There is a tension at the heart of Lucy Allais’s new account of Kant’s transcendental idealism. The problem arises from her use of two incompatible theories in contemporary philosophy – relationalism about perception, or naïve realism, and relationalism about colour, or more generally relationalism about any such perceptual property. The problem is that the former requires a more robust form of realism about the properties of the objects of perception than can be accommodated in the partially idealistic framework of the latter. On Allais’s interpretation, Kant’s notorious attempt to balance realism and idealism remains unstable.
