Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-s2hrs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-17T16:04:59.801Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Reply to Lorne Falkenstein

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2011

Rae Langton
Affiliation:
Edinburgh University

Extract

In Kantian Humility I argue that, for Kant, ignorance of things in themselves is ignorance of the intrinsic properties of substances, and that this is epistemic humility, rather than idealism: some aspects of reality, the intrinsic aspects, are beyond our epistemic grasp.

The interpretation draws upon what Falkenstein takes to be ‘a novel and not implausible understanding of Kant's distinction between things in themselves and appearances’ which views it as a distinction between the intrinsic and the relational. He concedes that Kant frequently puts his distinction in just these terms, that I make ‘a strong textual case for it’, that it is ‘plausible and intriguing’ and that it may even be ‘correct, at least for a certain strand of Kant's thought’. He presumably also allows that this distinction between ‘things as they are in relation to other things and things as they are on their own’ is at base a metaphysical distinction, which makes no mention of how things look to us, appear to us or depend on our minds. I am pleased to find sympathy for this understanding of Kant's distinction in a review whose overall tenor is so critical.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Kantian Review 2001

Access options

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

References

Notes

1 Strawson, P. F., Bounds of Sense (London: Methuen, 1966), p. 250.Google Scholar

2 It was lamented, and accepted, by Lewis, in ‘Extrinsic properties’, Philosophical Studies, 44 (1983), 197200CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lewis, and I attempt to remedy it in ‘Defining Intrinsic’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 58 (1998).Google Scholar

3 Kant's illustration, drawing on Leibniz, , in ‘On a discovery1790, Ak. 8:208. Kant is here arguing against the Leibnizian Eberhard.Google Scholar

4 I agree with him that supervenience is best not formulated in terms of change, popular though such a formulation is. I define it more formally in chapter 4.