Kant’s idealist realism

Abstract

In the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant, criticizing what he calls problematic idealism (which holds that it is impossible to be certain of the existence of things outside of us), distinguishes between two senses of “outside us”, transcendental and empirical: something transcendentally external or outside us is be something that exists as a thing in itself distinct from us; something empirically external or outside us is something in space. The second edition of the Critique introduces a new section entitled Refutation of Idealism which, according to some authors, should be read as an attempt to prove of the existence of something transcendentally external. I try to show here that the peculiarity of Kant’s position is the thesis according to which spatial objects are “representations” in one sense and “extra-representational” in another sense: spatial objects cannot be said to be transcendentally external, but they are, on the other hand, “extra-representational” because they are empirically external and therefore irreducible to determinations of inner sense. I also try to show that, if we take into account the ideality of the inner sense, there is a sense in which this empirical realism can properly be called a realist position compatible with the impossibility of proving the existence of something transcendentally external.