stankovic, sasa thesis.pdf - Atrium - University of Guelph

The Bounds of Sense P.F. Strawson recognizes this point. “Nothing which emerges from any
affecting relation can count as knowledge or awareness of the affecting thing as it is in itself.
Therefore there can be no knowledge or awareness of things which exist independently of that
knowledge or awareness and of which that knowledge or awareness is consequently an effect”
(Strawson 238-9). In other words, that we represent the thing in itself means that representation
is not the thing in itself. Thus in Kant and the Claims of Knowledge Paul Guyer argues: “of
course, that the concepts of such things [in themselves] will not include spatial and temporal
predicates follows from the fact that the things themselves lack spatial and temporal properties,
but it is clearly Kant’s view that the concept of a thing in itself lacks such predicates precisely
because a thing in itself must lack any such properties” (Guyer 334). That objects conform to
knowledge by definition means that objects do not correspond to knowledge. If we determine
something in regard to objects prior to their being given then that something cannot itself be part
of those objects. Otherwise we would not determine that something. Instead, the object would be
that something on its own. But it is not. “That which, while inseparable from the representation
of the object, is not to be met with in the object in itself, but always in its relation to the subject,
is appearance” (CPR B70n). What we know cannot be what is. In A Short Commentary on
Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason A.C. Ewing acknowledges this point. “For the assertion of
things-in-themselves then merely amounts to saying that there is something real which we
wrongly apprehend as subject to space and time and about which we can know nothing positive.
For there must be something real, and if space and time are appearances the real must be
distinguished from physical objects and minds as revealed in introspection” (Ewing 192-3). In
fact, Kant argues, the correspondence between knowledge and objects can be established only at
the expense of the necessity of knowledge. “A middle course may be proposed between the two
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