Kant, Cassirer and the Concept of Space

Abstract

Lachelier is reported to have remarked to Brunschvicg that “in France one has refuted Kant for some fifty years, without understanding him; for another fifty years now one admires him, without understanding him any better.” If there is more than local truth to this statement and if, where so many Frenchmen can be wrong, others may be so also, it would indicate that one would have to proceed with extreme caution in commenting on a philosopher about whose “real” meaning both disciples and adversaries appear to be singularly disagreed. Kant would surely have been impressed by the enormous display of scholarship devoted to uncover both the roots and the consistency of his philosophic endeavours. Yet, I believe, he would not have been altogether out of sympathy with an historically less ambitious attempt to assess the potential merit of his critical philosophy by applying it in ways and areas unknown to him. If, as Kant himself put it, his main concern was to teach a method of doing philosophy rather than a final philosophy and if, as he also said, “it is possible to understand an author better than he understood himself”, then there may indeed be some justification for trying to shed some new light on his critical philosophy by examining more closely what has been done with it by one of the most outstanding Kantians and in connection with a basic philosophical issue. The Kantian selected for treatment is Cassirer; the problem: the concept of space. In what follows I shall briefly summarize what I take to be Kant’s advance beyond all “pre-critical” philosophy. I shall then indicate what, from the vantage point of Cassirer’s Kantianism, appear to be both the merit and the limit of Kant’s own version of critical philosophy. With some attention to detail I shall then examine to whatever extent it may be developed at least with respect to one of Kant’s a priori concepts, namely the concept of space.KeywordsSymbolic FormMetrical SpacePerceptual SpaceNewtonian PhysicCritical PhilosophyThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.