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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 March 2011
The role of transcendental idealism in Kant's theory of knowledge has been both deliberately underrated1 and inadvertently exaggerated. If conceivably not necessary, its role in Kant's explanation of the possibility of a priori knowledge in the Critique of Pure Reason is at least pivotal to the success of the explanation. On the other hand, though transcendental idealism depends on Kant's epistemological criterion of an existing object, or, simply, his criterion of existence, the criterion for its part is actually independent of the idealism. In fact, it may be because this independence has hardly been recognized that commentators have been unaware of the role the criterion may actually be playing in the continuing controversy over the correct interpretation of the idealism. Altogether, this article addresses both shortcomings – the underestimation and the exaggeration of the role of the idealism in Kant's epistemology. While it places the idealism at the centre of the epistemology, it also separates the criterion of existence from the idealism. In highlighting this contrast, the article explains how the criterion may actually be contributing to the persistence of the ongoing dispute over the correct interpretation of the idealism.
1 See, for example, Strawson, P. F., The Bounds of Sense: An Essay on Kant's ‘Critique of Pure Reason’ (London: Methuen, 1966), e.g. pp. 21 ff.Google Scholar , and Guyer, Paul, Kant and the Claims of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason. All references to Kant's Critique are made in the customary way, to the first (A) and second (B) editions of the Critique, and all translations are from the Norman Kemp Smith translation, unless otherwise noted.
3 By ‘epistemological criterion’ I mean the criterion in Kant's theory of knowledge. It is not meant to cover any criterion that may belong to any knowledge itself that is subject to the theory, such as can be found in the second Postulate of Empirical Thought - actuality, or that may belong to Kant's metaphysics, such as may be found, for example, in the Transcendental Dialectic.
4 Cleve, James Van, Problems from Kant (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 37 ffGoogle Scholar . See , Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (London: Oxford University Press, reprinted 1957 (first edn 1912), pp. 86–7Google Scholar , cited by Van Cleve, ibid., p. 38.
5 Cleve, Van, Problems from Kant, p. 38.Google Scholar
6 Ibid., p. 40.
7 Ibid., p. 38.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid., p. 39.
12 Nicholas Rescher, ‘Kant and the ‘Special Constitution’ of Man's Mind: The Ultimately Factual Basis of the Necessity and Universality of A Priori Synthetic Truths in Kant's Critical Philosophy’, in Studies in Modality, American Philosophical Quarterly Monograph Series, 8 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), pp. 71–83Google Scholar , cited by Cleve, Van, Problems from Kant, p. 38Google Scholar.
13 Cleve, Van, Problems from Kant, p. 40Google Scholar.
14 Ibid.
15 Strawson, P. F., Introduction to Logical Theory (New York: John Wiley &C Sons, Inc., 1952), pp. 175 ff.Google Scholar
16 This entails that the concept of these logically independent objects is not Kant's concept of things in themselves, since the former allows us to intuit them (and indeed is part of his theory that we do intuit them), whereas for Kant we cannot intuit things in themselves. For a concept of these objects that is expressed independently of the stipulated condition that they are constituents of the presupposed fact that we intuit them, see Greenberg, Robert, Kant's Theory of A Priori Knowledge (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001) chs land 2.Google Scholar
17 In contrast to the negative argument given above in support of Kant's theory of our attribution of necessity to the propositions of arithmetic and geometry - the argument that was given as a rebutta l of Van Cleve's strengthened argument, and that thereby lent support to defences of Kant's theory such as Rescher's defence of what he takes to be Kant notion of a contingent necessity - I still owe the reader a positive argument that will provide the derivation that was promised in section 1.2 above.
18 It should be noted that the necessity in this case is that which belongs to the ascription only as it is a logical consequence of a set of propositions, and thus only as it is a conditional necessity, and not an absolute necessity. With the added proviso that certain of the conditions are contingencies, it would thus qualify as a contingent necessity, in Van Cleve's parlance. Hence, it would not be a necessity of a type Van Cleve would countenance, since it would involve rejecting the theorem of S4 mentioned above that Van Cleve accepts, namely, 
But then, what is not quite the same thing, Van Cleve's denial of necessity ascribed to a given proposition p is itself a conditional denial of necessity (see proposition 6 of Van Cleve's strengthened argument). In any case, Van Cleve's strengthened argument does not depend on this axiom of S4. Moreover, I have no t only tried to rebut his strengthened argument, in section 1.2 above, but am now, in this section of the article, 1.4, supporting Kant's explanation of our ascription of necessity to geometric propositions with a positive argument of my own.
19 At this point, I would like to thank Robert Hanna for his helpful review of the entire article and for his suggestions for its improvement. Of course, any deficiencies in the article remain my own responsibility. He finds that the interpretation of the Critique in the part of the article just completed - part 1 - is tantamount to his own model theoretic interpretation of the Critique: Kant and the Foundations of Analytic Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon/Oxford University Press, 2001), esp. pp. 239–264.Google Scholar
20 See Strawson, The Bounds of Sense, and Van Cleve, Problems from Kant, for example, for dual-object interpretations of transcendental idealism.
21 Probably the two best-known advocates of the dual aspect view are Prauss, Gerold, Kant und das Problem der Dinge an sich (Bonn: Bovier Verlag Herbert Grundmann, 1974), ch. 2Google Scholar , and Allison, Henry E., Kant's Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983)Google Scholar.
22 Perhaps Kant switched from ‘primordial’, or ‘original’ (ursprunglich), to ‘divine’ (gottlichen) when he came to characterizing the same being's cognitive self-consciousness, because he wanted to reserve ‘original’ for his characterization of our self-consciousness, that is, the self-consciousness of a being whose intuition is sensible. So he chose 'gottlichen' instead of ‘ursprunglich’ for the self-consciousness of a being whose intuition is intellectual and ‘original’ (B142).
23 See Langton, Rae, Kantian Humility (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998)Google Scholar . Of this concept of intellectual intuition Langton says, ‘we strike depths which I have no ambition to plumb’, p. 45. See also Walker, Ralph C. S., Kant: The Arguments of the Philosophers (London: Routledge &C Kegan Paul, 1978)Google Scholar . He also pronounces the concept a ‘mysterious idea’, p. 30.
24 This can be viewed as a response to a criticism of P. F. Strawson's, The Bounds of Sense. It is that Kant fails to argue for a ‘fundamental … complex premise of the Critique’, p. 250. This is the premjse that any knowledge involving perception that is the outcome of our being affected by things existing independently of perception cannot be knowledge of the things as they are in themselves; it can be knowledge ‘only of those things as they appear’, ibid. This same argument (in explanation and support of transcendental idealism) can also be viewed as supplementing and reinforcing the conclusions about transcendental idealism that were draAvn above in part 1, section 1.3. Rae Langton takes Strawson's criticism as a challenge, and views her book as supplying the missing argument, Kantian Humility, p. 24.
25 See note 23 above.
26 Werner S. Pluhar, trans. (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Co., 1996).
27 The same considerations would bear upon the objects of ‘all possible perceptions’ (B165) - nature as the ‘sum of all appearances’ (B163) -and also upon the objects of ‘experience in general’ and correspondingly upon the objects of ‘nature in general’, which can tell us what can be known as an object of experience (B165).
28 Among other places, see Quine, W. V, ‘Existence and Quantification’, in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), p. 94.Google Scholar