IX—Closing the Gap: A New Answer to an Old Objection against Kant’s Argument for Transcendental Idealism

In this paper I present a new solution to the so-called ‘neglected alternative’ objection against Kant’s argument for transcendental idealism. According to this objection, Kant does not give sufficient justification for his claim that not only are space and time forms of our intuition but they also fail to be things in themselves or properties thereof. I first discuss a proposal by Willaschek and Allais, who try to defend Kant against this charge by building on his account of a priori intuition, and argue that it is insufficient to meet the objection in its full force. I then present my own solution to the problem. It is based on a reconstruction of Kant’s account of properties of appearances, and tries to show that this account implies that spatio-temporal properties could in principle not pertain both to appearances and to things in themselves.