ABSTRACT
Kant's claim that Berkeley's idealism is "unavoidable if space be interpreted as a property that must belong to things in themselves" actually made it obvious that he held some form of idealism himself. In fact, he did; he called it "transcendental idealism." 41 If, as he said in his opening remarks, space is not a property of things in themselves, the phrase occurring in the thesis, "the existence of objects in space outside me," must be taken to refer to the existence of appearances. And if objects do exist in space outside me, I must exist in space as well; for "outside" is a spatial predicate. Yet if "I" exist in space, "I" must be an appearance as well. Thus, Kant's thesis must pertain to the empirical I, the one constructed from the data received by the transcendental I. The content of Kant's thesis, then, is that I can be conscious of my existence as an empirical self (a unified, conscious object in space and time) only if proof is available to me that empirical objects objectively appear to exist in space outside me. I use the verb "objectively appear" here because the assertion that an empirical object exists in space is true, for a transcendental idealist, just in case certain bundles of spatiotemporal appearances are objectively available or appropriately "bound up" (as Kant put it) "with the material conditions of experience." 42
7. Remarks on Kant s epistemology There are indications that, toward the end of his life, Kant was in the process of working his way out of his transcendental idealism.43 To succeed in this, he would have had to abandon the view that space, time, and the objects of experience are mere appearances. The thought of him abandoning this view prompts one to ask why he accepted it in the first place. The answer is complex. Basically, he inherited a mass of problems - metaphysical and epistemological - from his predecessors, and his transcendental idealism provided a means of resolving them in a systematic way.
