Appearances and the Problem of Affection in Kant

Abstract

Hans Vaihinger, in the late nineteenth century, posed a now famous trilemma for Immanuel Kant's theory of affection: (1) If things-in-themselves are the affecting objects, then one must apply the categories beyond the conditions of their application (space and time). (2) If one holds that appearances are the affecting objects, then one must hold that these appearances which are the effects of affection are themselves the causes of affection. (3) If one holds that things-in-themselves affect the noumenal self in parallel with appearances affecting the empirical self, then that which is a representation for the noumenal self must serve as a causally efficacious thing-in-itself for the empirical self's production of an empirical representation of the very same object (so-called ‘double affection’).