Metaphysical Exposition Research Articles

Kant’s ‘Transcendental Exposition’ of Space and Time in the ‘Transcendental Aesthetic’: A Critique

Immanuel Kant’s purpose in setting forth the system of the critical philosophy is to explain how scientific knowledge (which deals with the ideas of physical objects in space and time) is possible while denying the claims of metaphysics. His views on space and time are borne out of the historical background of the Newtonian ‘absolutist’ and the Leibnizian ‘relationalist’ debate in the early modern period. Kant held to the Newtonian view that space and time are absolute and not a system of properties, determinations or relations dependent on the existence of physical objects as proposed by Leibniz. Yet, in contrast to Newton, he denies that space and time are independently existing substances. In critiquing Kant’s transcendental exposition of space and time, we explain the essential details of the metaphysical exposition of these concepts before giving the transcendental arguments. By tying the axioms of geometry to space and time and by showing that the latter are the universal, necessary structures of the way we experience nature, Kant preserves the a priori nature of geometry while arguing that it does give us objective knowledge about the world of experience that science studies. The work considers relevant statements in the Critique of Pure Reason in our interpretation of Kant’s theory. We criticize his transcendental arguments on the grounds that if we can show that they are problematic, then we are justified in claiming that his system is not adequate to do what it claims or does.

Conceptual Analysis and the Essence of Space: Kant’s Metaphysical Exposition Revisited

Abstract:I offer here an account of the methodology, historical context, and content of Kant’s so-called “Metaphysical Exposition of the Concept of Space” (MECS). Drawing on Critical and pre-Critical texts, I first argue that the arguments making up the MECS rest on a kind of conceptual analysis, one that yields (analytic) knowledge of the essence of space. Next, I situate Kant’s MECS in what I take to be its proper historical context: the debate between the Wolffians and Crusius about the correct analysis of the concept of space. Finally, I draw on the results of previous sections to provide a reconstruction of Kant’s so-called “first apriority argument.” On my reconstruction, the key premise of the argument is a claim to the effect that space grounds the possibility of the co-existence of whatever things occupy it.

Against the metaphysical exposition of space

Against the metaphysical exposition of space1 Gershom Scholem Translated by Julia Ng (bio) (1918, Bern) Against the metaphysical exposition of space, the following main objections are to be raised: I. Kant mixes up perception and intuition. The space of perception, that of intuition and that of mathematics are confounded with one another. The s[pace] of perception is a plane. [The space of] intuition per se is to be contested. [The space of] mathematics forms the real space problem. II. The entirely arbitrary usage of "represent" and "thinking" in connection with the argument in proposition 2. Kant's proposition does not provide proof. One cannot represent that there is no space though one can represent that there are no objects in it. This proposition is false for the space of mathematics because the space of mathematics per se cannot be represented. It is false for experiential space because one cannot represent that there are no objects in it. Thus Kant confounds the two and puts "thinking" in the second part of the proposition, which proves nothing, because an equivocation has taken place. [End Page 456] III. The mixing up of concept and intuition through false terminology. "Space and concept of space" are two different things. Kant's entire argumentation in propositions 3 and 4 is therefore without substance [lit.: without object]. He only proves that the concept of space is not a concept of a concept, which is self-evident. Result: an investigation of the problem is impossible on the grounds of Kantian determinations. The transcendental appears in Kant and Cohen as a magical concept. // In the case of a posteriori objects, to the extent that they are given, i.e., real, it is not possible to pose the question of their possibility other than under the condition of [giving] an answer in [the form of] an analytic judgment. (By contrast, it is of course possible to answer the question of the "How" of this object, in the sense of what properties it has (Quale), with a synthetic judgment. With a priori entities,2 the question of How in the sense of Quale (what properties does it have) is completely meaningless; rather, there is here the prospect in the Kantian sense that, even after the reality of such a priori entities has been demonstrated by means of a metaphysical exposition, the question of the possibility of such a priori entities may still be posed with a view towards getting an answer in [the form of] a synthetic judgment. Now by designating both this last question and the question of the Quale with a "How," Kant gains the possibility of deviously acquiring the transcendental through the following quaternio terminorum [fallacy of four terms]: [major premise] I can ask "How" of every entity. [minor premise] The question of Quale (what properties does it have?) is meaningless in the case of a priori entities. [conclusion] The only meaningful question of How with regard to a priori entities is this: how is it possible, the transcendental question. Page 139 in Cohen is the height of nonsense. Link between logic and ethics: the law shall be!!! Why is he grumbling about Barbarossa?! And on what grounds shall it be? Not along the lines of morals, but rather—the [End Page 457] highest principle shall exist because of the "fact of science" and thus because of Newton! Because the earth revolves around the sun! The entire passage is groundless. We "want" to recognize necessity—as if there were a logical willing where there isn't even a logical must. Cohen wants to claim (on page 77) that only the posing of the question of the a priori is timelessly valid, but that the content, on the other hand—[the question of] which ones are the fundamental concepts—is determined by the "progressive culture of the spirit." For this reason, the metaphysical exposition is supposed to possess irrefutable validity in its tendency alone, but only relative validity in its results. The mystical obscurity is illustrated most distinctly here. A critical right is granted to positivism. The conceivability of such an evolution, if it is to have serious meaning at all, is unintelligible. The metaphysical exposition aims...

Introduction to the Special Issue

Introduction to the Special Issue Julia Ng (bio) and Rochelle Tobias (bio) The friendship between Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem has long been a subject of scholarly interest, but in recent years critical attention has turned to the influence of the German-Jewish philosopher Hermann Cohen on Benjamin's and Scholem's approach to religion, history, epistemology, and ethics. As a founder of the Marburg school of neo-Kantianism, Cohen represented one of the major trends in German thought at the turn of the twentieth century. He sought to replace transcendental subjectivity with an objectivity formulated strictly in terms of the "fact of science." Cohen also represented a rational Jewish theology defined by Enlightenment secularization and cosmopolitanism. Benjamin and Scholem encountered Cohen in the final period of his life, when his thought faced challenges from many quarters, including phenomenology and various strains of Jewish mysticism. Yet for both, Cohen served as the touchstone for many of their discussions during their early years and remained a point of reference for their subsequent writing. In fact, it was the shared interest in neo-Kantianism that brought the two friends together in the first place. Both sought to work out a philosophy of Judaism based on a "mathematical theory of truth," to borrow Scholem's phrase. In August 1916 the two met to discuss history and the "shape" of time as developed in Cohen's philosophy. Following this conversation, they corresponded on language, messianism, mathematics, and the Kantian theory of knowledge. Finally in 1918 they spent the summer studying Kant alongside Cohen's monograph Kants Theorie der Erfahrung. [End Page 427] The Modern Language Notes is proud to publish two sets of notes by Scholem from 1918, which document the progress he and Benjamin made in their study of Kant's critical philosophy and Cohen's interpretation. The notes have never been published before. The first set entitled "Über Kant" attests to the friends' interest in mathematics and the questions it raises about the notion of space in the Critique of Pure Reason and Cohen's discussion of it in Kants Theorie der Erfahrung. The second set entitled "Gegen die metaphysische Erörterung des Raumes" continues with this theme, albeit with emphasis on Cohen's response to Kant's exposition of space in the "Transcendental Aesthetic" in the first Critique. Thanks to Julia Ng's transcription and translation of the notes, as well as her annotations, scholars can now assess the influence of Cohen and mathematical thought on Benjamin's concept of history and Scholem's studies of the Kabbalah. The articles included in the issue make a powerful case for the importance of Cohen for Benjamin's reflections on poetry, language, history, and fate and Scholem's efforts to conceive, and represent, infinity. In her article "Kant's Theory of Experience at the End of the War: Scholem and Benjamin read Cohen," Julia Ng provides a critical commentary to the two sets of notes written by Scholem published in this issue. Drawing on contemporaneous fragmentary remarks by Benjamin on the neo-Kantian concept of science, Ng argues that in the months leading up to the end of the Great War, Scholem and Benjamin devote much of their time to studying Cohen's Kants Theorie der Erfahrung in an effort to work out a response to one central problem: the invented ground of the neo-Kantian concept of experience. In the milieu of the epochal transition from the historical completion of German Idealism to the birth of the influential new school of phenomenology, Scholem and Benjamin position themselves in a contest between the constructibility of being and the fundamental heterogeneity of the material of reality. Taking a cue from Scholem's mathematical studies, they attempt to formally revise the concepts of infinity, intuition, and concept at work in Cohen's interpretation of Kant's metaphysical exposition of space. As a result, Ng suggests, Scholem and Benjamin arrive at an articulation of the relation between "mathematics and language, i.e., mathematics and thinking" that enables them in turn to bring the theory of experience into relation with its own invented ground. Werner Hamacher's essay "Intensive Languages" articulates a practical demand for experience that...

The completeness of Kant’s metaphysical exposition of space

: In the first edition of his book on the completeness of Kant’s table of judgments, Klaus Reich shortly indicates that the B-version of the metaphysical exposition of space in the Critique of pure reason is structured following the inverse order of the table of categories. In this paper, I develop Reich’s claim and provide further evidence for it. My argumentation is as follows: Through analysis of our actually given representation of space as some kind of object (the formal intuition of space in general), the metaphysical exposition will show that this representation is secondary to space considered as an original, undetermined and as such unrepresentable intuitive manifold. Now, following Kant, the representation of any kind of object involves diversity, synthesis and unity. In the case of our representation of space as formal intuition, this involves, firstly, a manifold a priori, i.e. space as pure form, delivered by the transcendental Aesthetic, secondly, a figurative, productive synthesis of that manifold, and, thirdly, the unity provided by the categories. Analysing our given representation of space – the task of the metaphysical exposition – amounts to dismantling its unity and determine its characteristics with respect to the categories.

Kant's Metaphysical Exposition. On Philosophical Expositions Considered as Analysis of Given Concepts

Kant's Metaphysical Exposition. On Philosophical Expositions Considered as Analysis of Given Concepts

Kant on Intuition in Geometry

It's well-known that Kant believed that intuition was central to an account of mathematical knowledge. What that role is and how Kant argues for it are, however, still open to debate. There are, broadly speaking, two tendencies in interpreting Kant's account of intuition in mathematics, each emphasizing different aspects of Kant's general doctrine of intuition. On one view, most recently put forward by Michael Friedman, this central role for intuition is a direct result of the limitations of the syllogistic logic available to Kant. On this view, Kant's reasons for introducing intuition are taken to be logical or mathematical, rather than philosophical. The other tendency, which I shall try to develop here, emphasizes an epistemological or phenomenological role for intuition in mathematics arising out of what may loosely be called Kant's ‘antiformalism.’This paper, which focuses specifically on the case of geometry, falls into two parts. First, I consider Kant's discussion of intuition in the Metaphysical Exposition of the concept of space.

Peculiar Fate: Metaphysics and World-History in Kant (review)

638 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 31:4 OCTOBER a993 that his intended readers will include beginning students. He keeps the main line of Hume's arguments dearly in focus, the discussion of interpretive issues brief, and he avoids getting bogged down in the complexity of exegetical detail that is the more appropriate concern of advanced students and scholars. Given the amount of controversy over practically every aspect of Hume's thought, one is bound to find that some issue that one considers important for understanding Hume is not addressed, or that one's favored interpretation on some particular issue is not presented. But, aside from this being inevitable in a book of this nature, one should consider that Penelhum's overall presentation prepares the student both to expect differences in interpretation and to recognize that such differences have important implications for philosophical evaluation. This book is an excellent example of a sympathetic approach to the view~of a great philosopher. It looks for merits without ignoring defects. Thus, it will not only teach students a good deal about Hume; it will also teach them a good deal about how to go about understanding any philosopher. MARIE MARTIN Clemson University Peter D. Fenves. A Peculiar Fate: Metaphysicsand WorM-Historyin Kant. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991. Pp. xii + 3o6. Cloth, $36.5o. An all-too-common feature of Kant scholarship is to overlook or explain away some of the disconcerting or apparently odd aspects of his work in order to focus on the systematic architecture of the three great Critiques. Whatever appears not to fit with Kant's teaching as presented in these, its core, tends to be dismissed as a product of his sloppiness, haste, or enthusiasm. In addition, his "pre-critical" works are treated simply in the light of the "mature" works, with his speculations about, say, life on other planets most often regarded as embarrassing youthful indiscretions, if indeed they are mentioned at all. The leading virtue of Peter Fenves's A PeculiarFate:Metaphysicsand World-Historyin Kant is that he does not take the meaning of the three Critiques as self-evident, but regards them rather as mysteries whose elucidation requires a fresh reading of the other works in the Kantian corpus. In so doing, he takes two approaches: searching for continuities in the concerns of Kant's pre-critical and critical writings, and considering how well his "occasional" writings complement their "systematic" and "philosophical" counterparts. The Kant who emerges from this treatment appears much more eloquent and poetic, and much less drily systematic, than is ordinarily the case. Fenves sets himself the ambitious task of exploring the "peculiar fate" (1) of reason, which, he says, is "the impossibility of rendering a reason why precisely those questions that constitute metaphysica specialismthe nature of God, the rational soul, and the world--have to arise..." (2). While the limits of reason's self-understanding cannot be explained rationally, they can be discerned and described in Kant's "occasional" works, "where the presentation outdoes the basic theses it is supposed to illustrate..." (a). BOOK REVIEWS 639 The book is thus divided into three parts, each juxtaposing an occasional essa)) with "the major metaphysical exposition to which it is an addendum" (288): the Universal Natural History with the Nova dilucidatio; the Idea for a Universal History with the first Critique; and the Conflict of the Faculties with the third Critu~ue. This point of departure gives Fenves a license to explicate the imagery Kant uses and to account for the feelings he associates with reason. The results of such a "literary" study are sometimes interestingly revealing, sometimes irritatingly fanciful . Most interesting is his discussion of the feeling of respect associated with human recognition of the moral law "as an apodictically certain fact, as it were, of pure reason .... "~ Reason's self-legislation--a "fact" produced by a "factory" (~ 19 n. 26), not something given in experience--evokes respect, which "includes no reference to the course of appearances, no relation to the sensible world, no relation to phenomenality at all" (~21). This absolutely necessary respect points to an inexplicable , fateful, or absurd ground of human freedom. While "It]he being of man...

The Metaphysical Exposition: An Analysis of the Concept of Space

The Metaphysical Exposition: An Analysis of the Concept of Space