ABSTRACT
Much of the critique of traditional metaphysics that we have just examined has been based directly on Kant’s most fundamental claim about the foundations of knowledge, namely that knowledge always requires the application of concepts to the sensible intuitions that are our immediate contact with objects. Given this premise, traditional metaphysics can only be regarded as a baseless attempt to derive knowledge of real objects from the pure concepts of understanding alone, dressed up as “ideas of pure reason” by the supposedly natural but unjustified assumption that whenever anything conditioned is given so is something entirely unconditioned on which the conditioned rests. Of course, Kant’s constructive labor in the “Transcendental Aesthetic” and “Transcendental Analytic” was not confined to establishing merely the general claim that all knowledge requires both intuitions and concepts; he also established that space and time are the pure forms of all sensible intuitions, that the categories are the pure forms for all concepts of objects, and that using the categories to make determinate judgments about objects in space and time also requires the principles that he demonstrated under the titles of the “Axioms of Intuition,” the “Anticipations of Perception,” and above all the “Analogies of Experience.”The pure forms of intuition, the categories, and the principles are thus necessary a priori conditions for all determinate knowledge of objects, conditions that both can and must be confirmed independently of the particular claims to empirical knowledge that they frame and ground. We can now ask, however, whether they are the only a priori conditions for knowledge, or whether there are any further a priori conditions that we could discover before turning to the business of everyday life and everyday science, that of fleshing out the a priori framework of knowledge by empirical observation and theory-building.
