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

themselves are thinkers” (Langton 209). She elaborates on this point. “Kant thus thinks that the
most fundamental existents are—in this sense—not physical…To go further, and say that the
non-physical things are more basic and fundamental than the physical things, brings one perhaps
a little closer to idealism. To go further still, and not only deny that the fundamental things are
physical, but assert that they are mental in nature, would be to come much closer to
idealism…Here we must record that Kant comes close to doing both of these” (Langton 207-8).
Langton concludes that we cannot know things in themselves: “we have no knowledge of the
intrinsic properties of things…There is indeed an entire aspect of the world that remains hidden
from us” (Langton 12). In fact, this entire aspect of the world that remains hidden from us is once
again us. Thus, Langton concludes, her interpretation “does make a metaphysician of a
philosopher who is supposed to have abandoned metaphysics” (Langton 6).
Representational self-knowledge is a torturous enterprise for a good reason. Every time
we know some self in itself as the transcendental object we ask what self it is that does that
knowing. And when we know that self in itself as the transcendental object we ask the same
question and so on. In Problems from Kant James van Cleve asks the question: “but what about
these minds or acts? Do they owe their existence to being apprehended?” (van Cleve 136). In this
sense, representational self-knowledge always tries to get behind itself and it is precisely in this
getting behind itself that it fails. There is always a remainder. But what is this remainder? In the
Bounds of Sense P.F. Strawson distinguishes between the transcendental object that affects and
the transcendental subject that is affected. “Within this [supersensible] sphere there obtains a
certain complex relation (or a class of cases of this relation) which we can speak of, on the model
of a causal relation, in terms of ‘affecting’ and ‘being affected by.’ Let us call it the A-relation”
(Strawson 236). Thus the remainder is nothing other than die Vermögen, die Fähigkeiten, die
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