ABSTRACT
Immanuel Kant faces the difficulties again and again in more cautious passages in the Aesthetic, in the Deduction, in the Paralogisms. He distinguishes between "original" self-consciousness and empirical self-consciousness. Of course, people must not assume that Kant would for a moment have regarded the included phenomenalistic idealism as tenable apart from the rest of the metaphysics of transcendental idealism. It is time to seek further enlightenment by examining in greater detail some of the particular doctrines which belong to that metaphysics. Kant undertook to affirm truths about objects in abstraction from the spatio-temporal conditions of sensible intuition which in fact alone give sense to talk of objects. Kant's main concern is to insist that the necessary admission of a reality transcending sensible experience altogether does not disclose a field for transcendent metaphysics, though the open character of the pure concepts may delude people into the belief that it does.
