BODY AND PRACTICE IN KANT

KANT’S TRANSCENDENTAL EPISTEMOLOGY
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cognitive capacities and powers available to us. And, as we have seen, the
Critique actually offers such a theory. However, the above questions also
have an epistemic aspect, and Kant never fails to emphasize that this is
his most basic concern in the Critique. When we ask how it is possible for
us to attain objective knowledge of the world, there is introduced a
concept of objectivity according to which a statement about the world
can be either true or false. Thus, the question of objectivity goes beyond
asking merely how our knowledge is produced. It concerns the validity of
our knowledge claims.
How is it possible for us to attain objective knowledge of the world
given that the origin of this knowledge is subjective in the sense specified?
Kant’s answer is that such knowledge may be proved to be possible when
we realize that some of the subjective elements on which our knowledge
is based are actually that which makes experience (or knowledge)
possible. They are what Kant calls ‘a priori conditions of experience’. In
order to make this theoretical move to solve the problem, however, we
also have to show that these a priori conditions make possible what Kant
calls ‘synthetic a priori knowledge’ of the world. This synthetic a priori
knowledge is knowledge of the necessary order in which the world
appears to us, or the determinations that the world needs to have in
order to appear as more than a mere manifold, to use a well known
Kantian expression. That objects exist beside each other in Euclidean
space is an example of what Kant here means by order. Causality, the
fact that in the empirical world every event has a cause, is another
example. Kant’s point is that the world appears to us as ordered and
determined because our a priori forms of experience, even if they are all
subjective, are conditions of synthetic a priori knowledge of the kind just
suggested. This is why Kant can phrase what he claims to be the main
question of the Critique as ‘How is synthetic a priori knowledge
possible?’
This question is also implied by Kant’s general definition of
transcendental philosophy, which has already been discussed, as ‘a
system of transcendental knowledge (Erkenntnis) which deals with the
specific manner in which we achieve knowledge of objects (Erkenntnisart
von Gegenständen) as far as this is possible a priori’ (A 11/B 25). An
essential mark of this transcendental philosophy, Kant points out, is that
all its concepts are pure a priori: They contain nothing empirical (A 14/B
28). Later the same point is stated like this:
I call all representations pure (in the transcendental sense) in which
nothing is to be encountered that belongs to sensation. (A 20/B 34)