Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-t5tsf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-11T03:26:11.320Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Kant's Argument for the Principle of Intensive Magnitudes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 October 2013

Tim Jankowiak
Tim Jankowiak*
Affiliation:
Southern Utah University Email: timjankowiak@suu.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

In the first Critique, Kant attempts to prove what we can call the ‘principle of intensive magnitudes’, according to which every possible object of experience will possess a determinate ‘degree’ of reality. Curiously, Kant argues for this principle by inferring from a psychological premise about internal sensations (they have intensive magnitudes) to a metaphysical thesis about external objects (they also have intensive magnitudes). Most commentators dismiss the argument as a failure. In this article I give a reconstruction of Kant's argument that attempts to rehabilitate the argument back into his broader transcendental theory of experience. I argue that we can make sense of the argument's central inference by appeal to Kant's theory of empirical intuition and by an analysis of the way in which Kant thinks sensory matter constitutes our most basic representations of objects.

Keywords

Kantintensive magnitudesensationperceptionempirical intuitiontranscendental idealism
Type
Articles
Information
Kantian Review , Volume 18 , Issue 3 , November 2013 , pp. 387 - 412
Copyright
Copyright © Kantian Review 2013 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Allais, Lucy (2009) ‘Kant, Non-Conceptual Content, and the Representation of Space’. Journal of the History of Philosophy, 47(3), 383–413.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Aquila, Richard (1983) Representational Mind: A Study of Kant's Theory of Knowledge. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Bennett, Jonathan (1966) Kant's Analytic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Descartes, Rene (1985) ‘Principles of Philosophy’. In Robert Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff and Dugald Murdoch (eds), The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 177–291.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Falkenstein, Lorne (1995) Kant's Intuitionism: A Commentary on the Transcendental Aesthetic. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.Google Scholar
Ginsborg, Hanna (2008) ‘Was Kant a Non-Conceptualist?’. Philosophical Studies, 137(1), 65–77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Guyer, Paul (1987) Kant and the Claims of Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Haag, Johannes (2007) Erfahrung und Gegenstand: Das Verhältnis von Sinnlichkeit und Verstand. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hanna, Robert (2008) ‘Kantian Non-Conceputalism’. Philosophical Studies, 137(1), 41–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hogan, Desmond (2009) ‘Noumenal Affection’. Philosophical Review, 118(4), 501–532.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Longuenesse, Béatrice (1998) Kant and the Capacity to Judge: Sensibility and Discursivity in the Transcendental Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pippin, Robert (1982) Kant's Theory of Form: An Essay on the Critique of Pure Reason. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Sellars, Wilfred (1967) Science and Metaphysics: Variations on Kantian Themes. Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview Publishing Co.Google Scholar
Sellars, Wilfred (2007) ‘The Role of Imagination in Kant's Theory of Experience’. In Kevin Scharp and Robert Brandom (eds), In the Space of Reasons: Selected Essays of Wilfred Sellars. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 454–466.Google Scholar
Stang, Nicholas (2013, forthcoming) ‘Adickes on Double Affection’. In Proceedings of the XIth International Kant Congress (De Gruyter).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Van Cleve, James (1999) Problems from Kant. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Warren, Daniel (2001) Reality and Impenetrability in Kant's Philosophy of Nature. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Wolff, Robert Paul (1973) Kant's Theory of Mental Activity. Gloucester: Peter Smith.Google Scholar