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The Bounds of
Transcendental
Logic
Dennis Schulting
The Bounds of Transcendental Logic
Dennis Schulting
The Bounds
of Transcendental
Logic
Dennis Schulting
Bavaria, Germany
ISBN 978-3-030-71283-9 ISBN 978-3-030-71284-6 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71284-6
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature
Switzerland AG 2022
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Acknowledgements
Permission to use previously published material in the present volume is

hereby acknowledged for (sections from) the following journal articles,
which appear here in substantially revised form: Kant’s Idealism: The
Current Debate. In Kant’s Idealism. New Interpretations of a Controversial
Doctrine, ed. D. Schulting and J. Verburgt, 1–25. Dordrecht: Springer,
2011; Kant’s Idealism and Phenomenalism. A Critical Notice of Lucy
Allais’s Manifest Reality. Kant’s Idealism and His Realism. Studi kantiani
XXX (2017): 191–202; and Gaps, Chasms and Things in Themselves: A
Reply to My Critics. Kantian Review 23(1) (2018): 131–143. Chap. 2
was published in Dutch in Tijdschrift voor Filosofie 80(2)(2018): 337–346.
A section in Chap. 5 has been translated and revised from the Dutch
original that was published, as part of a larger article, in Tijdschrift voor
Filosofie 80(2) (2018): 363–378. I again thank Christian Onof for kindly
agreeing to read and comment on the penultimate draft. I also thank
Henny Blomme, Anil Gomes, Alexandra Newton, and Robert Watt for
their thoughtful critiques of a range of themes from my Kant’s Radical
Subjectivism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), which were published as part of
book symposia in Tijdschrift voor Filosofie, Kantian Review and Critique
respectively, and which solicited the replies that can be found across some
of the chapters in this volume.
vii
Contents
1 Introduction 1
Notes 7
References 8
Part I The Metaphysics of Transcendental Idealism and

Conceivability 9
2 Apperception, Objectivity, and Idealism 11

Notes 22
References 23
3 Transcendental Idealism and the Metaphysical Two-

Aspect Interpretation 25
3.1 Introduction 25
3.2 Metaphysical Two-Aspect Readings and Allais’s Middle
Course 31
3.3 Two-Aspect Readings and Cross-Boundary Identity 36
Notes 40
References 43
ix
x Contents
4 Transcendental Idealism and Phenomenalism 47

4.1 Phenomenalism Revisited 47
4.2 Kant’s Elephant in the Room: Problems with Allais’s
Refutation of Phenomenalism 53
4.3 The Extreme Phenomenalistic Interpretation 63
4.3.1 Phenomena as Sense Impressions and the
Supersensible 65
4.3.2 The Distinction Between the Phenomenal and
Noumenal Worlds 71
Notes 74
References 75
5 Phenomenalism, Conceivability, and Epistemic Humility 77

5.1 Strawson on the Self-Reflexiveness of Experience 77
5.2 Strawson on Phenomenalism 80
5.3 Radical Subjectivism, Conceivability, and Epistemic
Humility 83
5.4 Epistemic Humility and the Existence of Things in
Themselves 87
5.5 Conclusion 93
Notes 94
References 95
Part II The Intimacy Between the Logic of Thought and the

Thought of an Object 97
6 The Unity of Cognition, or, How to Read the Leitfaden

(A79) 99
6.1 Introduction 99
6.2 The ‘Additive’/‘Disjunctivist’ Theory of Cognition and
Kant’s Deduction 101
6.3 The Three ‘Puzzles’ in Relation to the Transcendental
Deduction106
Contents xi
6.4 The Relation Between Sensibility and the

Understanding107
6.5 Ways of Reading the Goal of the B-Deduction 111
6.5.1 A Restrictive or Non-Restrictive View of
Subjectivity112
6.5.2 Two-Stage or Anti-Two-Stage 113
6.5.3 The Sense(s) of ‘Anschauung’ 116
6.5.4 One or Two Kinds of Unity? 120
6.6 Two Kinds of Synthesis? On How to Read the
‘Leitfaden’ Passage (A79) 128
6.7 Concluding Remarks 134
Notes135
References138
7 Transcendental Logic and the Logic of Thought141

7.1 The Highest Point of ‘Even the Whole of Logic’ and
Contradictory Thoughts 142
7.2 Contradictory Thoughts and the Unity of
Consciousness152
Notes157
References158
8 Once More Unto the Breach: The Derivation of the

Categories From a Principle159
Notes170
References170
9 Categorial Necessity and Categorial Illusion171

9.1 Introduction 172
9.2 Categorial Necessity and Bridging the Gap of the
B-Deduction172
9.3 Necessary Instantiation and Categorial Illusion 175
9.4 Categorial Misapplication in Metaphysical Statements 180
Notes183
References184
xii Contents
10 A Last Remark on Objective Validity185

10.1 Introduction 185
10.2 Intuition and Object-Reference 186
10.3 General and Objective Validity 190
Notes195
References196
Index199
Key to Abbreviations of Kant’s Works
Throughout this book the abbreviations listed below are used for refer-
ence to Kant’s works. The abbreviations are followed by the volume and
page numbers (and sometimes line numbers) of the respective volume in
the Akademie edition (AA) of Kant’s work (Kant’s Gesammelte Schriften.
Berlin: De Gruyter, 1900–) in which the cited work appears. However,
for the Critique of Pure Reason the standard way of citation by means of
reference to the pagination of the A- and B-edition is adhered to.
All English language quotations from Kant’s works in this book are
from The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant, ed. P. Guyer
and A. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992–), except
for the Prolegomena, which is sometimes used in the Ellington/Carus edi-
tion (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1977). Where I used a different translation
from the Cambridge, I have indicated so. Where a translation was not
available, I provided my own.
AA Kants Gesammelte Schriften, ed. königlich preußische

(deutsche) Akademie der Wissenschaften. Berlin, 1900–
A/B Critique of Pure Reason, first (1781) and second
(1787) edition
Anth Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (AA 7)
Corr Correspondence (AA 10–13)
xiv Key to Abbreviations of Kant’s Works
FM What Real Progress Has Metaphysics Made in Germany

Since the Time of Leibniz and Wolff? (Prize
Essay) (AA 20)
KpV Critique of Practical Reason (AA 5)
Log Jäsche Logik (AA 9)
MAdN Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (AA 4)
PND Principiorum primorum cognitionis metaphysicæ nova
dilucidatio (AA 1)
Prol Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (AA 4)
Refl Reflexionen (AA 14–19)
UD Inquiry Concerning the Distinctness of the Principles of
Natural Theology and Morality (AA 2)
ÜE On a Discovery Whereby Any New Critique of Pure Reason
is to be Made Superfluous by an Older One (AA 8)
V-Met/Volckmann Volckmann Metaphysics Lectures (AA 28)
1
Introduction
Abstract In Chap. 1, I introduce the theme of the book and delineate

the content of the following chapters. One of the central themes of this
book is the idea that transcendental logic and transcendental idealism go
together, and that the logic of thought that is the ground of possible
knowledge of objects entails epistemic humility about how the world is
in itself. The humility is not a detachable add-on to the logic of possible
knowledge, but follows directly from the conceivability thesis, namely
the Strawsonian core idea that the self of experience and the object of
experience are reciprocal elements of the same ‘limiting framework of all
our thought about the world and experience of the world’, which dictates
what we can conceivably know about objective reality. This shows what it
means to be able to think about objects if we are able to think at all.
Transcendental idealism is the framework from within which objects can
be seen as in principle intelligible. It constitutes the bounds of transcen-
dental logic.
The majority of the essays in this volume pivot around themes that are
central to the thrust of my interpretation of Kant’s Deduction including
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 1

D. Schulting, The Bounds of Transcendental Logic,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71284-6_1
2 D. Schulting
the so-called ‘metaphysical deduction’—which I expounded in my earlier

books Kant’s Deduction From Apperception (Schulting 2012, Schulting
2018 [rev. edition]) and Kant’s Radical Subjectivism (Schulting 2017)—
except for the Chaps 3–5, which focus on the topic of idealism. Those
two groups of themes, Kant’s Deduction and idealism, are nonetheless
inextricably related. Unlike many commentators, I believe Kant’s tran-
scendental idealism is not severable from his transcendental logic, which
however does not imply that the logic entails his theory of space, often
seen as intrinsically related to his idealism. (Of course, the theory of space
is an additional necessary condition of empirical knowledge of objects.)
One of the central themes of this book is the idea that transcendental
logic and transcendental idealism go together, and that the logic of
thought that is the ground of possible knowledge of objects entails epis-
temic humility about how the world is in itself. The humility is not a
detachable add-on to the logic of possible knowledge, but follows directly
from the conceivability thesis, namely the Strawsonian core idea that the
self of experience and the object of experience are reciprocal elements of
the same ‘limiting framework of all our thought about the world and
experience of the world’ (Strawson 1968:15), which dictates what we can
conceivably know about objective reality. This is not tantamount to epis-
temological relativism. Rather, it shows what it means to be able to think
about objects if we are able to think at all. Transcendental idealism is the
framework from within which objects can be seen as in principle intelli-
gible. It constitutes the bounds of transcendental logic.
Chap. 2 can be seen as a capsule account of my interpretation of Kant’s
argument in the Deduction and its relation to idealism, and thus serves
as a good introduction to my general interpretative approach to that
notorious difficult chapter of the Critique. As such, it forms a succinct
preview of the more detailed arguments of the remainder of the book. In
this chapter, I explain why for Kant self-consciousness is intimately
related to objectivity, how this intimacy translates to real objects, what it
means to make judgements about objects, and, importantly, what ideal-
ism has got to do with all of this. It thus shows why transcendental logic
and transcendental idealism are really two sides of the same transcenden-
tal coin. This problematic forms the transition to the remainder of Part I,
in which I address various topical issues surrounding Kant’s much
1 Introduction 3
misunderstood doctrine of idealism, especially problems concerning the

current metaphysical two-aspect interpretation (Chap. 3) and the persist-
ing spectre of phenomenalism (Chaps 4–5). As to the latter issue, I delve
into one older (P.F. Strawson 1968) and two more recent (Lucy Allais
2015, Emanuel Rutten 2020) readings of Kant as a phenomenalist. I
believe Kant is indeed a phenomenalist, as Strawson and Rutten do, but
unlike them, I do not think his phenomenalism is a straightforward one,
that is, amounting to the theory according to which objects are con-
structed out of sense data, a reading that goes back to H.A. Prichard
(1909). Allais dismisses phenomenalist readings of Kant’s idealism in all
their varieties, but in Chap. 4 I provide several reasons for why we should
not throw the baby out with the bathwater. I also show how an extreme
phenomenalist interpretation of Kant, such as Rutten’s, fails to acknowl-
edge Kant’s fundamental empirical realism about objects.
In Chap. 5, I discuss grounds for seeing Strawson’s conceivability argu-
ment as compatible with a benign form of phenomenalism that shows
our epistemic humility with respect to knowledge of things in them-
selves. I also address the often held, but mistaken belief that on Kant’s
view things in themselves cannot be said to exist independently of our
categorial determination. Such a belief betrays a misunderstanding of the
function of the category of existence as a modal category which relates
the subject of judgement to the thing that is judged about, as well as a
conflation between the de re and de dicto senses of ‘existence’. It once
again shows that transcendental logic and transcendental idealism hang
together, in intricate ways that are not always appreciated by commenta-
tors: whilst knowledge of things is constrained by our capacity for deter-
mining things as objects for our thought, implying idealism, the existence
as such of things is not dependent on our categorial determination.
Things are ideal only to the extent that they are knowable. This idealism
is not ontological, but formal or transcendental.
Part II tackles central topics from the Transcendental and Metaphysical
Deductions in the Critique of Pure Reason, the sections in the
Transcendental Analytic where Kant expounds the heart of transcenden-
tal logic.
In Chaps 6, 7, and 8, respectively, I examine three main elements of
transcendental logic: (i) the idea that there is a unity of cognition that
4 D. Schulting
reveals an intimate bond between thought and experience, between

judgement and intuition, a unity that refers back to the very capacity of
thought and its various functions; (ii) the primordiality of transcendental
logic in relation to what Kant calls general logic, which indicates that
transcendental logic is a metaphysical logic that concerns the very condi-
tions of the capacity for thinking; and (iii) the closeness of the forms or
functions of thought and the categories of experience, which points to
the logical or a priori derivability of the categories from the capacity of
thought or the understanding itself. These three elements show transcen-
dental logic to be a metaphysical logic.
In Chap. 6, in the context of a critique of James Conant’s (2016)
important new reading of the main argument of the Deduction, I present
my current, most detailed interpretation of the well-known Leitfaden
passage at A79, which in my view has been misinterpreted by a host of
prominent readers. The Leitfaden passage is crucial to understanding the
argument of, not just the so-called Metaphysical Deduction, but also the
Transcendental Deduction. This new account expands and improves
upon the account of the Leitfaden I gave in Chap. 5 of Kant’s Deduction
From Apperception. While I agree with the core of Conant’s critique of
what he calls the ‘layer-cake’ reading of the Deduction argument, in this
new account I make clearer my position on why the unity of judgement,
in which concepts and intuitions are a priori synthetically unified, is
wholly determined in virtue of the unity of apperception as the unitary
function of the understanding, without this leading to a strong form of
conceptualism such as that of Conant and others.
In Chap. 7, I reflect on the idea, hinted at by Kant in a footnote to §16
of the B-Deduction that is not often discussed (B134n.), that transcen-
dental logic is the ground of logic as a whole. This has important reper-
cussions for the way we should see the role of transcendental logic with
respect to the question of truth as well as the nature and scope of tran-
scendental logic in relation to cognition, and in relation to general or
formal logic as such. To illustrate one of the ways in which transcendental
logic is fundamental to our way of thinking, I address an issue that is
brought up by Kant’s counterfactual claim at B132 that if a representa-
tion is not accompanied by an ‘I’ thought, it is ‘either impossible’ or at
least ‘nothing for me’, suggesting to some recent commentators that by
1 Introduction 5
the former Kant means the impossibility of thinking contradictory

thoughts. Unlike these commentators, I do not think Kant is saying here
that we cannot think contradictory thoughts. To believe he is betrays a
misunderstanding of the metaphysical nature of transcendental logic, or
so I shall argue. It is because transcendental logic is a metaphysical logic
that Kant can claim that transcendental logic grounds even the whole of
logic, including the possibility of thinking contradictory thoughts.
In Chap. 8, I once again revisit issues that have to do with Kant’s con-
troversial claim that the table of categories is derived from a principle,
which formed the basis for the account in my first book Kant’s Deduction
From Apperception (Schulting 2012, 2018 [rev. ed.]) in which I made the
case for the thesis that all of the twelve categories are derived from apper-
ception, and can be shown to be so derived by closely looking at the argu-
ments of §§16 and 17 of the B-Deduction. This can be done by means of
patiently teasing out all of the analytical implications of the first Grundsatz
of thought, namely the proposition that the ‘I think’ must be able to
accompany all my representations. It is clear from the critics’ reactions to
my interpretation that not many readers are convinced that this is what
happens, or indeed should be seen as happening, in the Deduction.1 But
this won’t blunt my own conviction, following in the footsteps of Klaus
Reich (1986, 1992), that this type of prima philosophia is exactly what
goes on in the Deduction.2 Here, in Chap. 8 in this volume, I rehearse
several arguments that I presented in my earlier books and I provide addi-
tional textual evidence for why I think my approach, despite it being the
minority reading, is the most straightforward one, and in fact the only
one which can make sense of Kant’s central claims about the role of
apperception in the deduction argument.
Chaps 9 and 10 reflect on interpretative issues that are the corollaries
of the three main elements of transcendental logic discussed in the pre-
ceding three chapters. These issues reinforce the central idea of an inextri-
cable connection between transcendental logic and transcendental
idealism. In particular, many commentators believe that the constraints
of transcendental logic, i.e. the categories, merely concern the experience
of, or judgement about, objects and that transcendental logic is not con-
stitutive of the objects themselves. Categorial determination is presumed
to hold merely for our experience of the objective world, while it cannot
6 D. Schulting
account for the constitution of the world of objects itself. In other words,
the categories do not reach the real world of objects, and Kant is said to
have failed to provide a convincing argument for the claim that they do.
In Chap. 9, I consider a particular formulation of this criticism, namely
the criticism that the fact that the categories must be applied to our expe-
rience of objects does not imply that the categories are instantiated in the
objects of our experience. In other words, it is argued that the objective
reality of the categories is not eo ipso proven in determining their neces-
sary applicability in our experience or judgements. I believe this charge of
an invalid inference or a ‘slide’ on Kant’s part rests on a misunderstanding
of the argument in the Transcendental Deduction and a failure to under-
stand the implication of transcendental idealism in that argument, that
is, a failure to understand the conceptual intimacy between thought and
the thought of an object in terms of objective reference (Chap. 6). This
misunderstanding is also reflected in the way that the notion of objective
validity is consistently misinterpreted as having to do with the truth value
of a judgement, rather than with the truth of our cognitive claims, again
suggesting that the categories, which determine objective validity, do not
concern the objects, but merely our representation, experience, or judge-
ment of them. I reconsider this aspect in Chap. 10.
More in particular, in Chap. 9, I discuss two ostensibly related issues
concerning the argument of the B-Deduction, one of which touches on
the problem of the famous so-called ‘two-steps-in-one-proof ’ reconstruc-
tion of Kant’s reasoning and the aforementioned argumentative slide
from the necessary application of the categories to our experience to the
necessary instantiation of them in the objects of our experience. In his
reply to my critique of his interpretation of categorial necessity, Anil
Gomes (2018) has rejoined that there may be more agreement between
our positions than I made it out to be, and importantly, in his view there
is still an argumentative gap in the argument that needs to be bridged,
which is where the ‘second step’ comes in. This discussion goes to the
heart of the problem of how one should evaluate the argumentative pro-
cedure in the Deduction. In response to Gomes, I elucidate further my
position on the two-step proof, and specifically what, in my view, it
1 Introduction 7
means for Kant to say that categories are necessarily instantiated in all of
our determinative judgements solely in virtue of the act of transcendental
apperception. In this context, I also address a related issue that Gomes
brings up, namely, whether there can be cases of categorial illusion, cases
for which it seems that the categories are instantiated in our judgements
but where in fact categories turn out not to be instantiated. I argue that
the idea of categorial illusion is based on a conflation of the necessary
categorial application in Kant’s (transcendental) sense and cases of empir-
ical illusion. It is therefore not something we should worry about. The
exemplification of the categories in a determinative judgement about an
object necessarily entails the exemplification of the categories in the
object of judgement.
In Chap. 10, I rehearse my thesis, argued in Schulting (2017), that
Kant’s notion of objective validity should not be confused with the truth
value of a judgement or, as I argue against suggestions made by Robert
Watt (2017) in a critique of my position, with Kant’s notion of
Allgemeingültigkeit. I provide additional textual evidence for reading
objective validity in the way I have proposed, namely as having chiefly to
do with reference to objects of experience or as Kant himself calls it,
objective reality. This once again shows that Kant’s transcendental logic is
not concerned with merely the logical rules for valid thinking but rather
with the conditions for the possibility of true reference to objects. It con-
cerns a metaphysical logic about objective thought and experience.
Notes
1. See Dyck (2014), Howell (2018), Land (2018), Stephenson (2014), and
Watt (2017); see my reaction to Dyck and Stephenson in Schulting
(2014, 2017, Chap. 2).
2. Quarfood (2014) is more positive than my other critics; see also
Blomme (2018).
8 D. Schulting
References
Allais, L. (2015). Manifest Reality. Kant’s Idealism and His Realism. Oxford
University Press.
Blomme, H. (2018). Over de radicaliteit van Kants theoretische filosofie. Enkele
aanmerkingen bij Dennis Schultings Kant’s Radical Subjectivism. Tijdschrift
voor Filosofie, 80(2), 341–353.
Conant, J. (2016). Why Kant Is Not a Kantian. Philosophical Topics,
44(1), 75–125.
Dyck, C. (2014). The Function of Derivation and the Derivation of Functions:
A Review of Schulting’s Kant’s Deduction and Apperception. Studi kantiani
XXVII, 69–75.
Gomes, A. (2018). Minding the Gap: Subjectivism and the Deduction. Kantian
Review, 23(1), 99–109.
Howell, R. (2018). Deduction Difficulties. Kantian Review, 23(1), 111–121.
Land, T. (2018). Review of D. Schulting, Kant’s Deduction and Apperception.
Explaining the Categories. Kantian Review, 23(1), 145–151.
Prichard, H. A. (1909). Kant’s Theory of Knowledge. Clarendon Press.
Quarfood, M. (2014). A Note on Schulting’s Derivation of Contingency. Studi
kantiani, XXVII, 87–93.
Reich, K. (1986). Die Vollständigkeit der kantischen Urteilstafel (3rd ed.). Meiner.
Reich, K. (1992). The Completeness of Kant’s Table of Judgments, trans. J. Kneller
& M. Losonsky. Stanford University Press.
Rutten, E. (2020). Contra Kant. Herwonnen ruimte voor transcendentie.
Kok Kampen.
Schulting, D. (2012). Kant’s Deduction and Apperception. Explaining the
Categories. Palgrave Macmillan.
Schulting, D. (2014). Kant’s Deduction From Apperception. A Reply to My
Critics. Studi kantiani, XXVII, 95–118.
Schulting, D. (2017). Kant’s Radical Subjectivism. Perspectives on the Transcendental
Deduction. Palgrave Macmillan.
Schulting, D. (2018). Kant’s Deduction From Apperception. An Essay on the
Transcendental Deduction of the Categories (rev. ed.). De Gruyter.
Stephenson, A. (2014). A Deduction from Apperception? Studi kantiani,
XXVII, 77–85.
Strawson, P. F. (1968). The Bounds of Sense, 2nd printing. Methuen.
Watt, R. (2017). Robert Watt on Dennis Schulting’s Kant’s Radical Subjectivism.
Critique (November issue). https://virtualcritique.wordpress.com/2017/11/07/
robert-watt-on-dennis-schultings-kants-radical-subjectivism/
Part I
The Metaphysics of Transcendental
Idealism and Conceivability
2
Apperception, Objectivity, and Idealism
Abstract Chap. 2 can be seen as a capsule account of my interpretation

of Kant’s argument in the Deduction and its relation to idealism, and
thus serves as a good introduction to my general interpretative approach
to that notorious difficult chapter of the Critique. As such, it forms a suc-
cinct preview of the more detailed arguments of the remainder of the
book. In this chapter, I explain why for Kant self-consciousness is inti-
mately related to objectivity, how this intimacy translates to real objects,
what it means to make judgements about objects, and, importantly, what
idealism has got to do with all of this. It thus shows why transcendental
logic and transcendental idealism are really two sides of the same tran-
scendental coin.
In a key passage in the Transcendental Deduction of the Categories in the

A-edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant poses the following
question:
What does one mean […] if one speaks of an object corresponding to and
therefore also distinct from the cognition? (A104)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71284-6_2
12 D. Schulting
One would think that it is obvious to suppose that the object of which
we claim knowledge, which corresponds to it, exists independently and
regardless of that claim. The being of the object does not depend on our
knowledge and must therefore be strictly distinguished from it. But
Kant’s question goes beyond distinguishing between the necessary condi-
tions under which we can claim knowledge of an object and the ostensi-
bly quite separate question concerning the constitutive or ontological
conditions for the independent existence of the object. This distinction
reflects the traditional distinction between an epistemological question,
which concerns knowledge, and a metaphysical question, which is about
the being or existence of things. Kant asks a more fundamental question:
What do we actually mean by ‘object’? This question goes beyond both a
purely metaphysical and a purely epistemological question because it is
precisely about determining what we mean by the notion ‘object’ before
we can even formulate any specific knowledge claims about any arbitrary
given object and assess their truth conditions.
In his analysis in the Deduction, Kant wants to make visible some-
thing more formal that would remain implicit if we were to take the
object too concretely, as merely an empirically given thing that presents
itself to us. If we were to consider the object merely as an empirically
given thing, we would never be able to gather more than random infor-
mation about it. This formal aspect concerns the way in which we relate
to an object at all. To make this element visible, we must take a certain
reflective distance from the concrete object we experience. The concept of
‘object’ itself already expresses a certain reflexiveness, as Kant suggests (cf.
A103–104). In his analysis in the Deduction Kant highlights this reflex-
ive element in order to be able to elucidate what it actually means to talk
about an object and, in a more concrete sense, in fact first to be able to
have experience of it and make judgements about it.
What is revealed in such a formal analysis is what Kant understands by
the so-called transcendental conditions of possibility for both the experi-
ence of an object and the object of experience, namely the conditions that
govern the domain of possible experience. He links this to the possibility
of synthetic a priori judgements, judgements that are neither purely ana-
lytical—that is, judgements whose truth can be deduced from the analy-
sis of the concepts contained therein—nor a posteriori empirical
judgements. These synthetic a priori judgements are not concrete judge-

ments in the usual sense of the word but express the fundamental prin-
ciples that make it possible to speak of an object of experience in the first
place, to judge about it. They are principles that play in the background
of our ordinary judgements of experience. These synthetic a priori judge-
ments declare that under certain rules that Kant names categories objects
can first be known as objects, and at the same time these categories are
constitutive of the object itself, qua object. Kant writes at the beginning
of the Analytic of Principles:
In this way synthetic a priori judgments are possible, if we relate the formal
conditions of a priori intuition, the synthesis of imagination, and its neces-
sary unity in a transcendental apperception to a possible cognition of expe-
rience in general, and say: The conditions of the possibility of experience in
general are at the same time conditions of the possibility of the objects of
experience, and on this account have objective validity in a synthetic judg-
ment a priori. (B197/A158)
To return to the above-cited passage from the A-Deduction, Kant answers

the question as follows:
It is easy to see that this object must be thought of only as something in

general = X, since outside of our cognition we have nothing that we could
set over against this cognition as corresponding to it. (A104)
Kant denies here that the object of which we claim knowledge is given
outside of our cognition. Instead, the object of knowledge is only ‘some-
thing in general = X’. In a sense, the object of knowledge is internalised
in thought, that is, it is a function of thought. In the following passage,
Kant indeed repeats that we are dealing only with our representations and
that the ‘X which corresponds to them (the object)—because it [i.e. the
object] is something that should be distinct from our representations—is
nothing for us [and] the unity that the object makes necessary can be
nothing other than the formal unity of the consciousness in the synthesis
of the manifold of the representations’ (A105, translation emended). He
continues: ‘Hence we say that we cognize the object if we have effected
14 D. Schulting
synthetic unity in the manifold of intuition.’ The questions that arise are:
What is correspondence? How is distinction taken account of? To what
extent does a correspondence theory of truth still play a role in Kant? I
cannot deal with these questions in any detail here, but it seems clear that
for Kant correspondence between representation and object should not
be understood as a relation of some sort between, on the one hand, an
absolutely inner self and, on the other, an absolutely externally
given object.
The claim that an object is when we have effected a unity among our
representations does not mean to say, however, that the thing that we
know something objective about is also ‘generated’ by our thinking, by
the unity of consciousness, in terms of its existence. The thing that, inso-
far as it is an object of experience, is as an object for the knower and is
‘something in general = X’, is itself, qua existing in itself, of course not
internalised. As is well-known, Kant makes a distinction between the
appearance of a thing and the thing in itself. It is the appearance of a thing
that Kant identifies with the object of knowledge. We can know only the
appearance of a thing, and not the thing in itself, which remains indepen-
dent of the knowing subject (I come back to this distinction in detail in
the course of Part I). Objects are therefore in some very specific sense
distinct—at least conceptually, if not numerically—from things in them-
selves. By contrast, the traditional conception of true knowledge is that
our true judgements about things actually correspond to the things that
are independent of our judgements and therefore have an in-itself-nature
independently and regardless of our judgements (which is expressed in
the correspondence theory of truth). How else could our judgements be
true of things if they did not correspond to the things as they are in
themselves?
Importantly, Kant is not so much interested in the question of truth
per se, that is to say, the standard question of the logical conditions under
which a certain judgement a is F is true or false, or what the truth value
of our judgements is, nor in the question about which other necessary
but non-logical conditions must be met so that a certain judgement is
true. He is rather interested in a deeper aspect of the relation between
judgement and the object of judgement, whereby judgement should be
interpreted here as a synthetic judgement.1 Kant therefore speaks of the
question of transcendental truth. What makes it possible for me to attri-

bute, truly or falsely, a predicate a to an underlying object, the ‘X’ that
Kant speaks of in the above-quoted passage in A104 (and by means of a
also another predicate F, G, etc.)? What is at issue here is the primordial
relation to the object as such in any arbitrary judgement about an arbi-
trary given object or objective event, namely the original orientation to
the object or object-directedness—regardless of the question whether
attributing any arbitrary predicates a and F to any object leads to a true
or false judgement about same object. This deeper relation to the object,
which is indicated by the adjective ‘transcendental’, expresses the objective
validity of an arbitrary empirical judgement about a given object.
Objective validity is the fundamental ground that enables us first to make
a (true or false) judgement about a given object at all. For Kant, therefore,
objective validity is the characteristic of judgement as such.2
But what exactly is it that determines objective validity? How does
objective validity come about if it does not lie in the correspondence per
se between, on the one hand, judgement or our understanding, and, on
the other hand, the thing that is to be distinguished from it and that has
an independent existence in itself, let alone that the object or thing itself
is the so-called truthmaker? And does the uncoupling of objective valid-
ity as the fundamental orientation to the object from the traditionally
conceived correspondence relation between intellect and thing not pre-
cisely lead to a gap between our conceptuality and reality? Does Kant’s
approach to the question of truth as representation-internal not run the
risk of a hopeless idealism, whereby we are forever locked into our own
ideas and our own mental ‘reality’? In other words, is there not the risk of
an epistemological relativism according to which only our own ideas and
judgements are objective and the ‘really real’ cannot be reached?
In Schulting (2017), against the background of current discussions in
contemporary analytical Kant research, I argued that Kant is a radical
subjectivist in the sense that the objective application rules for our con-
cepts are purely a function of the capacity to judge, given the fact that we
are sensory beings who receive impressions from the outside, from the
things themselves. Our sensibility is of course a necessary condition of
possible empirical knowledge of objects, but sensibility is not determina-
tive in the sense Kant means; only our capacity to judge determines what
16 D. Schulting
knowledge and an object of knowledge is. The radical-subjective element

lies, more specifically, in the fact that our capacity to judge is defined by
what Kant calls transcendental apperception. Apperception is the prin-
ciple of self-awareness and makes it possible for me to be aware of myself
as the person who has certain representations. But apperception is not
merely the principle of self-awareness, as if this should be seen in contrast
to the consciousness of objects.
The radical claim that Kant makes—and which I explained in detail in
my previous monographs (Schulting 2017, 2018, 2021)—is the claim
that the act of transcendental apperception, which is an act of the synthe-
sis of all my representations, does not concern the apprehension of a
random series of representations that I happen to have (more accurately,
which are occurrent in the mind); rather, transcendental apperception
establishes the objective unity among those representations that I regard
as mine. The rules for a priori synthesis that enable such an objective
unity among my representations are the categories. The categories are the
various, very general modes—twelve to be exact—in which that unity
among my representations obtains, in such a way that these representa-
tions are identical to each other insofar as they count as all my representa-
tions qua combined, namely, those representations that I apprehend as
mine. Kant calls this unity the original synthetic unity of apperception,
which is the unity of the thinking subject that takes a series of representa-
tions together as his own. Kant speaks of this act of apperception as an act
of accompanying by the ‘I think’. The unity of the act of apperception is
the original ground of unity among representations that are accompanied
by this ‘I think’.
The identity of this thinking subject, the ‘I’ of the ‘I think’ that unites
its representations, is at the same time the identity of the whole of unified
representations accompanied by the same subject, that is, the same ‘I’.
This unified whole of representations forms a something, an object in gen-
eral, for that subject. What is termed ‘object’ thus lies in the way in which
the thinking subject takes his representations as an identical whole that is
as an object for that same subject. That is why Kant calls the transcenden-
tal unity of apperception an objective unity of apperception, and why he
defines object as ‘that in the concept of which the manifold of a given
intuition is united’ (B137): the unity of apperception maps exactly onto
the unity of the manifold in the intuition. There is an element of neces-

sity or invariance in the act of apperception that is not already contained
in the flow of the separate representations as such (cf. A107). This ele-
ment ensures that the representations are not merely subjectively valid
representations of an arbitrary representer, arranged in a haphazard way.
Because it is a necessary connection between representations, the objec-
tive unity of apperception, which expresses the unity of the twelve cate-
gories of experience, is always the unity of a thinking subject’s judgement,
which has the basic character of a is F—in contrast to a contingent
sequence of variant, separate representations that any representer might
have. For Kant, the thinking subject is always the judging, cognising,
self-conscious subject. The objective unity of apperception is therefore
the definition of judgement in terms of a cognitive unity of representa-
tions and expresses the unity of the predicates a and F in relation to the
underlying object that the judgement a is F is about. In short, the objec-
tive unity of apperception in a judgement in fact defines what an object
is, qua that in which predicates a and F are necessarily united insofar as
they are attributes of some thing x. This expresses the fundamental, inti-
mate identity relation between thought and object, between judgement
and object, without there having to be an inexplicable relation that is
external to an object outside of its representation.
But how can an identity relation between thought and object in a
judgement establish the relation to a real empirical object? Kant makes a
fundamental distinction between the intuition of an object, which
expresses the immediate relationship to the given object, and the concept
which relates to the object only by means of such an intuition. But as we
have seen, in Kant’s view the relation to the object is representation-
internal; the object is nothing outside of our knowledge to which that
knowledge should correspond. Yet the objective unity of apperception is
the condition of possibility only for the object qua object, that is, it con-
stitutes its objectivity. It does not constitute the object with respect to its
existence (cf. A92/B125). That would in fact be impossible because it
would mean that thinking would generate the reality of an object in an
existential or factual sense. The condition of real possibility for knowl-
edge, that which makes knowledge true empirical knowledge, experience
18 D. Schulting
(B147), lies in sensibility because only empirical intuition provides a

direct sensory relation to the really existing object.
On the other hand, the intuition itself is also only a representation, or
a bundle of representations (sensory impressions), which, although hav-
ing a direct relation to the real thing of which we have a representation
(the x of a judgement), are not identical to that thing. We must differenti-
ate between, on the one hand, the distinction between representation and
represented and, on the other hand, the distinction between representa-
tion/represented and the thing in itself, namely the thing with all its pos-
sible predicates. In a judgement we can attribute only a limited number
of predicates to the thing judged about, and so any representation of a
thing is only a limitation of all of its possible predicates. Kant’s Copernican
turn—which states that in order to be able to analyse the possibility of
knowledge we no longer take the correspondence relation to be directed
from mind to thing, but instead must take things as they conform to us,
to our forms of knowledge—applies both to intuition, the form of our
sensibility, and to the concept, the form with which our mind works.
Although the intuition thus establishes the immediate, as yet indetermi-
nate relation to the real existing thing, the determined relation remains
representation-internal.
Here it is important to see that transcendental apperception works
both ways: it establishes unity among concepts, on the one hand, and
among representations in sensible intuition, on the other, and this hap-
pens simultaneously in judgement in virtue of one and the same deter-
mining act of synthesis (the act of apperception) that is performed by the
judging agent. Take for example the judgement This armchair is Prussian-
blue-coloured. The predicates <this armchair> and <Prussian-blue-coloured>
are connected in this judgement by the ‘copula’ (Verhältniswörtchen) ‘is’.
But the copula ‘is’ says more than just stating that predicates are linked to
each other. For a judgement always also has a modal element; it is not just
a proposition. The copula says something about the existence of the
object about which a judgement is made. The predicates <this armchair>
and <Prussian-blue-coloured> are also connected with an intuition of a
particular existing thing that falls under the subject concept which, just
in case the judgement is true, has the characteristics of being an armchair
and being Prussian-blue-coloured. In the judgement I thus perceive the
existing thing as the object with the objective properties that I attribute
to it in the judgement. That object is, of course, from a purely empirical
point of view the thing that exists independently and regardless of the
judgement. But the object qua object, or qua the determined thing with
such and such properties, is purely a function of judgement.
As we have seen, what is characteristic of Kant’s position is that our
knowledge does not consist in a direct correspondence relation between
concepts/intuition and thing. Whereas it is true to say that in Kant’s view
empirically speaking a thing existing independently of the perceiving
subject is presupposed as given for any true judgement—contrary to
what many commentators think, Kant is not concerned with proving
that such things or objects exist de re; he just takes their de re existence
for granted3—from a transcendental point of view there is nothing
beyond the judgement, that is to say, beyond the relation between con-
cepts and the underlying intuition to which the judgement corresponds
that determines the truth of my cognition. The objective validity of a
judgement about a given object o is established only in virtue of the
objective unity of apperception that connects concepts and intuition in
the judgement about o; as Kant says, ‘we say that we cognize the object if
we have effected synthetic unity in the manifold of intuition’ (A105),
confirming that the unity of apperception defines the object in the way
that we know it. This is the thesis that I have called Kant’s radical subjec-
tivism, referring to what Kant himself says, in the A-Deduction, where he
speaks about nature as a ‘whole of appearances’ (Inbegriff von
Erscheinungen), namely all possible objects of experience that can be
found only ‘in the radical faculty [dem Radikalvermögen] of all our cogni-
tion, namely, transcendental apperception’, in ‘that unity on account of
which alone it can be called object of all possible experience, i.e., nature’
(A114).4
The objective validity of an arbitrary judgement about a given empiri-
cal object is wholly constituted by the determining power of the judging,
apperceiving subject that apprehends and synthesises his representations.
This applies not only to the concepts in the judgement but also to the
sensory representations in the underlying intuition. The same subject
that combines the predicates <this armchair> and <Prussian-blue-coloured>
in the judgement This armchair is Prussian-blue-coloured at the same time
20 D. Schulting
combines the sensory perceptions of a particular given thing, the arm-

chair, to which these predicates are attributed in the judgement. Kant
expresses this in such a way that the synthesis of the intuition must be
seen as ‘the transcendental synthesis of the imagination’, whose faculty ‘is
an effect of the understanding on sensibility and its first application […]
to objects of the intuition that is possible for us’ (B152). So the under-
standing itself, that is to say, the thinking subject that apperceives his
representations, has, ‘under the designation [unter der Benennung] of a
transcendental synthesis of the imagination’ (B153), an effect on sensibility,
and thus it acts as a synthesis of the apprehension of representations in
sensible intuition itself. In this way the identity relation between thought
and object manifests itself as a relation that refers to an empirically per-
ceived object without it having to go beyond our representations.
It should be emphasised that what is, as it were, generated here by the
judging subject is only the necessary form of the empirical judgement,
namely the synthetic unity that combines both the concepts and the
empirical intuitions. The content of the judgement, namely, the predi-
cates themselves (in this case <this armchair> and <Prussian-blue-
coloured>) and the sensory material as such that underlies the judgement
and provides it real possibility, are wholly contingent and dependent on
all sorts of non-transcendental conditions.5 The form of judgement—the
objective unity of apperception—is necessary in the sense that it is the
necessary transcendental condition for the essential nature of a judge-
ment as an objectively valid statement about an object or objective event.
But it is also the sufficient condition for objective validity because the
object is, in terms of its objectivity, a function of that form; or more pre-
cisely, the form, namely the objective unity of apperception, defines the
object. Transcendental-logically speaking, the object does not exist out-
side the judgement, outside apperception. This is what is radically subjec-
tive about Kant’s position.
However, that does not mean, again, that the object depends on the
judgement for its actual existence, nor for its empirical characteristics, for
that matter. As I indicated earlier, Kant makes a distinction between
appearances and things in themselves. Appearances are things insofar as
we can know them as an object of our knowledge, of our judgements. An
appearance is, as Kant says (A20/B34), the indeterminate object of a
sensible intuition (the ‘x’ which I mentioned earlier) and is identical to

the object as a function of judgement insofar as that appearance is deter-
mined by the categories. ‘Existence’ is of course a category, too, but here
a distinction must be made between the fact that something exists and
establishing in virtue of applying the category ‘existence’ in a judgement
the fact that something exists (see further Chap. 5).
Kant’s radical subjectivism thus implies an idealism with respect to the
object as being in some sense dependent on our judging, but this is not
the idealism of Berkeley, say, which denies the mind-independent exis-
tence of things in themselves. Kant’s radical subjectivism ensures that we
can explain the intimate correspondence between knowledge and object
as a function of our own capacity to judge, namely the objective unity of
apperception, and that at the same time things insofar as their existence
is concerned are not reduced to being a function of our representations.
Whereas Kant’s subjectivism is thus characterised by both a metaphysical
and epistemological component—metaphysical because not only the
knowledge or experience of an object but also the knowable object itself
is a function of transcendental apperception—the thing in itself retains
its existential independence.
This in no way implies that our knowledge of objective reality is only
relative because supposedly it would not reach the things in themselves—
an oft-heard criticism, especially from Hegelians reading Kant.6 Such a
conclusion ignores the fact that the object determined by the judging
subject is the appearance of the thing itself, for that judging subject.
Although the judging subject does not know the thing as such, namely
independently of judgement, i.e. in itself, he does know the thing in the
way in which it appears to him as an object. The fact that he does not
know the thing as a thing in itself follows logically from the fact that
knowledge of something is not possible apart from the necessary condi-
tions under which such knowledge is first possible: For how can I judge
of something that it is so and so independently of judgement? Things are
therefore knowable if and only if they are subject to the necessary condi-
tions for knowledge, and they are subject to those conditions only if and
when they appear to us qua objects, not as things in themselves.
Knowledge of objects is thus possible only if the necessary a priori
conditions for knowledge of objects are met; outside of those necessary a
22 D. Schulting
priori conditions knowledge is ex hypothesi not possible, nor are objects

of knowledge, that is, objects for us, possible outside of those conditions.
This means that things in themselves, that is, things as they are indepen-
dently of the conditions under which alone they (as objects) can be
known, cannot be known as such (as things in themselves) under the
conditions under which alone objects can be known.7 Or, as Kant says in
the foreword to the B-edition of the Critique, ‘we can cognize of things a
priori only what we ourselves have put into them’ (Bxviii). This Copernican
principle ensures that things in themselves retain their absolute indepen-
dence. Does this mean that Kant’s theory of knowledge is relativist? Not
at all. Such a question betrays a misunderstanding with regard to the
transcendental question of how knowledge of an object is possible at all,
how ‘object’ is defined, and what it means to make a judgement about
an object.
Notes
1. With analytic judgements the relation to an object, an underlying x, is
otiose because irrelevant for assessing whether the judgement is true
or false.
2. Kant provides the definition for judgement in the Critique of Pure
Reason at B142; there he explicitly connects objective validity with
the nature of judgement. But it should be noted that this concerns
determinative judgements, not non-determinative, merely-reflective
judgements, such as aesthetic judgements, of which Kant speaks in
the Third Critique, nor analytic judgements, for which reference to an
underlying object is irrelevant to the understanding of their truth.
3. On the de re and de dicto senses of the category of ‘existence’, see Chap.
5, this volume.
4. For an account of this passage, see Schulting (2017:10–17, 328).
5. This should not be misunderstood as suggesting that the sensible mate-
rial is not also transcendentally determined in terms of its intensive mag-
nitude, by the understanding, in judgement. But this still concerns the
form of matter, i.e. matter qua matter, which is being determined as
a necessary element of all objective knowledge, not the factuality or the
empirical characteristics of this or that particular sense impression, or
this or that particular conceptual trait.
6. Schulting (2021, Chap. 9).

7. Of course, I can form a notion of the necessary characteristics of a thing
in itself and make claims about it—e.g. that a thing in itself cannot be
spatiotemporal. Such a judgement, however, does not relate to an actual
particular object, that is, the x of an empirical intuition that underlies
the subject-concept of a synthetic a posteriori judgement. It does not
yield empirical knowledge (empirische Erkenntnis, B147) in the sense of
the claims made in the Deduction. Further, such a judgement would still
be bound by the constraints of transcendental apperception, under
which an object in general can be thought, and so does not reach things
in themselves as such (but just explains the concept of them). See
Schulting (2017, Chap. 9).
References
Schulting, D. (2017). Kant’s Radical Subjectivism. Perspectives on the Transcendental
Deduction. Palgrave Macmillan.
Schulting, D. (2018). Kant’s Deduction From Apperception. An Essay on the
Transcendental Deduction of the Categories (rev. ed.). De Gruyter.
Schulting, D. (2021). Apperception and Self-Consciousness in Kant and German
Idealism. Bloomsbury.
3
Transcendental Idealism
and the Metaphysical Two-Aspect
Interpretation
Abstract In Chap. 3 I address various topical issues surrounding Kant’s

much misunderstood doctrine of idealism, especially problems concern-
ing the current metaphysical two-aspect interpretation, in particular
interpretations from Lucy Allais and Cord Friebe. Topics that are dis-
cussed are the methodological reading, the nature of appearance, its rela-
tion to things in themselves and cross-boundary identity.
3.1 Introduction
In the last century much has been written about Kant’s controversial doc-
trine of idealism and the problems surrounding the distinction between
appearance and thing in itself. Notably, the great Kant scholar Erich
Adickes dedicated a whole book to the topic, entitled Kant und das Ding
an sich, published in 1924 (Adickes 1924), in which all the relevant pas-
sages in Kant’s entire work were canvassed that dealt, implicitly or explic-
itly, with idealism or the transcendental distinction between appearance
and thing in itself. For Adickes, it was in any case beyond doubt that the
notion of things in themselves referred to Kant’s commitment to a

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71284-6_3
26 D. Schulting
thoroughgoing realism and the mind-independence of the things that we

cognise.1 Fifty years on, in 1974, came the seminal work by Gerold
Prauss, Kant und das Problem der Dinge an sich (Prauss 1974), whose
specifically non-metaphysical reading of the distinction between appear-
ances and things in themselves, and the apparent solving of a few riddles
that such a reading yields (e.g. the problem of noumenal causality), has
found, in the Anglophone world, an ally of sorts in Henry Allison, who
with his already classic Kant’s Transcendental Idealism. An Interpretation
and Defense (Allison 1983, 2004) defended the idea, against the predomi-
nant view that existed previously in English language Kant scholarship,
that the nature of Kant’s idealism should be seen in the light of his
epistemology.
According to Allison, drawing on Prauss’s work, Kant’s idealism does
not commit Kant to any speculative metaphysics or ontology that lies
beyond the limits of knowledge. This view of Kant’s idealism has since
come to be known as the epistemological or methodological reading,2
which foregrounds the perspectival change brought about by the tran-
scendental turn and thus the way that issues of realism, and a fortiori the
status of things an sich, should henceforth be regarded. Allison empha-
sises the thought that to regard objects from the perspective of their nec-
essary conceptual or, as he initially put it, epistemic conditions is precisely
not to regard them from the perspective of their being qua things in them-
selves, from which the appearance/thing-in-itself distinction must be
understood to derive. Allison has been accused of presenting an anodyne
interpretation of the appearance/thing-in-itself distinction (Langton
1998:9), as it ostensibly yields a mere tautology that cannot be what Kant
had intended by making the distinction.3 But, although the way Allison
presented his views in the first edition of Kant’s Transcendental Idealism
could be seen as vulnerable to this criticism, he later clarified his position
as having to do with Kant’s discursivity thesis, which includes the dual
theory of the necessary constraints of sensibility and thought, not any
mere notion of an epistemic condition (see Allison 1996:4–8; 2006:10ff.).
This might still strike one as too thin a characterisation of Kant’s ideal-
ism—for such a reading remains distinctively non-ontological, but it at
least shows that the distinction itself is not to be taken as a mere concep-
tual one.
3 Transcendental Idealism and the Metaphysical Two-Aspect… 27
On Allison’s view, the distinction that idealism draws between appear-

ances and things in themselves rests on the difference between two types
of concept of an object rather than two kinds of object, one of which would
have greater ontological status. The one concept (the object as appear-
ance) includes a reference to the necessary conditions for the perception,
and cognition, of an object whilst the other (object as thing in itself )
includes no such reference, that is to say, it abstracts from the human
cognitive perspective.4 And so the distinction drawn between appearance
and thing in itself has no ontological import. As Allison says, the tran-
scendental distinction has been ‘deontologized’ (1996:18). It merely
indicates the importance of the transcendental turn regarding how to
consider things, and the way we cognise them, at all. Appearances are the
things as they appear to us, and things in themselves are the very same
things as they do not appear to us, i.e. as they would be in abstraction
from the way we experience them.
Allison’s reading has sometimes been characterised in terms of a ‘two-
aspect’ reading so as to differentiate it from the ontological ‘two-object’
or ‘two-world’ interpretation. However, as Allison has subsequently
pointed out (2004:16), this description is somewhat confusing since
aspect theories are usually associated with metaphysical conceptions of the
distinction. Two-aspect views can either be a form of ‘property dualism’,
or, as Allison sees it, a methodological view regarding a ‘contrast between
two ways in which […] objects can be considered in a philosophical
reflection on the conditions of their cognition’ (2006:1). But, as Lucy
Allais has pointed out—and we shall have cause to return to Allais’s own
reading later—this last characterisation can also again be seen in terms of
a metaphysical interpretation.
Against the backdrop of the major work carried out by Karl Ameriks
in the 1980s and 90s and afterwards—in which he showed, in sharp con-
trast to Allison, that Kant was far more metaphysically committed and
hence that his idealism must be seen as a thesis about the ontologically
non-ultimate nature of appearances—a return to a more metaphysical
approach to Kantian idealism can be discerned in the Kant scholarship of
the last twenty years. Prime examples of this approach are Rae Langton
(1998), James Van Cleve (1999) and Lucy Allais (2006, 2007, 2015).5
Notwithstanding the possibility that, as Marcel Quarfood has suggested,6
28 D. Schulting
the potential of methodological or epistemological readings has not been

fully realised, I shall focus here on these more metaphysically informed
readings. The sheer quality of a range of papers, and two monographs,
published in the last two decades indicates that the debate surrounding
Kant’s doctrine of idealism is very much alive, notwithstanding the last-
ing influence on Kant commentators in the English speaking world of
the early dismissive approach to idealism propagated by the likes of
P.F. Strawson and Jonathan Bennett (one detects this continuing influ-
ence in the work of Arthur Collins, Paul Guyer, Robert Hanna, Kenneth
Westphal and others).7
In this chapter, and in the following two chapters, I want to focus on
two elements that have recently been emphasised in the context of inter-
preting Kant’s idealism: (1) the metaphysical two-aspect interpretation
that reaffirms the Adickesian idea that Kant was committed to realism
about things in themselves, and (2) the universally maligned position
that Kant’s idealism is a phenomenalism. More specifically, with respect
to (2), I want to look at one older (Strawson 1968) and two more recent
(Allais 2015, Rutten 2020) readings of Kant as a phenomenalist. I believe
Kant is indeed a phenomenalist, as Strawson and Rutten do, but unlike
them, I do not think his phenomenalism is a straightforward one, that is,
the theory according to which objects are constructed out of sense data.
By contrast, Allais dismisses phenomenalist readings of Kant’s idealism in
all their varieties, but I provide several reasons, in Chap. 4, for why we
should not throw the baby out with the bathwater. I also show how an
extreme phenomenalist interpretation of Kant, such as Rutten’s, fails to
acknowledge Kant’s fundamental empirical realism about objects.
Furthermore, in Chap. 5, I discuss grounds for seeing Strawson’s conceiv-
ability argument as compatible with a benign form of phenomenalism
that shows our epistemic humility with respect to knowledge of things in
themselves.
But first, in this chapter, I take a closer look at element (1). Lately,
there has been a little boom in literature on Kant which focuses—often
with the not always so helpful help of current theorising—on Kant’s ide-
alism in terms of a two-aspect or dual-aspect view that is ontological or
metaphysical in outlook rather than methodological or epistemological
(in addition to the aforementioned Langton 1998 and Allais 2006, 2007,
2015, see also Westphal 2004, Langton 2006, Friebe 2007, Rosefeldt
2007, and more recently Marshall 2013, Oberst 2015 and Onof 2019).
Quarfood (2004) has helpfully characterised the difference between the
metaphysical and methodological or epistemological approaches in terms
of adopting a ‘transcendent’ and a ‘transcendental’ or ‘immanent’ point
of view respectively. The ‘transcendent’ point of view, which ‘takes a top-
down approach’ (2004:36), accepts the limits that Kant imposes on our
having cognitive access to things in themselves but nonetheless deems it
legitimate to inquire into the nature of things in themselves, or at least
into the relation between things in themselves and appearances. Quarfood
also points out that metaphysical two-aspect interpretations bear a deeper
family resemblance to the two-world view than admitted since both the
two-world view and the metaphysical two-aspect view think it possible to
establish, ‘by means of general metaphysical reasoning’, ‘the existence of
unknowable properties belonging to the thing in itself ’. That is to say,
‘both views take Kant’s distinction between appearance and thing in itself
to be primarily ontological rather than epistemological. […] What both
[the metaphysical two-aspect and the two-world view] have in common
is that Kant’s distinction is considered to involve the assumption of a
realm of entities of different ontological status than objects on the empir-
ical level have’ (Quarfood 2004:35).
As suggested earlier, it is perhaps more natural to regard aspect theories
as ontological rather than as having to do with epistemological readings
such as Allison’s. In the context of a strongly realist interpretation of
Kant’s transcendental philosophy, Kenneth Westphal (2004:56–61), for
example, espouses such a metaphysical ‘dual aspect’ reading of idealism,
referring to Kant’s talk of a double perspective in the Bxviii note in the
First Critique preface. Westphal writes:
[T]he double aspect view cannot simply be two ways of thinking about or
describing objects. Rather, those two ways of thinking about objects must
be based on, because they can only be justified by, the metaphysically dis-
tinct characteristics objects have as intuited by us and as not intu-
ited. (2004:57)
30 D. Schulting
The classic example of a metaphysical dual-aspect theory is Spinoza’s view

regarding mind and body, which as irreducible attributes both belong to,
or more precisely express, one identical and unique substance. Associating
Kant’s transcendental theory, as the extreme opposite of Spinoza’s natu-
ralism, with aspect theory would then seem not so befitting.
It appears that Westphal, and perhaps metaphysical two-aspecters
about Kant’s idealism in general, assumes the naturalist position that the
objects as things in themselves are given, with all their determinate char-
acteristics, to which we subsequently latch on by means of intuiting these
objects or aspects of these objects, or not as the case may be. This seems
hardly Kantian, not even in spirit. Kant’s distinction between things in
themselves and appearances appears to be relocated to the given object,
the thing in itself, which is characterisable by two distinct types of state,
so that the object itself has different states which are either intuitable or
not. This is what Westphal seems to be saying:
Kant holds that the distinction between phenomena and noumena is not
simply one of description, but concerns objects intuited by us and as not
intuited, or, more specifically, those states of an object that occur or are evi-
dent as we intuit them and the other, nonintuitable states of that object. On
Kant’s view, the former are all spatiotemporal, though none of the latter
are’. (2004:57, emphasis added)
Westphal thus believes that the ‘double aspect’ character is not a matter
of distinguishing between ‘two ways of describing’ these two kinds of
aspect, but rather of distinguishing between two kinds of properties that
the thing itself, presumably the same identical object (since he uses the
term ‘object’), has (2004:58). The contrast between two aspects has to do
with the kinds of properties a thing has, either as intuited or as unintu-
ited (or, intuitable or unintuitable), and presumably, the ideal aspect
would be that aspect of the object that is intuited or intuitable in virtue
of the forms of intuition. Strikingly, the metaphysical nature of this dis-
tinction that Westphal, who thinks Kant’s transcendental philosophy is a
realism sans phrase, ascribes to Kant’s assumption of the ideal nature of
the forms of intuition is described by him as a ‘metaphysical fact’
(2004:58), which is at least somewhat counterintuitive considering Kant’s
radical turn away from a metaphysics that purports to describe reality in

a de re fashion or in terms of metaphysical facts, or any facts for that matter.
Without further ado, I now want to look in particular at Allais’s meta-
physical two-aspect reading, which she presented in a series of articles in
the mid-noughties, and then in monograph form in Allais (2015). Her
book is undoubtedly one of the most illuminating, novel, and important
in scholarship on Kant’s idealism in recent years.
3.2 etaphysical Two-Aspect Readings

M
and Allais’s Middle Course
Allais aims to steer ‘a middle course’ (2007:460) between the two extremes
of phenomenalist and ‘methodological’ readings of the distinction
between appearances and things in themselves. Allais is particularly con-
cerned with refuting the phenomenalist reading of Kant’s idealism, which
holds that appearances are (merely) mental representations. She empha-
sises that phenomenalism conflicts with Kant’s metaphysics of experi-
ence, which takes empirical objects to be really existing things that exist
unperceived. On her account, Kant is not a constructionist, for whom
the necessary constraints of experience are ‘mere ways of organising sense-
data’ (2007:461).8 Allais notes:
Kant is not concerned merely with how we construct experience, but also
to argue that there must actually be substance that endures through time
and is not created or destroyed. (2007:461n.10)
In other words, there must be a way that appearances are seen, not as
mental representations, or as existing in the mind, or as sense data, but as
publicly perceivable objects that endure unperceived and form part of
causally determined empirical nature, but which also—and this marks
the distinctiveness of Allais’s interpretation—allows appearances to be
mind-dependent as opposed to things in themselves, which are mind-
independent. In order to prop up her reading of appearances as both
being of substantial existing things in themselves and mind-dependent,
she alludes to Kant’s secondary quality analogy in the Prolegomena (Prol,
32 D. Schulting
AA 4:288–290).9 She argues that once we have a proper account of Kant’s

theory of perception in place (namely in terms of a direct theory of per-
ception), and so do not take Kant as a representationalist, and ‘once we
have the appropriate account of secondary qualities’ (2007:460), this
analogy is very useful in understanding the in-between status of appear-
ances as of things in themselves and mind-dependent (see 2007:463ff.).
Allais also wants to chart a middle course between what she calls ‘the
extremes of seeing Kant as committed to the existence of supersensible,
non-spatiotemporal objects distinct from the things of which we have
experience (noumena in the positive sense), and denying that Kant has
any real metaphysical commitment to the existence of things in them-
selves’ (2007:462n.17). Allais wants to stress that Kant is committed to
the existence of really mind-independent things, which as mind-
independent exist independently from us, and so are not appearances,
but which have another side to them, for which they are dependent on us
to the extent in which they appear to us. She sees her view (and that of
Langton 1998) as a correction of methodological one-world views
(2006:146), but as stopping short of what she intimates is extreme nou-
menalism about supersensible entities (2006:148). It seems that for Allais
the only things that would have a distinct existence as supersensible enti-
ties, were they to exist, would be noumena in the positive sense, and
things in themselves are not these. But, against Allais, one could argue
that to say that things in themselves are not such positive distinct entities,
i.e. noumena, does not imply that there is no way in which an ontological
distinction can be upheld between things in themselves and appearances
as two kinds of object.
In general, Allais’s reading is an attractive one, as it enables us to make
sense of the very term that Kant adopts, Erscheinung, to denote the object
of experience. An appearance is not a mere mental item, but a genuine
way or mode in which a mind-independent thing or object exists for us,
apart from the way it exists in itself as mind-independent. On the other
hand, Kant repeatedly says that appearances are ‘mere’ representations. At
one point in the A-Deduction Kant writes that ‘appearances themselves
are nothing but sensible representations [sinnliche Vorstellungen]’, which
‘in themselves [an sich] […] must not be seen as objects (outside the
power of representation)’ (A104, trans. modified). At A127 Kant is even

clearer: ‘[A]ppearances, as such, cannot occur outside us, but exist only in
our sensibility.’10 And to be sure, it is not just their formal possibility that
appearances receive from the understanding, it is also ‘as they lie in the
sensibility as mere intuitions’ (A127, emphasis added) that they depend
on the mind. By contrast, Allais’s account of appearances would seem to
affirm their being mind-external objects, against Kant’s claim here, not
mere representations or items in our sensibility. It seems to me that Allais’s
account cannot fully exorcise the phenomenalist spectre by way of
explaining the mentalist language that Kant clearly adopts. I discuss her
criticisms of phenomenalist readings of Kant’s idealism in more detail in
Chap. 4.
Furthermore, her view creates a problem if an appearance were always
a mind-dependent aspect of a thing that as it is in itself is mind-
independent, for the question then arises as to how there can be purely
subjective appearances, that is, appearances which are not objectively
determinable and so not aspects of real things—that is, aspects of pub-
licly perceivable objects such as bent sticks (see her account in Allais
2007:471ff.). Sometimes Kant seems to use the notion ‘appearance’ syn-
onymously with a mere mental representation, a Praussian empirical-
subjective object, say. In other words, an appearance is not eo ipso a
representation of an object.11 However, in Allais’s favour it could be
argued that to the extent that mental representations and hence illusions
etc. are also, as ‘inner appearances’ (A386), possible objects of experience,
they belong to the same realm of appearances as any other that are tran-
scendentally ideal, i.e. dependent on minds such as ours for being cog-
nised as genuine empirical objects of experience (albeit not as purely
subjective).
One of the biggest problems facing Allais’s interpretation, however, is
that on her one-world view it seems that only empirical objects exist,
which have both an in-itself nature and an appearance nature, and not
things in themselves which only have an in-itself nature and no appearance
aspect (e.g. God, the soul).12 Allais may rightly point out that Kant is not
committed to the (theoretically determinable) actual existence of God
and other such noumenal objects—although this is more difficult to
34 D. Schulting
maintain regarding Kant’s view on the soul, more specifically, the imma-
terial nature of the human mind. However, her position (at least in her
earlier work) goes further than that: it in fact seems to disallow even the
possibility of God’s existence, for on her one-world reading no room is
left for objects that are effectively numerically distinct from appearances,
and which have no phenomenal counterpart (or for noumenal objects
that would affect beings with a different intuitional capacity than ours).
This is a general problem for two-aspect readings of idealism: no sense
can be made of the different numerical identities of things in themselves
and appearances whose difference is not just the difference in the set of
properties of one and the same thing.
Allais is right to query two-world views if such views are to mean that
Kant’s pre-Critical stance, in the Inaugural Dissertation—namely that we
distinguish strictly between a mundus sensibilis and a mundus intelligibilis
as mapping two kinds of theoretically accessible objects or worlds of
objects—still somehow informs Kant’s position in the Critique (she
quotes B311, B274, and Prol, AA 4:293).13 However, Kant’s denial of
theoretical knowledge of positive noumena does not mean he denies their
existence tout court (nor of course can he affirm it). In fact, Kant is com-
mitted to finding a proper way of being able to claim something positive
about the noumenal, e.g. in the Groundwork (cf. Wagner 2008:76, 77),
where Kant proposes the idea of human beings being part of the intelli-
gible world as well as of the sensible world.14 Generally, we cannot justify
claims that things in themselves are noumena in a positive sense (theo-
retically or speculatively determinable), but some noumena are real things
in themselves and not mere thought entities (e.g. a soul-substance that
underlies the ‘I’) even if we cannot know anything determinate about
them. Also, all appearances have things in themselves underlying them,
but, as said earlier, some things in themselves have no appearances some-
how supervening upon them (e.g. God).
Lastly, and perhaps most distinctively of her reading, Allais proposes—
so as to show that she pursues a middle way between extreme noumenal-
ism and mere methodological readings as well as to indicate her differences
with Langton on intrinsicness—to see the distinction between things in
themselves and appearances in terms of ‘distinguish[ing] between two
ways of knowing things’. Allais writes:
We can know things in terms of the ways in which they affect other things,
and we can know things as they are apart from this. (2006:159)
Allais uses the terminology of specifying something opaquely and speci-

fying something transparently. Both ways of specifying refer to the same
thing; describing opaquely does not give us knowledge of the intrinsic
nature of the thing but gives us knowledge of it as appearance. Our way
of cognising things is by way of opaque specification, for we never know
what things are intrinsically. We can only know outer relations, as Kant
says (A277/B333). The distinction that Allais has in mind is not so much
a distinction between sets of properties of the one thing, but ‘between
two ways of knowing the same things—knowing things intrinsically, or
as they are apart from other things (including ourselves), and knowing
things in terms of other things’ (2006:160). Knowing things intrinsically
would be knowing them by transparent description, but we do not actu-
ally know things that way.
Although such a reading might strike one as epistemological, Allais
still means it to be nontrivial in that it says something of the thing in
itself that exists (2006:164). To make a complex interpretation even more
complex, Allais also says that
[o]ur representation of space and time is not an opaque presentation of

something which has a way it is in itself, but rather belongs only to appear-
ances. […] We cognise space and spatial relations, time and temporal rela-
tions, intrinsically and directly. (2006:165)
But, regarding this last remark—i.e. that space is represented directly and
not opaquely—if the purpose of the distinction of ways of describing the
same things, either transparently or opaquely, was to capture the tran-
scendental distinction between, respectively, things in themselves that
have an intrinsic nature and appearances that are merely relational, and
given that one of the fundamental features of appearances in contrast to
things in themselves is their spatiotemporality, then Allais’s proposal
turns out not to be very useful. It could be argued though on Allais’s
behalf that Kant does allow talk of knowing (directly) the inner nature of
things if by inner is meant comparatively inner determinations, which for
phenomena are nothing but relations.15
Another random document with
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There were titters from the younger members of the much
interested audience and even unconcealed laughter from the older
boys, and Elk’s dark countenance took on a deeper and more angry
red as he thrust it close to Laurie’s.
“That’ll be about all for you,” he growled. “You’re one of these
funny guys, aren’t you? Must have your little joke, eh? Well, see how
you like this one!”
Elk raised his right hand, unclenched but formidable. An expectant
hush filled the little store. Polly, with troubled eyes fixed on the
drama, deluged a pineapple ice-cream with soda until it dripped on
the counter below. Laurie continued to smile.
CHAPTER II
KEWPIE STATES HIS CASE
“W hatever’s going on?” asked a pleasant voice from the

doorway that led into the room behind the shop. “Is—is
anything wrong, Polly? Dear me, child, you’re running that all over
the counter!”
More than two dozen pairs of eyes turned to where Mrs. Deane
looked perplexedly about her. She was a sweet-faced little woman
whose white hair was contradicted by a plump, unlined countenance
and rosy cheeks. Elk’s uplifted arm dropped slowly back. For a short
moment the silence continued. Then a veritable Babel of voices
arose. “Hello, Mrs. Deane!” “Say, Mrs. Deane, don’t you remember
me paying you ten cents last Friday? Miss Polly says I still owe—”
“Mrs. Deane, when are you going to have some more of those twirly
things with the cream filling?” “Mrs. Deane, will you wait on me,
please? I want—” “Aw, I was ahead of him—”
The Widow Deane beamed and made her way to the rear of the
counter, greeting the boys by name. She was fond of all boys, but
those of Hillman’s School she looked on as peculiarly her own, and
she knew the names of nearly every one of them and, to a
remarkable extent, their taste in the matter of pastry and beverages.
“I couldn’t imagine what had happened,” she was explaining to Cas
Bennett as she filled his order for two apple turnovers. “All of a
sudden everything became so still in here! What was it?”
Cas grinned. “Oh, just some of Nod Turner’s foolishness,” he
replied evasively. “He and Thurston were—were talking.”
They were still talking, for that matter, although their fickle
audience no longer heeded. The interruption had quite spoiled Elk’s
great scene, and after lowering his arm he had not raised it again.
Even he realized that you couldn’t start anything when Mrs. Deane
was present. But he was still angry and was explaining to Laurie
none too elegantly that vengeance was merely postponed and not
canceled. Ned, maintaining outward neutrality, watched Elk very
closely. Ned had an idea, perhaps a mistaken one, that when it came
to fistic encounters it was his bounden duty to substitute for Laurie,
and he had been on the point of substituting when Mrs. Deane’s
appearance had called a halt.
Laurie’s smile gave place to sudden gravity as he interrupted Elk’s
flow of eloquence. “That will do,” he said. “I’m not afraid of you,
Thurston, but it’s silly to get so upset over a trifle. Of course I
shouldn’t have taken your wheel, but I didn’t hurt it any, and you’ve
bawled me out quite enough, don’t you think? I’ll apologize, if you
like, and—”
“I don’t want your apology,” growled Elk. “You’re too blamed fresh,
Turner, and you talk too much. After this you let everything of mine
alone. If you don’t, I’ll do what I was going to do when the old lady
came in. Understand?”
“Perfectly,” replied Laurie soberly. “Have a soda?”
“Not with you, you little shrimp!” Elk strode away, fuming, to elbow
his way to the fountain.
“What did you have to say that for?” asked Ned. “You had him
pretty nearly calmed down, and then you had to spoil it all by offering
him a drink. When he said you talk too much he was dead right!”
“Oh, well, what’s he want to kick up such a fuss for?” asked Laurie
cheerfully. “Come on. I’ve got to beat it to gym for practice.”
They waved a farewell to Polly over the heads and shoulders of
the throng about the fountain, but that young lady demanded speech
with them and left her duties for a hasty word nearer the door. “I’ve
just got to see you boys about Kewpie,” she announced. “It’s very
important. Can’t you come back a minute before supper, Ned?”
“Kewpie?” asked Laurie. “What’s wrong with him?”
“I don’t know. That’s what I want to talk about. There isn’t time
now.”
“All right, we’ll be back about five thirty,” agreed Ned. “By. See you
later.”
“Wonder what’s up,” said Laurie when, having reached School
Park, they turned their steps briskly over the slushy pavements
toward Hillman’s. “Looked perfectly normal last time I saw him.”
“Kewpie? Sure, all except his size. That’s not normal. By the way,
he was looking for you, Polly said. Matter of life or death.”
“Huh, I know what he wants. He’s got it into that crazy head of his
that he can pitch, and he wants me to give him a try-out. I sort of half
promised I would.”
“Mean he wants to pitch for the nine?” asked Ned incredulously.
“Well, he wants to get on the squad, anyway. Thinks that if I tell Mr.
Mulford he’s sort of good, Pinky will take him on.”
“Would he?”
Laurie shrugged. “I don’t believe. Mulford warned the fellows two
weeks back that if they didn’t report for indoor work he didn’t want
them later. And he generally keeps his word, Pinky does.”
“Why didn’t Kewpie think of it before?” asked Ned.
“Search me, old dear. What’s troubling me is that he’s thought of it
now. He’s been pestering the life out of me for a week.”
“What’s he want you to look him over for? Why doesn’t he ask Cas
Bennett or some one who knows something about pitching?”
“Reckon he knows they wouldn’t bother with him. Thinks because
Pinky’s got it into his old bean that he can make a catcher of me that
I can spot a Mathewson or a Mays with my eyes shut. I appreciate
his faith in me and all that, Ned, and it wounds me sorely that my
own kith and kin—meaning you, old dear—haven’t the same—er—
boundless trust in my ability, but, just between the two of us, I don’t
know a curve from a drop yet, and if I can stop one with my mitt I’m
as pleased as anything and don’t care a continental whether the silly
thing stays in said mitt or doesn’t. Frankly, I’m plumb convinced that
Pinky had a brain-storm when he dragged me in from the outfield
and stuck me behind a wire bird-cage!”
“Oh, I guess he knows his business,” responded Ned. “Anyhow,
you’ve got to do your best. If you don’t I’ll lick the daylight out of you.”
“Don’t you mean into me?” asked Laurie sweetly. “Seems to me
that ought to be the proper phrase. Having, as I understand
physiology, no daylight in me, to start with—”
“Oh, shut up! I mean what I say, though. We agreed when we got
here last fall that I was to go in for football and you for baseball. I
know I didn’t make very good—”
“Shut up yourself! You did so!”
“But that’s the more reason you should. The honor of the Turners
is at stake, partner. Don’t you forget that!”
“Oh, I’ll do my best,” sighed Laurie, “but I certainly do hold it ag’in
Pinky for butting in on my quiet, peaceful life out in the field and
talking me into this catching stuff. Gosh, I had no idea the human
hand could propel a ball through space, as it were, the way those
pitcher guys do! Some time I’ll break a couple of fingers, I suppose,
and then I’ll get let out.”
“Oh, no, you won’t,” said Ned grimly. “All the big league catchers
have two or three broken fingers on each hand. Don’t count on that,
old son!”
They had crossed Walnut Street now and were stamping the
melted snow from their shoes on the drier concrete sidewalk before
the school property. Above the top of a privet hedge the upper
stories of the school buildings were in sight, West Hall, School Hall,
and East Hall facing Summit Street in order. In the windows of West
Hall, a dormitory, gaily hued cushions added color to the monotony
of the brick edifice, and here and there an upthrown casement
allowed a white sash-curtain to wave lazily in the breeze of a mild
March afternoon. As the two boys turned in at the first gate, under
the modest sign announcing “Hillman’s School—Entrance Only,”
Laurie broke the short silence.
“What are you doing this afternoon?” he asked.
“I don’t know. There isn’t much a fellow can do except read.”
“Or study,” supplemented Laurie virtuously. “Better come along
and watch practice a while.”
But Ned shook his head. “Not good enough, old-timer. That
baseball cage is too stuffy. Guess I’ll wander over to the field and
see if there’s anything going on.”
“There won’t be. They say the ice has gone to mush. Listen. If you
see Kewpie, tell him I died suddenly, will you? And how about Polly?
Shall I meet you there?”
“Yes, five thirty we told her. So-long!”
“By, old dear! Here’s where I go and lose a finger!”
Ned climbed to the second floor of East Hall and made his way
along the corridor to No. 16. The door was ajar, and when he had
pushed it open he discovered Kewpie Proudtree stretched at length
on the window-seat. It was no unusual thing to find Kewpie in
possession of No. 16, for he appeared to like it fully as well as his
own quarters across the way, if not better. Kewpie laid down the
magazine he had been examining and laboriously pulled himself to a
sitting posture.
“Hello, Nid,” he greeted. “Where’s Nod?” It was Kewpie who had
tagged those quaint nicknames on the Turner twins, and he never
failed to use them.
“Gym,” answered Ned. “Practice.”
“What! What time is it? And here I’ve been wasting my time
waiting for him!”
“Too bad about your time! Get your cap, and let’s go over to the
field.”
But Kewpie shook his head sadly, relapsing against the cushions.
“I’m not feeling very well, Nid,” he said plaintively.
Ned looked at him with more interest, wondering if it could be
Kewpie’s state of health that was concerning Polly Deane. But it was
difficult to associate that youth’s bulk with illness, and Ned
abandoned the idea. “What’s wrong with you?” he inquired jeeringly.
“It seems to be my stomach,” said Kewpie, laying a sympathetic
hand on that portion of his anatomy.
“Does, eh? Well, what have you been eating?”
“Eating? Nothing much. Well, I did have a cream-puff and a tart at
the Widow’s, but I guess it isn’t that.”
“Oh, no, of course not, you silly prune! And you probably had a nut
sundae with whipped cream and sliced peaches and a lot of other
truck on it. Funny you don’t feel well, isn’t it?”
“I didn’t have any whipped cream,” said Kewpie indignantly. “It—it
makes me bilious.”
“Well, come on over to the field. It’ll do you good.”
“I’ve been there. There’s nothing doing, Nid. The rink looks like
tapioca pudding, and you can go in to your ankles anywhere you
walk. Look at my shoes.”
“Yes, and look at that window-seat, you crazy galoot! Why don’t
you wipe your dirty feet on your own cushions?”
“Oh, that’ll come off.” Kewpie flicked at the muddy stains with a
nonchalant hand. “Say, listen. I’ve been trying to get hold of Nod all
day. How long’s he going to practise?”
“Search me. They keep at it until five or a bit after, I think. What
you got on your so-called mind, Kewpie?”
Kewpie hesitated and finally decided to take Ned into his
confidence. “Well, it’s like this,” he began impressively. “A fellow
needs more exercise than he gets along this time of year, Nid. Of
course, it’s all right for you fellows who play basket-ball or hockey,
but I couldn’t get into those things, and there isn’t much else to keep
you fit. Now—”
“Except pastry at the Widow Deane’s, Kewpie.”
Kewpie ignored the interruption. “Well, anyway, I’ve been thinking
that if I could get into baseball it would be a mighty good thing for
me. Sort of keep me in training, you know. I—I’m likely to put on
weight if I don’t watch out. You understand.”
“What’s your line?” asked Ned innocently. “Short-stop?”
Kewpie grinned. “Pitcher,” he said.
“Really? Why, I didn’t know you were a baseball pitcher. Ever
worked at it much?”
“Sure,” said Kewpie. Then his gaze wavered and he hedged a
trifle. “Of course, I’ve never tried for the team or anything like that,
but last spring we had a scrub team here and I pitched on it—
generally. I’ve got something, too, let me tell you.” Kewpie’s
assurance returned. “All I need is practice, Nid. Why, I can pitch a
drop that’s a wonder!”
“Too bad you didn’t go out for the team this year,” said Ned. “I
understand Mr. Mulford won’t take any fellows on who didn’t report
early.”
Kewpie’s dejection returned and he nodded. “I know,” he
answered. “That’s why I wanted to get Nod to—to sort of speak a
good word for me. You see, if I can show him I’ve got something on
the ball and he tells Pinky, why, I guess Pinky wouldn’t want to lose
me.”
“Why don’t you speak to Pinky yourself?”
“Oh, you know how coaches are. They don’t believe what you tell
’em half the time; think you’re just stringing ’em to get on the squad.”
“And, of course, you wouldn’t do that,” said Ned gravely.
“Oh, shut up,” answered Kewpie, grinning. “You don’t think I can
pitch, I’ll bet.”
“You win,” replied Ned simply.
“All right, then, I’ll show you, by Joshua! You get Nod to catch me,
and you’ll see. Honest, you might help a fellow, Nid, instead of
joshing him. Why, say, look how I got you on the football team last
fall! If I hadn’t told Joe Stevenson about you being a star half-back
—”
“Yes, and you came mighty close to getting your silly dome
knocked clean off you,” interrupted Ned grimly. “A nice bunch of
trouble you got me into!”
“Well, it came out all right, didn’t it?” asked Kewpie irrepressibly.
“Didn’t you win the old game for us with that kick of yours? Sure, you
did! I’ll say so!”
“Never you mind about that, old son. If you expect me to help you
get on the baseball team you needn’t crack up what you did last fall!”
Kewpie looked momentarily pained, but perhaps he was
accustomed to the ingratitude of human nature. Anyway, he arose
with careful deliberation from the window-seat, an inquiring palm laid
against his stomach, and smiled forgivingly down on Ned. “Well, I’ve
got to be going back,” he announced. “Tell Nod I’ll be in about six,
won’t you? And—er—say, you don’t happen to have a half-dollar you
don’t need right away, I suppose.”
“I might,” answered Ned, reaching into a pocket. “Going to bribe
your way into baseball, you fat rascal?”
“No, but I went off without paying for the stuff at the Widow’s, Nid;
clean forgot all about it, and—”
“Kewpie, don’t lie, or you won’t get this!”
Kewpie grinned. “Well, I didn’t exactly forget it, maybe, but it—it
sort of passed out of my mind at the moment. You understand. I
really ought to go back there and pay it, Nid.”
“That’s all right. I can save you the trouble. I’m going down there
myself pretty soon. How much is it?”
“Twenty cents,” faltered Kewpie.
“Fine! Then you won’t need the other thirty, old son.”
There was deep reproach in Kewpie’s face as he went out.
CHAPTER III
THE “A. R. K. P.” IS FORMED
F ew customers patronized the little blue shop on Pine Street

between five and six. Hillman’s discouraged the consumption of
sweets so close to the school supper-hour, and, while there was no
rule against it, the fellows felt themselves more or less on honor to
observe the doctor’s frequently expressed wish. Neighbors ran in at
intervals for a loaf of bread or cake or ten cents’ worth of whipped
cream, but for the most part, as six o’clock approached, the bell
tinkled infrequently. Consequently the conference held this afternoon
in the Widow Deane’s sitting-room, which was also kitchen and
dining-room and parlor, was almost undisturbed. The conference
was participated in by four persons, Polly, Ned, Laurie, and Mae
Ferrand. Mae’s presence had been unforeseen, but as she was
Polly’s particular chum and, as Laurie phrased it, “one of the bunch,”
it occasioned no embarrassment. Mae was about Polly’s age and
perhaps a bit prettier, although, to quote Laurie again, it all depended
on whether you liked light hair or dark. Mae’s hair was pure
sunshine, and her skin was milk-white and rose-pink; and, which
aroused Polly’s envy, she never freckled.
As the four had known each other since autumn there was no
stiffness apparent in either speech or action. Ned lolled back in the
comfortable old patent rocker, with his legs over one arm of it, and
Laurie swung his feet from the table, secure in the knowledge that
Polly’s mother was up-stairs. Laurie had a weakness for positions
allowing him full liberty for his feet. Polly was talking. She and Mae,
arms entwined, occupied the couch between the windows. A shining
kettle on the stove hissed cozily, and a big black cat, Towser by
name, purred in Ned’s lap as he scratched her head.
“There’s something wrong with him,” stated Polly convincedly. “I’ve
noticed it for quite a while, more than two weeks. He looks dreadfully
gloomy and unhappy, and he—he’s absent-minded, too. Just this
afternoon he went off without thinking a thing about paying for a
sundae and some cakes he had.”
Ned grinned but said nothing. Laurie winked gravely.
“And that’s another thing,” continued Polly. “It’s perfectly awful the
way he eats sweet things, Laurie. He comes in every day and, if I’d
let him, he’d make himself sick with cream-puffs and tarts and candy.
It just seems as if he didn’t care what happened to him, as if he was
—was desperate! Why, he told me to-day that maybe he wouldn’t
play football any more!”
“I guess he was just talking,” said Mae.
“I don’t think so.” Polly shook her head. “He acts funny. Haven’t
you noticed it, Laurie?”
“Yes, but he always did act funny. He’s a nut.”
“No, he isn’t; he’s a real nice boy, and you oughtn’t to talk like that.
He’s unhappy, and we ought to help him.”
“All right,” agreed Laurie cheerfully. “What’ll we do?”
“Well, I suppose that first of all we should find out what’s worrying
him,” answered Polly thoughtfully. “You—you have to know the
disease before you apply the remedy.” Polly was plainly rather
pleased with that statement, and so was Mae. Mae squeezed her
friend’s arm in token of appreciation. Laurie allowed that it was a
“wise crack” but wanted to know how Polly proposed to make the
discovery. “Far as I can see,” he added, “Kewpie’s much the same
as usual, if not more so. Although, to tell the honest gospel truth, I
haven’t seen an awful lot of him just recently. I’ve been sort of
keeping out of his way because he’s after me to see him pitch so’s I
can ask Pinky to let him on the baseball squad.”
“It couldn’t be that, do you think?” asked Polly of the room at large.
“I mean, you don’t suppose he’s hurt because you’ve been avoiding
him? He might think that you’d gone back on him, Laurie, and I
guess that Kewpie has a very sensitive nature.”
Ned snorted. “Kewpie’s nature’s about as sensitive as a—a
whale’s!”
“I don’t know anything about whales,” declared Polly with dignity,
“but I do know that very often folks who don’t seem sensitive are
actually the very sensitivest of all. And I am quite sure that if Kewpie
thought Laurie had—had deserted him—”
“Hey, hold hard, Polly! Gee, I haven’t deserted the poor prune. I—
I’ve been busy lately and—and—well, that’s all there is to it. Gosh, I
like Kewpie. He’s all right, isn’t he, Ned?”
“Yes. Look here, Miss Chairwoman and Ladies and Gentlemen of
the Convention, the only thing that’s wrong with Kewpie is that he
doesn’t know what to do with himself. Ever since he stopped playing
football he’s been like a chap who’s lost his job and can’t find
another one. Of course, at first it wasn’t so bad, for Christmas
vacation was coming. But for the last couple of months he’s just sort
of mooned around, getting sore-headed because he couldn’t make
the basket-ball team or the hockey team or anything else. Give the
old chap something to do and he’ll snap out of it. He comes over
here and fills up on pastry and stuff because he hasn’t anything
better to do and has a sweet tooth, anyway. Laurie and I have told
him often enough that he ought to cut it out, but he says he doesn’t
care whether he gets on the eleven next fall or not. That’s just guff,
of course. If they had spring football practice here he’d behave
himself, but they don’t. Only trouble with Kewpie is he’s lost his
ambition.”
After that long speech Ned subsided further into the rocker. Mae
looked across at him admiringly. “I’m sure Ned’s quite right, Polly,”
she declared.
“Well, I’m glad if he is,” said Polly with a sigh of relief. “I was
dreadfully afraid that he had some—some secret sorrow in his life,
like—like a cruel stepmother or—or a father who drank or something.
If it’s only what Ned thinks it is, why, everything’s quite easy,
because getting on the baseball team will be just the thing for him.”
“How’s he going to get there?” asked Laurie suspiciously.
“Why, I thought you said he wanted you to help him!”
“I did, but what he wants and what I aim to do—”
“Kewpie couldn’t play baseball, Polly,” said Ned. “Look at him!”
“But I’ve seen stout boys play baseball plenty of times,” Polly
protested. “Two years ago we had a first baseman on the high
school team who was every bit as fat as Kewpie Proudtree. You
remember George Wallen, Mae.”
“But it isn’t only his fatness, or stoutness, or whatever you like to
call it,” insisted Laurie. “He isn’t built right for baseball. Gee, think of
Kewpie trying to beat out a bunt or sliding to second! Besides, hang
it, I couldn’t get him on the team if he really could pitch! Pinky said
positively—”
“Is he a pitcher?” asked Polly eagerly.
“No, but he wants people to think he is.”
“But that would make it lots easier, Laurie! A pitcher doesn’t have
to run much, and—”
“Why doesn’t he? Don’t you think he has to take his turn at the bat
sometimes?”
“But he never hits the ball,” replied Polly triumphantly, “and so he
doesn’t need to run!”
“She had you there, partner,” laughed Ned.
“Well, just the same,” answered Laurie, grinning, “I’ll be hanged if
I’m going to ask Pinky to let Kewpie on the squad just so he won’t be
lonesome. Pinky wouldn’t listen to me, anyway.”
“You don’t know,” said Polly. “And I think you really ought to try.
Yes, I do! Kewpie’s having a miserable time of it, and he’s ruining
himself for football, and it’s our duty to the school to do everything
we can so he won’t!”
“Say that again,” begged Ned, but Polly paid no heed.
“Besides,” she went on warmly, “we all pretend to be his friends,
and I guess a friend ought to be willing to make some sacrifices for
you, and it wouldn’t be very much for Laurie to get him on the
baseball team and—”
“But I tell you I can’t do it!” wailed Laurie.
“You don’t know. You haven’t tried. Don’t you think he ought to try,
Mae?”
“I certainly do,” said that young lady decisively.
“Don’t you, Ned?” persisted Polly earnestly.
“Not a doubt of it in the world,” answered Ned gravely.
Laurie glared indignantly at him, but Ned was looking at Towser.
After a brief silence Laurie sighed gloomily.
“All right,” he said. “But I can tell you right now that it won’t do any
good. Mr. Mulford said he wouldn’t take on any fellow who didn’t
report for early practice, and he means it. Besides, Kewpie’s no
more of a pitcher than—than I am!”
“I know, Laurie,” said Polly persuasively, “but maybe with practice,
and if you showed him—”
Ned chortled. Laurie, although he wanted to smile, kept a straight
face.
“Of course,” he agreed, “I might do that. Well, I’ll do it, though I’ll
feel like a perfect ass when I speak to Pinky about it.”
“There,” said Polly in triumph. “I knew we could do something if we
all put our heads together! And I do hope it will be all right. Kewpie’s
really a very dear boy, and he certainly did wonderfully at football last
fall and he’s just got to keep on. I do think, though, that we should
keep this quite to ourselves, don’t you, Ned?”
“Don’t just see how we can. If Kewpie gets on the baseball squad
he’s almost sure to know something about it. He’s not such a fool as
he looks sometimes, Polly.”
Polly stared. “I don’t see—” she began. Then the twinkle in Ned’s
eye explained. “Of course I didn’t mean that, silly! I meant that
Kewpie shouldn’t know that we—that we’d been discussing him and
that we had—well, conspired, Ned. Don’t you see? He might resent it
or something.”
“I get you! We’ll make a secret society out of it, eh? Association for
the Restoration—no, that won’t do.”
“Advancement,” suggested Mae.
“Association for the Reclamation of Kewpie Proudtree!”
pronounced Ned. “And the password—”
“Association for the Degradation of Laurence Turner, you mean,”
said Laurie dejectedly. “And there isn’t any password, because he
won’t pass!”
“All right,” agreed Ned. “But the dues are twenty cents. Here you
are, Polly. You’ve got ‘treasurer’ written all over you.”
“But—but what is it?” asked Polly, refusing to accept the two dimes
that Ned proffered.
“Madam, I am settling the debt of none other than our
distinguished and rattle-brained friend Kewpie. At his request. It
seems he—er—he neglected to settle for the entertainment you
provided him this afternoon, and, torn by remorse—”
“Oh, I knew he forgot!” exclaimed Polly gladly.
“He would,” said Laurie pessimistically. “He has a perfectly
remarkable forgetory. I guess he’s the champion long-distance
forgetter—”
“Don’t be horrid,” begged Polly. “With so much on his mind, it’s no
wonder he—”
“On his what?” exclaimed Laurie. “Ned, did you get that? Kewpie
has so much on his mind! Honest, Polly, when Kewpie takes his cap
off he hasn’t—”
The kettle caused a diversion by boiling over just then, and the
conference broke up.
Kewpie awaited Laurie in No. 16, and as the twins entered he
broke into speech. “Say, Nod, when—”
“To-morrow morning. Half-past ten. Back of the gym,” replied
Laurie promptly. Kewpie stared, puzzled.
“What?” he demanded suspiciously.
Laurie performed an exaggerated parody of a pitcher winding up
and delivering a ball. Then, assuming the rôle of catcher, he leaped
high off his feet and pulled down a wild one that would undoubtedly
have smashed the upper pane of the further window had it got by
him.
“Honest?” cried Kewpie. “Me and you?”
“No, you and me.”
“But—how did you know what I was going to ask?”
Laurie viewed him sadly. “Kewpie,” he replied, “it’s a mighty good
thing you decided to be a pitcher. That’s the only position that
doesn’t call for any brain!”
CHAPTER IV
PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT
L aurie folded Kewpie’s sweater and placed it on the ground a few

yards from the gymnasium wall. “There’s your plate,” he
announced. “See if you can put ’em over the middle button, Kewpie.”
Kewpie tightened his belt, thumped a worn baseball into a
blackened glove, and rather ostentatiously dug a hole in the moist
turf with his heel. Laurie grinned. Here on the south side of the
building the sun shone warmly and the ground was fairly dry. Behind
Laurie about four yards away, was a wire fence which, if Kewpie
retained ordinary control of the ball, would make life easier for Ned,
who sat in the embrasure of a basement window. Laurie pulled his
mitten on and waited. Kewpie was at last satisfied with the hole he
had dug and fitted his toe into it. Then he looked speculatively at the
folded sweater and wrapped his fingers about the ball.
“What’s this going to be, Kewpie?” asked Ned. “A drop?”
“Straight ball. Just warming up.” Kewpie let go, and the ball struck
the fence and bounded back. Laurie sighed and went after it.
“I’m not as young as I was, Kewpie,” he said, “and anything more
than ten feet on either side of me is likely to get away. See if you can
put ’em somewhere near the plate.”
Kewpie laughed. “That one got away from me, Nod.”
“Me, too,” said Laurie. “Let her come. Shoot her in!”
Kewpie’s next offering was a good deal better, and Laurie didn’t
have to move to get it. Kewpie sent four or five more balls within
reasonable distance of the sweater. There was no speed in them,
nor were they other than perfectly straight offerings. Still, as Laurie
reflected encouragingly, it was something to be able to do that much.
He was not quite sure he could do it himself the first few times.
“All right, old son,” he called. “Speed ’em up now.”
But speed did not seem to be included in Kewpie’s budget of
tricks. The first attempt sent the ball over Laurie’s head and likewise
over the fence. While Ned, sighing, went after it, Laurie indulged in
gentle sarcasms. Kewpie thumped his glove with a bare fist and
smiled genially. Then the ball came back, and Kewpie began again.
Laurie picked the ball from the trampled turf between his feet and
viewed Kewpie questioningly.
“Didn’t you have some drop on that?” he queried.
“Sure,” answered Kewpie. “Here’s another. You watch it.”
Laurie did watch it. And it did drop. A faint, new-born respect for
Kewpie as a pitcher was reflected in his voice as he said: “That’s not
so poor, old thing. Where’d you learn it?”
But Kewpie was throwing his chest out now, a purely unnecessary
thing for Kewpie to do, and strutting a bit. “Never you mind,” he
answered. “I told you I had something, and you wouldn’t believe me.”
“That’s all right,” remarked Ned, “but you’ve got to know more than
just how to pitch a drop if you’re going to put Nate Beedle out of
business.”
“That’s not half so worse,” commented Laurie after the next ball
had performed a very creditable drop, “but let’s see something else,
old son. How about a curve just for variety?”
“We-ell,” said Kewpie, “I haven’t got curves down so well, but—”
He spent a long moment fingering the ball and finally sent it off with a
decidedly round-arm delivery. Laurie caught it by leaping far to the
left.
“What was that supposed to be?” he asked politely.
“In-shoot,” said Kewpie, but his tone lacked conviction.
“Huh,” returned Laurie, “you ain’t so well in your in-shoot. Better
see a doctor about it. Try an out, old son.”
But Kewpie’s out wasn’t any better, and, at the end of about twenty
minutes, by which time Ned was the only member of the trio not
bathed in perspiration, it had been shown conclusively that Kewpie’s
one and only claim to pitching fame rested on a not very remarkable
drop-ball. Laurie picked up Kewpie’s sweater and returned it to him
gravely. “Better put that on,” he said with vast concern. “It would be
awful if you got cold in that arm of yours.”
Kewpie struggled with the garment, breathing heavily, and when
he had conquered it he turned expectantly to Laurie. “Well, what do
you say?” he asked.
“What do you want me to say?” Laurie stared frowningly at his
mitten.
“Why, you know what I asked you,” said Kewpie. “I—you—”
“But, great jumpin’ Jupiter, Kewpie, I can’t ask Pinky to put you on
the squad just because you can pitch a sort of a drop! You haven’t
an ounce of speed; you can’t curve ’em—”
“Well, but I haven’t had any work!” protested the other. “Gee, I
guess Nate Beedle couldn’t do much better the first time he pitched!”
“But Nate knows how, you simple fish! All the work in the world
won’t make you any better if—”
“Practice makes perfect, don’t it?” interrupted Kewpie indignantly.
“Maybe. Maybe not. If you don’t know anything about pitching you
can practise from now until—”
“But I do know, I tell you. All I need is practice. I’ve got a book that
tells—”
“Book be blowed!” exploded Laurie. “You can’t learn pitching by
taking a correspondence-course, you fat-head!”
“Quit your arguing, you two,” said Ned. “Laurie’s quite right,
Kewpie. He can’t recommend you to Mr. Mulford until you’ve got
more to show than you’ve shown just now. But I don’t see what’s to
prevent you from learning more tricks or what’s to prevent Laurie
from helping you if he can. Seems to me the thing to do is for you
two to get together every day for a while.” Ned was looking
meaningly at his brother. “Maybe Kewpie’s got it in him, Laurie. You
can’t tell yet, eh?”
“Eh? Oh, no, I suppose not. No, you can’t tell. Maybe with practice
—”
“Right-o,” agreed Ned. “That’s it; practice, Kewpie. Now you and
Laurie fix it up between you to get together for half an hour every
morning, savvy? Maybe after a week or so—”
“All right,” agreed Kewpie, beaming. “Gee, in a week I’ll be
speeding them over like—like anything!”
Laurie looked at him pityingly. “You—you poor prune!” he sighed.
Ned surreptitiously kicked him on a shin and quickly drowned
Kewpie’s hurt protest with, “There! That’s fine! Come on, Laurie, it’s
nearly eleven.”
“All right,” answered Laurie, rubbing the shin. “See you later,
Kewpie, and we’ll fix up a time for practice.” Out of ear-shot of the
more leisurely Kewpie, Laurie turned bitterly on his brother. “It’s all
right for you,” he complained, “but that poor fish doesn’t know any
more about pitching than I know about—about my Latin this morning!
It’s all right for you, but—”
“You said that before,” interrupted Ned unfeelingly. “Look here, old-
timer, did we or didn’t we agree to help Kewpie? Are you or aren’t
you a member of the Association for the Reclamation—”
“Sure, I’m a member! And I’m the goat, too, it seems like! I have to
do all the dirty work while you stand around and bark up my shins!
How do you get that way? You can catch a ball if you try. Suppose
you take Kewpie on some of the time and see how you like it!”
“I would in an instant,” responded Ned, “if you’d let me, but you
wouldn’t.”
“I wouldn’t!” echoed Laurie incredulously as he followed the other
up-stairs to No. 16. “Say, you ain’t so well! You just try me!”
But Ned shook his head, smiling gently. “Just now, old son, you’re
not quite yourself. When your better nature asserts itself you’ll—”

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The Bounds of Transcendental Logic

1st ed. 2022 Edition Dennis Schulting

ISBN 978-3-030-71283-9 ISBN 978-3-030-71284-6 (eBook)

Permission to use previously published material in the present volume is

Part I The Metaphysics of Transcendental Idealism and

2 Apperception, Objectivity, and Idealism 11

3 Transcendental Idealism and the Metaphysical Two-

4 Transcendental Idealism and Phenomenalism 47

5 Phenomenalism, Conceivability, and Epistemic Humility 77

Part II The Intimacy Between the Logic of Thought and the

6 The Unity of Cognition, or, How to Read the Leitfaden

6.4 The Relation Between Sensibility and the

7 Transcendental Logic and the Logic of Thought141

8 Once More Unto the Breach: The Derivation of the

9 Categorial Necessity and Categorial Illusion171

10 A Last Remark on Objective Validity185

AA Kants Gesammelte Schriften, ed. königlich preußische

FM What Real Progress Has Metaphysics Made in Germany

Abstract In Chap. 1, I introduce the theme of the book and delineate

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 1

the so-called ‘metaphysical deduction’—which I expounded in my earlier

misunderstood doctrine of idealism, especially problems concerning the

reveals an intimate bond between thought and experience, between

the former Kant means the impossibility of thinking contradictory

Abstract Chap. 2 can be seen as a capsule account of my interpretation

In a key passage in the Transcendental Deduction of the Categories in the

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 11

judgements. These synthetic a priori judgements are not concrete judge-

To return to the above-cited passage from the A-Deduction, Kant answers

It is easy to see that this object must be thought of only as something in

question of transcendental truth. What makes it possible for me to attri-

knowledge and an object of knowledge is. The radical-subjective element

the unity of the manifold in the intuition. There is an element of neces-

(B147), lies in sensibility because only empirical intuition provides a

combines the sensory perceptions of a particular given thing, the arm-

sensible intuition (the ‘x’ which I mentioned earlier) and is identical to

priori conditions knowledge is ex hypothesi not possible, nor are objects

6. Schulting (2021, Chap. 9).

Abstract In Chap. 3 I address various topical issues surrounding Kant’s

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 25

thoroughgoing realism and the mind-independence of the things that we

On Allison’s view, the distinction that idealism draws between appear-

the potential of methodological or epistemological readings has not been

The classic example of a metaphysical dual-aspect theory is Spinoza’s view

radical turn away from a metaphysics that purports to describe reality in

3.2  etaphysical Two-Aspect Readings

AA 4:288–290).9 She argues that once we have a proper account of Kant’s

power of representation)’ (A104, trans. modified). At A127 Kant is even

Allais uses the terminology of specifying something opaquely and speci-

[o]ur representation of space and time is not an opaque presentation of

“W hatever’s going on?” asked a pleasant voice from the

F ew customers patronized the little blue shop on Pine Street

L aurie folded Kewpie’s sweater and placed it on the ground a few

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3 Transcendental Idealism and the Metaphysical Two-

4 Transcendental Idealism and Phenomenalism 47

5 Phenomenalism, Conceivability, and Epistemic Humility 77

Part II The Intimacy Between the Logic of Thought and the

6 The Unity of Cognition, or, How to Read the Leitfaden

6.4 The Relation Between Sensibility and the

7 Transcendental Logic and the Logic of Thought141

8 Once More Unto the Breach: The Derivation of the

9 Categorial Necessity and Categorial Illusion171

10 A Last Remark on Objective Validity185

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