/lit/ - Literature

>>18759175
>>18758361

The mind cannot answer this question by examining the world of experience itself, because the sensory data of that world is precisely what's trying to be explained, and the laws of cause and effect are only applicable if structuring sensory data into a possible or actual experience. So Kant can't say that any thing-in-itself CAUSES sensory data to arise within our forms of intuition, which is the same as saying that our sensations cannot be the EFFECT of any thing-in-itself. Critics like Jacobi thought that this conclusion was fatal to Kant's whole enterprise.

What such critics didn't grasp is that physical, schematized rules are not the only way to draw logically valid inferences in Kant's system. Consider the following excerpt from Caygill's Kant Dictionary, under the entry for Thinking:

"In order to cognize an object 'I must be able to prove its possibility, either from its actuality as attested by experience, or a priori by means of reason' but 'I can THINK whatever I please, provided only that I do not contradict myself' (CPR B xxvi). Thus it is possible to think things-in-themselves, but not to know them, for as Kant 'reminds' his readers 'for THOUGHT the categories are not limited by the conditions of our sensible intuition, but have an unlimited field' (CPR B 166). It is, of course, also possible for thinking to be consistent with cognition, as in the case of synthetic a priori judgements where 'thinking is the act whereby given intuitions are related to an object' (CPR A247/B304). Such thinking must fulfil the conditions for the subsumption of intuitions under concepts, and its objects are accordingly restricted to those of a possible experience."

So technically, what can Kant say about the sensory data that arises within the mind's faculty of spatiotemporal intuition? That such sensations are the logical consequence of some logical ground; this logical ground he calls a thing-in-itself, which is unknowable but not unthinkable - in fact, it is required by the rule of "hypothetical relation" which is listed in the table of logical functions of judgement; when schematized, this table is rendered as the more-familiar table of categories.

So there ya go.