ABSTRACT
Is Kant’s critical philosophy best viewed as falling midway between rationalism and empiricism, or it is better seen as continuous with either rationalism or empiricism? Whether explicitly or not, most interpret it as continuous with rationalism. In this chapter, the author presents Kant’s philosophy as continuous with empiricism via their shared thesis that the contents of human understanding all either originate in sensibility, are produced (synthesized) from contents originating in sensibility, or are preceded and made possible by such productions. The primary obstacle in the way of interpreting it this way is Kant’s notion that a representation can be at once sensible and a priori. After analyzing the difficulty, the author shows that and how he overcame it.
