Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: Anja Jauernig's book provides an exceptionally clear, rigorous, and illuminating account of Kant's critical idealism as an ontological doctrine that posits two layers of being or reality.Jauernig seeks to reconstruct "Kant's account of what there is in the world, understood as the sum total of everything that has reality, including, in particular, his account of appearances and things in themselves and their relation to one another" (xii).Central to Kant's view is the claim that our mind cannot actively produce the intuitive data that it needs for representing sensible appearances: it must receive such data from without via affection by things in themselves.In Jauernig's analysis, this appeal to things in themselves derives from a "basic", "rock-bottom" commitment (307): Kant holds that our faculty of intuition is passive and requires affection by things in themselves because he regards the human mind as finite.This finitude, our "inability to be ontologically creative" stands "in contrast to the ontologically creative nature of a divine infinite mind, which is purely active and does not stand in need of being given any material to bring forth representations or genuine existents" (314).Jauernig stresses that "From Kant's point of view, it is obviously true that the human mind is finite" and "this finitude entails that the human mind is ontologically uncreative" (316).Since our finite theoretical intellect lacks the power to produce sensible objects, we cannot represent such objects unless we receive sensations from existing things in themselves.The sensible world of human experience is mind-dependent.Objects like cats, including their spatiotemporal and causal properties, ontologically depend upon our shared cognitive capacities: "empirical objects have all of their spatial and temporal determinations in virtue of being represented by finite minds to have them" (155).But although spatiotemporal objects are "fully mind-dependent", they have genuine empirical reality: "a mind-dependent fact" or "a mind-dependent existence is still a kind of genuine fact" or "a kind of genuine existence" (156).Jauernig posits two conditions under which the objects of our representations genuinely exist: "empirical objects exist because" (this is the first criterion) "they not only conform to Kant's formal conditions of proper objecthood but" (this is the second criterion) "also are grounded
DOI: 10.1111/phpr.13099
Author: Markus Kohl
Institution: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4402336562