In this paper, I offer a systematic account of Kant’s view on ‘phenomenal substance’. Several studies have recently analyzed Kant’s notion of substance. However, I submit that more needs to be said about how this notion is reconceptualized within the critical framework to vindicate a genuine and legitimate sense of substance in the phenomenal realm. More specifically, I show that Kant’s transcendental idealism does not commit him to a rejection of substantiality in phenomena. Rather, Kant isolates a general notion of (...) substance (as ultimate subject) and argues that (i) the relationality of phenomena is compatible with this notion; and that (ii) matter and all its parts are the ultimate subjects of everything existing in space (as what is independently movable in space). I suggest that vindicating a genuine and legitimate notion of phenomenal substance has far-ranging consequences for the interpretation of Kant’s empirical realism. (shrink)

Kant describes intellectual intuition as a kind of non-sensible intuition that creates its objects and provides knowledge of them as noumena. Although he precludes intellectual intuition from the human mind, Reinhold attributes it to the human mind. Pioneering research has already shown that Reinhold deviates from Kant in this way to explain the possibility of a priori self-cognition. It has also already shown that Fichte follows Reinhold by deviating from Kant in the same way. Yet, other aspects of Reinhold’s doctrine (...) of intellectual intuition remain largely overlooked. Among the few Reinhold scholars who study it, the extant view is that intellectual intuition does not yield cognition of an absolute knower, and that only Fichte makes this assertion. However, this view ignores Reinhold’s claim that I must attribute all my representations to an absolute knower to explain the unity of experience. In this paper, I argue that we must take this claim seriously, and I show that, for Reinhold, my cognition of myself as an absolute knower in intellectual intuition enables me to attribute all my representations to myself as such a knower, and he does so prior to Fichte. (shrink)

Within Kant scholarship, there is an entrenched tendency to distinguish, on Kant’s behalf, between pure and ‘schematized’ categories. There is also a widespread tendency to view the schematized categories as conceptually richer than the pure categories. I argue that this reading of the distinction, which I call the standard view, should be rejected. In its place, I draw on a neglected part of Kant’s theory of marks – namely, his account of ‘synthetic attributes’ – to propose an account of the (...) distinction that preserves a strict identity between pure and schematized categories at the level of analysable content. (shrink)

I recently argued that critical realists ought to adopt transcendental idealism in favour of Bhaskar’s transcendental realism. In response, Dustin McWherter presents two arguments against transcendental idealism: it is inferior to transcendental realism because it cannot account for the epistemic significance of experimentation, and it is internally inconsistent because it affirms the existence of things-in-themselves. This brief reply defends transcendental idealism against both objections.

Kant states in §76 of the third Critique that the divine intuitive intellect would not represent modal distinctions. Kohl and Stang claim that this statement entails that noumena lack modal properties, which, in turn, conflicts with Kant’s attribution of contingency to human noumenal wills. They both propose resolutions to this conflict based on conjectures regarding how God might non-modally represent what our discursive intellects represent as modally determined. I argue that these proposals fail; the viable resolution consists in recognizing that (...) we modalize human noumenal wills as a merely regulative-practical principle in our judgements of imputation. (shrink)

I begin by considering a question that has driven much scholarship on transcendental idealism: are appearances numerically identical to the things in themselves that appear, or numerically distinct? I point out that much of the debate on this question has assumed that this is equivalent to the question of whether they are the same objects, but go on to provide textual, historical, and philosophical evidence that “object” (Gegenstand) and “thing” (Ding) have different meanings for Kant. A thing is a locus (...) of intensively gradable causal force, reality. I argue that appearances and things in themselves are not identical as objects, because the very concept of object-identity is tied, for Kant, to the concept of an intellect that would cognize the numerical identity of the objects in question. Because no intellect can be both discursive and intellectual, no intellect could cognize the numerical identity of objects across the phenomenal/noumenal divide, and thus the claim that they are identical has no content. However, the very same things, the same reality, can be given to our sensible intellects, and to divine intuitive intellect, as two non-overlapping domains of objects. Identity readers are thus shown to be right about the same thing relation, while non-identity readers are vindicated on the numerical identity of objects. (shrink)