A Non-Constructivist Reading of Kant’s Philosophy

Abstract

The article reveals the consequent process of the Кantian empirical cognition. Separating a priori and empirical knowledge, the philosopher gives grounds for a more detailed analysis of empirical and pure experience. Since Kant denies empiricism, the question arises what is an experience for him? I think that spatio-temporal relations that play a leading role in his theory of experience can be analyzed on the transcendental level as the concept of magnitude, while the sensations of space and time, in turn, can be pretty good described from the perspective of a physiology of empirical experience. Kant’s phenomenological approach allows for a description of the mechanism of perception, beginning with the pure intuitions, which underlie mathematics, and ending with empirical sensations. Thus, I claim that it is possible to reconstruct a certain scale of perceptions: there are intuitions of space and time on the transcendental level, which gives the possibility of applying mathematics to nature. This level becomes a starting point for the subsequent stage of presentation of mathematical time and geometric space. The process results in empirical judgments which don’t have an apodictic character any more.