ABSTRACT
1. When Kant mobilizes the position which he calls ‘transcendental idealism’ to resolve the antinomies, he describes it as the doctrine that “everything intuited in space and time, and therefore all objects of any experience possible to us, are nothing but appearances, that is, mere representations which, in the manner in which they are represented, as extended beings or as series of alterations, have no independent existence outside our thoughts.” He contrasts this thesis with that of the “realist, in the transcendental meaning of the term” who “treats these modifications of our sensibility as self-subsistant things, that is, treats mere representations as things in themselves” (A 490-1; B 518-9).
