Kant and Short Arguments to Humility

Abstract

Abstract Offers an extended analysis of the problems of idealism and interaction as treated in Rae Langton’s recent monograph, Kantian Humility (1998). It endorses Langton’s thought that Kant’s notion of things in themselves has much to do with a conception of the intrinsic natures of things, but it finds difficulties in Langton’s own argument that transcendental idealism, in the sense of an insistence on our ignorance of things in themselves, is to be understood as resting basically on the consequences of the mere receptivity of our experience. There are historical and systematic problems with this reading (concerning key features in the development of Kant’s treatment of space, time, and interaction), and in some ways it is very close to a questionable and influential reading of Kant by his German idealist successors (and some versions of the contemporary ‘merely methodological’ interpretation of transcendental idealism, criticized elsewhere under the heading of the so-called ‘short argument to idealism’).