Abstract

Most commentators of the first Critique hold that Kant adopts an imposition theory, according to which the subject imposes forms of knowledge on the matter of experience. I contend that Kant's argument is the other way round: he abstracts different "forms" from experience in such a "transcendental" way that he does not beg the sceptic's question. If one adopts this interpretive model, the Transcendental Aesthetic becomes a very solid "exposition," and one can clearly see how Kant links the forms of a subject's experience with those of an object there. I explore this subject/object link further by proposing a new interpretation of the distinction between the appearance and the thing in itself. The key is to discern three, instead of the traditionally two, different senses of the "thing in itself" , and to combine the epistemically negative with the ontologically positive implications for the thing in itself, interpreted in the transcendental sense. This interpretation underscores Kant's Copernican revolution, which is best seen as his explanation of why the possibility that something does not conform with our knowledge would not undermine our possession of empirical knowledge in general. Kant's revolutionary approach is also highlighted in my discussion of the Transcendental Deduction, which I interpret as his attempt to merge the conditions of the experience-unity and the object-unity in our necessary use of the categories. Against Strawson's and Allison's interpretations, I argue that the Deduction, though it does not directly prove the existence of spatio-temporal objects and their objective order, is a powerful argument for our possible knowledge of objects, inner and outer. I then outline how the argument of the Deduction can be extended to the Principles of Pure Understanding. In addition, I point out that if Kant's account of the unities of space and time in the Transcendental Aesthetic is seen as an organic part of the First Analogy and the Refutation of Idealism, his culminative argument for the existence of a unified spatio-temporal world is a very sophisticated theory