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A Response to 'Kantian Space and Time Reconsidered'
| Article
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13153 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
11 / 1987 |
1,465 Words |
| Author
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Reney Myers
Reney Myers is the former chairman of the English Department
at Middlesex Country College; author of a geometry textbook, a
volume of verse, and a translation of Catullus. |
It should be stated at the outset of the discussion of Kantian space and time that the author does not believe Kant's final views on this topic are defensible. The reasons leading to this opinion come from the lessons of modern science, and not from a direct refutation of Kant's basic thesis that time and space are subjective a priori conditions for cognition. Kant's assumption is one of many starting places for a theory about time and space and is as defensible as any other starting place. His theory's eventual failure is caused by something other than the particular set of axioms that he offers to the reader.
To Kant, time and space are universal forms of intuition that render sensory impressions intelligible. They are prior to and independent of the events for which they form a conceptual basis. One of his arguments in favor of ideal time and space comes from mathematics. To him axioms were "synthetic judgments a priori;" that is, they described preexisting conditions with which all subsequent events had to comply. Their synthetic nature arose because, being prior to experience, they could not be learned through the senses.
However, Kant does not deal efficiently with the distinction between what men directly experience, and classes of phenomena. No one experiences the idea of a class of events. Therefore, the arbitrary arrangement of things into classes seems to be a theoretical, or conceptual, act. Yet, Kant saw that these arrangements or classes corresponded with groups of events that occurred the same way in nature. He thus transferred evidence of natural occurrence to the classes that the human mind conceived. Perhaps, he did so because mathematical ideas seemed to him to be more real in the mind than in the outerworld. Lines, planes, and solid volumes do not occur in nature, though they exist in geometry. Accordingly, Kant postulated that the Euclidean geometric system was this concept of mathematics; he extended it to include the concepts of time and space.
Kant explained that time and space could not be experienced directly; they must be mediated by the events which occur within them. Since neither mathematical ideas nor time and space could be experienced, he defined them in the same way. Consequently, time and space became for him subjective concepts that provided the conditions according to which men saw natural objects. He justified this view by asserting that an object must exist within something that is not an object itself, and since time and space were conceptions rather than things-in-themselves, they could only be
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