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

direction. Even when it goes towards the transcendental subject, it goes towards the
transcendental object. In “How to Know Unknowable Things in Themselves” Desmond Hogan
brings out precisely this point. He distinguishes between two different ways of understanding
what it is that Kant means when he talks about the unknowability of things in themselves.
“Consider again the following propositions expressible by the claim that agent A cannot have a
priori knowledge of feature of reality F: (a) Non-empirical knowledge of F exceeds A’s cognitive
capabilities. (b) F lacks a ground through which it could be non-empirically known” (Hogan 57).
Hogan argues that commentators have emphasized the a-unknowability at the expense of the b-
unknowability of the thing in itself. However, Hogan continues, Kant means precisely the
opposite. “Commentators have proceeded unquestioningly from the assumption that Kant’s
Critical denials of a priori knowledge of reality in itself reduce to the a-unknowability claim that
a priori cognition of things in themselves exceeds our cognitive capabilities. We have already
seen that this assumption is false. I propose that some of the CPR’s denials of the possibility of a
priori knowledge of things in themselves incorporate Kant’s claim that some features of things in
themselves cannot be non-empirically cognized in the stronger sense of being b-unknowable”
(Hogan 58).That we cannot know things in themselves just means that “some features of reality
are unknowable in the sense of lacking a ground through which they could be non-empirically
cognized in principle (‘b-unknowability’)” (Hogan 58). Hogan discusses freedom in this regard.
We cannot know freedom not so much because freedom exceeds our cognitive capabilities.
Instead, we cannot know freedom because freedom just is the kind of thing that has no ground.
“Kant does not merely think that a priori knowledge of free acts exceeds our cognitive powers.
He rather means to point out that in the case of a feature of reality lacking a determining ground,
there is nothing through which it could be cognized in principle” (Hogan 56). In other words, we
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