The World According to Kant: Appearances and Things in Themselves in Critical Idealism

Abstract

Anja Jauernig here addresses with great scholarship and philosophical insight a central issue in the interpretation of the Critique of Pure Reason: ‘The project of this book is to develop a comprehensive account of Kant's theoretical views in his theoretical critical philosophy or, perhaps more accurately, of the ontological implications of his theoretical critical philosophy. More specifically, my aim will be to sort out Kant's views on the nature of appearances, the nature of things in themselves, and the relation between them as presented and hinted in the Critique of Pure Reason…and associated writings’ (p. 1). This project, she thinks, is of more than historical interest, as Kant's ontological position, ‘critical idealism’, has great philosophical merit and may very well be in its main lines true (a thesis she does not claim to demonstrate in this book, though a sequel to it is planned). In taking this stance, she sharply dissents from the view, most closely associated in Anglo-American analytic philosophy with Peter Strawson, that Kant's transcendental idealism must either be rendered innocuous or disregarded altogether. ‘…Strawson's two-world reading of transcendental idealism, and his claim that Kant's more valuable philosophical insights can, fortunately, be “disentangled” from the doctrine of transcendental idealism, inspired legions of Kant scholars to either follow him in setting transcendental idealism to one side—or engage in the business of saving Kant from his bad reputation by devising readings that do not present him as a two-world theorist after all…’ (p. 24).