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

objects in abstraction from this ability, that is, in abstraction from intuition in space and time, 6 or,
to put it positively, we can consider objects purely intellectually. Thus we consider objects as
they are in themselves. “Conversely, to consider [things] as they are in themselves is to consider
them apart from their epistemic relation to these forms or epistemic conditions, which, if it is to
have any content, must be equivalent to considering them qua objects from some pure
intelligence or ‘mere understanding.’” (Allison 2004 16).
The thing in itself is the thought of reason. However, this thought fails to know the thing
in itself. “To think an object and to know an object are thus by no means the same thing” (CPR
B146). But why does reason fail? This point is fundamental. Kant argues that it is nothing about
reason itself that makes it fail. “The perplexity into which it [reason] thus falls is not due to any
fault of its own” (CPR Avii). The ability to reason is the activity of thinking the unconditioned.
In this sense, the ability to reason makes no pretensions at knowledge whatsoever. “Reason does
not really generate any concept” (CPR A409/B436). Therefore reason itself cannot fail to know
the thing itself. Instead, the ability to reason is the activity of thinking the unconditioned that can
be used in two different ways. In “Kant’s Two Priorities of Practical Reason,” Frederick
Rauscher argues that “Kant uses the terms ‘theoretical reason’ and ‘practical reason’ as short for
‘theoretical or practical ‘use’ [Gebrauch] of reason’” (Rauscher 400).Most of the time Kant talks
about the theoretical use of reason in the Critique of Pure Reason. “It [reason] begins with
6 There are many commentators who defend this negative interpretation of the thing in itself as appearance. Arthur
Melnick’s Kant’s Analogies of Experience argues that “the notion of a thing in itself is the notion of a concept of an
object that does not require for its sense any reference to a cognitive subject. This is opposed to our notion of an
object (thing) that has for its content or meaning the semantic connection of a subject with what is given to him”
(Melnick 154). In “The Complementarity of Phenomena and Things in Themselves” W.H. Werkmeister writes that
“it seems clear from the passages quoted (and from others that could be added) that in most of the relevant
statements Kant uses the terms ‘things in itself’ and ‘things in themselves’ as abbreviations of the expression ‘things
viewed (or contemplated) without reference to our experiencing them in sensory intuition.’” (Werkmeister 303).
Carl J. Posy’s “The Language of Appearances and Things in Themselves” argues that “empirical singular concepts
(concepts of particular appearances) make essential reference to the notion of a knower with an articulated epistemic
structure, and intellectual singular concepts explicitly exclude any such reference” (Posy 342). Nicholas Rescher’s
“On the Status of Things in Themselves in Kant” argues that “the thing in itself is the creature of the understanding
(Verstandeswessen) arrived at by abstracting from the conditions of sensibility” (Rescher 291).
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