A History of Philosophy in EpitomeSchwegler, Albert
Philosophy
A History of Philosophy in Epitome
Schwegler, Albert
Philosophy -- History
we would represent intuitively to ourselves we must place in space and
time, for without these no intuition is possible. From this it follows
that it is only phenomena which we know, and not things in themselves
separate from space and time.
A superficial apprehension of these Kantian principles might lead one to
suppose that Kant’s criticism did not essentially go beyond the
standpoint of Locke’s empiricism. But such a supposition disappears upon
a careful scrutiny. Kant was obliged to recognize with Hume that the
conceptions, cause and effect, substance and attribute, and the other
conceptions which the human understanding sees itself necessitated to
think in the phenomena, and in which every one of its thoughts must be
found, do not arise from any experience of the sense. For instance, when
we become affected through different senses, and perceive a white color,
a sweet taste, a rough surface, &c., and predicate all these of one
thing, as a piece of sugar, there come from without only the plurality
of sensations, while the conception of unity cannot come through
sensation, but is a category or conception borne over to the sensations
from the mind itself. But instead of denying, for this reason, the
reality of these conceptions of the understanding, Kant took a step in
advance, assigning a peculiar province to this activity of the
understanding, and showing that these forms of thought thus furnished to
the matter of experience are immanent laws of the human faculty of
knowledge, the peculiar laws of the understanding’s operations, which
may be obtained by a perfect analysis of our thinking activity. (Of
these laws or conceptions there are twelve, viz., unity, plurality,
totality; reality, negation, limitation; substantiality, causality,
reciprocal action; possibility, actuality, and necessity.)
From what has been said we can see the three chief principles of the
Kantian theory of knowledge:
1. WE KNOW ONLY PHENOMENA AND NOT THINGS IN THEMSELVES.—The experience
furnished us by the external world becomes so adjusted and altered in
its relations (for we apprehend it at first in the subjective framework
of space and time, and then in the equally subjective forms of our
understanding’s conceptions), that it no longer represents the thing
itself in its original condition, pure and unmixed.
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