ABSTRACT
Transcendental synthesis is the key to the solution of the heterogeneity problem of Chapter 7. However, completing its solution required Kant to show how transcendental objectivity can combine with physical reality in such a way that pure concepts of the understanding can finally merit their designation as categories—and, in the process, psychologistically explicate nature itself. The explication falls short of idealism insofar as the existence of physical things remains completely independent of consciousness, even if, by Kant’s psychologistic reckoning, everything about them—their spatiality, temporality, substantiality, causality, mathematical quantifiability, universal subordination to natural laws, and laws of nature themselves—does not. In particular, in the absence of consciousness, physical existence remains in the form of what Kant termed things in themselves. After addressing a number of topics relating to mathematical physics, the chapter concludes by laying out, step by step, Kant’s refutation of the Humean skepticism outlined in Chapter 5. Subjects discussed include objectivity, physical reality, existence, cause and effect, material substance, space, time, subjectivity, objectivity, Kant’s Copernican revolution, physics, electromagnetism, relativity, quantum theory, cosmology, the Big Bang universe, the multiverse, the “theory of everything,” associative psychology, self-consciousness, soul, cognitive evolution, epistemology, understanding and knowledge, physicalism, and mind-independent reality.
