In the First Antinomy of The Critique of Pure Reason, Kant drew two conclusions from the argument he gives. First, Kant took his argument to show that the referent of the concept of ‘world’ does not exist as a thing in itself. For at B532 he says.

In the First Antinomy of The Critique of Pure Reason, Kant drew two conclusions from the argument he gives. First, Kant took his argument to show that the referent of the concept of ‘world’ does not exist as a thing in itself. For at B532 he says.

Direct Realism as a theory of perception has traditionally been thought to collapse on the existence of hallucinations. The cause of that collapse is what is familiar to philosophers as the Argument from Illusion. And what sustains that argument is the equally familiar No-Intrinsic-Difference Claim. The argument and the claim conspire to undermine Direct Realism as follows. We are first given cases in which we are acquainted with perceptual states of affairs that can be neither material bodies nor parts of (...) such bodies. We are told that what we see in such cases is phenomenally indistinguishable from what we see in cases of veridical perception: There is, so the argument goes, no characteristic of either kind of state of affairs available to inspection which enables us to distinguish one from the other. And since there is no phenomenal difference between them, there is also no intrinsic difference; hence, we are never directly aware of material bodies or their parts in perception—from which it is generally inferred that Direct Realism is false. (shrink)

The paper constitutes a reply to a recent attack (gull, "bradley's argument against relations," "new scholasticism", xlv) on the conclusions of my earlier article, "the reality of relations" ("new scholasticism", xlv). the main issues are (1) whether russell's solution to the bradleyan argument is question-begging; (2) whether the distinction between the representation and the analysis of a fact can solve bradley's problem; and (3) whether the answer i give to bradley's argument rests on a confusion of three very different issues. (...) i argue, first, that the exegesis of russell which gull proposes in place of mine merely provides a more elaborate statement of the original mistake; secondly, that the distinction between representation and analysis is powerless to answer what i call bradley's argument from scarcity; and thirdly, that the answer i offer to that argument, so far from confounding three very different issues, is clearly addressed to only one of them. (shrink)

As I understand him, Veatch claims that there is a kind of proposition in which essential predicates figure, such propositions having the following characteristics.