A problem for Kant
pp. 331-349
in: Esa Saarinen, Risto Hilpinen, Ilkka Niiniluoto, Merrill Provence Hintikka (eds), Essays in honour of Jaakko Hintikka, Berlin, Springer, 1979Abstract
Kant's basic account of knowledge in the Critique of Pure Reason is well known. Objects, which exist in themselves in independence of their relations to our human sensibility, affect that sensibility in a quasi-causal manner. As a result of this affection, we acquire intuitions which represent these objects to us as single, individual entities. By means — and only by means — of our mental awareness of these intuitions, in conjunction with rule-governed synthetic activities that we carry out on the manifolds of the intuitions, do we come to know the objects in question. We know the objects simply in the forms that the intuitions represent them to us as having. But, Kant argues, these forms are necessarily spatiotemporal in character, and space and time are simply entities in the mind that structure objects as those objects are represented to us as being by our intuitions. Hence, according to Kant, objects, as they exist in themselves, are non-spatiotemporal. And when we come to know objects via our mental contemplation of our intuitions, we know these objects only as they appear to us (or are represented to us as being) by our intuitions and not as they are in themselves.
