The argument of the Analytic: questions of method

Although the Aesthetic provides an account of how objects are intuited, it does not establish their givenness in a cognitive sense. It is the job of the Analytic to show, through an account of the faculty of understanding, how objects of intuition, and space and time themselves, become objects of thought, and thus how empirical knowledge is possible.

Both Newton and Leibniz’s view of space and time is that they are contained in the world independent of the subject’s awareness, and that we have representations of space and time because we have knowledge of reality. That is what Kant denies. Kant formulates it by saying that space and time, and objects with spatial and temporal properties, are transcendentally ideal. The first two sections of this chapter aim to explain what Kant means by this claim, and those that follow consider his defense of it.

The Transcendental Aesthetic is concerned with sensibility, and thus with objects in so far as they are sensed. Its focus, however, is principally on space and time, regarding which its first central claim is that space and time provide the sensible form of experience, and on that account play a fundamental role in making objects possible. The second central claim is that space and time are forms of sensibility and all the objects of our experience are mere appearances as opposed to things in themselves.

Kant’s Logical Formulation of the Problem of Metaphysics

Both Leibniz and Hume believes that knowledge is divided to two fundamental types: necessary, a priori knowledge and contingent a posteriori knowledge. Kant affirms that all our knowledge begins with experience but not all knowledge arise out of experience. That is, there are a priori knowledge like mathematical judgments and principles of causality.

This chapter attempts to set out the line of thought underlying Kant’s Copernicanism, in terms that as far as possible avoid the technicalities of his philosophy.