/lit/ - Literature

>>18755203

>He says that the sensory world is saved from being a subjective illusion by the uniformity of appearances. But such uniformity of appearances to me suggests intuition of things as they actually are.

It's not mere uniformity of appearances that saves the reality of the external world, but several special kinds of uniformities that all operate together in a hierarchy, Kant argues.

Kant wrote his Refutation of Idealism to address this issue (refutation of Berkeley's "idealism" especially, which claims that outer representations of spatial objects are imaginary and only exist in inner sense - though Kant also addresses his refutation against Descartes' skepticism of the external world, which is more agnostic about the reality of space than Berkeley).

In all honesty, Kant's Refutation of Idealism is one of his more confusing and suspicious arguments, and reads more like something he cobbled together to plug a hole in his system; the premises seem very vague, even for Kant, and the inferences are not obvious. He revised the argument several times over the years because he seemed to be particularly unsatisfied with it, and it's not clear if it's even the same argument each time.

Pic related is a short summary. I'll try to present a more complete one, as charitably as I can, later today if I'm available to.

>There is nothing to suggest to the average person that what they perceive on an every day basis are mere mental representations.

Well yeah, and there was also nothing to suggest to the average person that the earth orbits the sun, until a few ingenious people did a lot of hard work to demonstrate it.