Independence and Transcendental Idealism

Abstract

There is sense, I think, in taking up an obscure and difficult, but clearly important, philosophical doctrine, assuming it to be true, and asking if it solves the problem that is its target. In an important section of The Significance of Philosophical Scepticism' Stroud undertakes such a project with respect to transcendental idealism. He wishes to see whether, on the assumption that that Kantian doctrine is true, the problematic idealism of Descartes-scepticism, in short-is refuted. Could transcendental idealism refute scepticism? Indeed, Stroud does not devote himself to a careful textual exegesis of transcendental idealism. He takes, rather, the doctrine to be roughly characterizable in terms of a few claims that it licenses. Those main claims are: (i) objects are dependent upon our sensibility, (2) the principles that 'constitute' objects for us must be 'in us', and (3) objects must conform to us.2 The project for Stroud is to see if there is any interpretation of these claims such that under it, our ordinary knowledge claims (a) come out true, while (b) continuing to assert everything that common sense wishes to assert (the point of this last will emerge shortly). This too, I think, is appropriate. For it is Stroud's contention that no doctrine that commits itself to such claims could refute the Cartesian sceptic. If he is right, then no amount of poring over Kant's texts is likely to help us against the sceptic. I shall argue in what follows however that there is an interpretation of the above claims, and of the objects they yield, that is of service against the sceptic. I will not suggest that the interpretation I put forward is faithful in detail to Kant. Kant scholars have struggled for a very long time over just how to take transcendental idealism. I daresay that a good many of them have, in one form or another, taken as dim a view of it as Stroud has taken, because of the difficulty of interpreting the above claims.3