and why) Kant concludes from these “expositions” that space and time are transcendentally ideal.