ABSTRACT
In a recent article, Michael Friedman critiques a group of studies proposing a new “diagrammatic” interpretation of Euclid, allegedly more appropriate to Kant’s spatial theory. He finds them inadequately Kantian. He provides his own construal of Kant’s formal intuition of space, and in so doing defends Kant’s use of Euclidian geometry. Without substantially disagreeing with Friedman, we think there is another way of justifying Kant’s use of Euclidian geometry, one with advantages over Friedman’s from (at least) a pedagogical point of view. Our outline of this alternative justification takes the form of a Gedankenexperiment, utilizing a number of outside sources. It follows Friedman in recognizing the importance of the distinction between form of intuition and formal intuition for Kantian space and the function here of the arbitrary, focusing on their respective roles. And it illustrates the central move of the experiment with considerations adopted from Albert Einstein.
