Kant’s first critique, Videos 13-16

This document will cover comments and notes on a series of videos on the critique by Victor Gijsberts.

Video 13, Intuition and appearance

• Intuition, that in which an object is given to us.
• Sensibility, the manner in which we are receptive.
• Concepts, general categories an object belong to.
• Empirical, intuition through sensation is empirical.
• Pure, intuition trough sensibility is pure.
• Appearance, the object of empirical intuition.

For humans, objects can only make contact with the mind through sensibility. There might be other ways to get into contact with objects, but nor for humans.

Video 14, Metaphysical Exposition of Space

Space is an a priori intuition, meaning it is an object through which we experience things. Kant gives four (short) arguments for this.

One
Space is not empirical, because all empirical experience already takes place in space.

Two
Space is a prior, for it necessarily grounds outer experience. After all, we cannot imagine anything outside of ourselves without the intuition of space.

Three
Space is not a concept, it is an individual. There is only one “space” which can be subdivided into smaller spaces. Space is therefore a pure intuition.

Four
Not only is there only one “space”, there can also only be one space, it has no possible variants. In this sense, space is infinite and all of space happens at the same time.

Video 15, The transcendental ideality of space.

Space does not represent any “thing in itself” nor any relation between them. In other words, we can only speak of space from the human perspective. Things in themselves are what remain after we abstract away everything subjective. We can consider things from two perspectives. The human perspective and the perspective of the thing in itself. Since space and time are how we make sense of the world, they are completely meaningless for the thing in itself.

Video 16, General Remarks on the transcendental aesthetic

Ⅰ. Leibniz differs from Kant because Leibniz argues that there is a difference between a conceptual grasp and a sensible grasp and that this difference comes from the sense causing confusion. Kant claims that there is no such thing as a conceptual grasp and to say that the senses confuse us is false.

ⅠⅠ. Here, Kant makes a distinction between properties and relations. In space, we get relations from our senses. Space (and time) have no internal properties. Spatio-temporal objects thus cannot be things in themselves.

ⅠⅠⅠ. Here Kant clarifies that appearance does not imply nor mean illusion.