Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: While disputes about the interpretation of Kant's transcendental idealism continue, there are perhaps currently some tendencies toward convergence in the literature.A number of recent interpretations agree on the need to make sense of Kant's transcendental idealism as a metaphysical position which holds that appearances are grounded in really existing things in themselves and are genuinely mind-dependent. 1 Dispute is focused on how exactly to understand the minddependence of appearances and their relation to things in themselves.In her dense, rich, bold, combative book, The World According to Kant, Anja Jauernig presents an intentional object interpretation of Kantian appearances.While she is not the first to understand Kantian appearances in this way, 2 the detail with which she develops the account makes a welcome and important contribution, which enlarges our interpretative options, including because this detail helps bring out differences between intentional object and phenomenalist readings.Jauernig sometimes explains her view through formal statements of a mind-dependent relation, such as that '[t]he being of an entity E is mind-dependent if, and only if, necessarily, if E has being, there is a finite mind, M, and E has being, at least partly, in virtue of the fact that M has, or could have, a possible complex representation whose presentational content includes E' (Jauernig 2021:1 See for example (Allais 2015; Chignell 2022; Rosefeldt 2022; Schafer 2022; Stang 2018; 2016).This contrasts with earlier work which disputed the idea that Kant is committed to things in themselves actually existing (Bird 2006; Senderowicz 2005) and disputed the idea that Kant's transcendental idealism should be understood as primarily a metaphysical position, rather than an epistemological or methodological one (Allison 1983). 2 For example, see (Aquila 1983b; 1983a;
DOI: 10.1111/phpr.13096
Author: Lucy Allais
Institutions: Johns Hopkins University, University of the Witwatersrand
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $2,760
OpenAlex ID: W4402336318