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Kant, Mendelssohn, Lambert, and the Subjectivity of Time LORNE FALKENSTEIN KANTFREQUENTLYCLAIMSthat space and time are subjective conditions of our sensitivity.' This is often--and quite naturally--taken to mean that they are imposed by the mind on the objects of knowledge, as if nothing apart from our mental representations exhibited spatio-temporal properties; rather our minds are so constituted that we inject spatio-temporal form into our mental representations.' I believe that this view is mistaken. In what follows I will show that though Kant did indeed sustain an "imposition" thesis in his Inaugural Dissertation of 177o (hereafter cited as "ID"), he carefully rejected it in his later work. One of the motivating factors behind this change may have been an objecReferences to space and time as subjective conditions or as grounded on the "constitution" (Beschaffenheit) of the subject are widespread in Kant's works. A26 = B42 and A3~-33 = B49 can perhaps be taken as the canonical instances, as it is here that the claim is first stated under the title of an established conclusion (from the metaphysical and transcendental expositions of the Transcendental Aesthetic). References to Kant's Critique ofPure Reason are to the pagination of the first and second original editions (Leipzig: Johann Friedrich Hartknoch, 1781 and 1787), cited as 'A' and 'B' respectively. References to his other works are to the pagination of the Prussian Academy edidon of Kant's collected writings (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1968), cited as 'Ak' with volume and page in arabic numerals. Translations from Kant's German are my own. Those from his Latin follow Kerferd in G. B. Kerferd and D. E. Walford, Kant: Selected Pre-Critical Writings (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1968). ' Witness Strawson's references to a physiological model of perception underlying (what he takes to be) Kant's posidon (P. F. Strawson, The Bound, of Sense [London: Methuen, 1966], 15-16, 39-40. The same account of Kant's thought is offered by H. A. Prichard, Kant's Theory of Knowledge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 19o9), 3o-32. The colored spectacles analogy, frequently used to explicate Kant's position (see H. J. Paton, Kant's Metaphysic of Experience [London: Allen and Unwin, 1936], 1: x66; A. C. Ewing, A Short Commentary on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, 2nd ed. [London: Methuen, 195o], 3o; Stephan Koerner, Kant [Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1955], 37) is based on the same picture. Explicit statements that for Kant space and time are imposed by the mind on sensation can be found in Jonathan Bennett, Kant's Dialectic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 54-56, and Paul Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 361. [~'71 228 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 29:2 APRIL 1991 tion to ID which Kant received from a number of his colleagues in 177o and 1771--an objection which points out a serious inconsistency in the theory of mental imposition. I will describe this objection in Part 1 below,3 and in Part 2 I will argue that it constitutes a decisive refutation of the imposition thesis and of ID's consequent claims about the ideality of knowledge based on sensory experience. The thesis of Part 2 is a philosophical one--that the imposition thesis is exploded by the objection Kant's colleagues presented, and that if he continued to sustain it, then he did so either by failing to appreciate the force of the objection or by overestimating the adequacy of his response. In Part 3 I will complement this philosophical point with a historical one: that in his later work Kant abandoned the imposition thesis and instead relied upon a much more conservative account of what it means for space and time to be subjective . Part 4 will show that this revised position is adequate to escape the 177o objection. If I am right, then, whatever Kant may have meant by the "subjectivity" of space and time, he did not mean that they can apply only to the subject's mental representations. One consequence of this conclusion will be the by now familiar thesis that Kant's transcendental idealism cannot be a form of phenomenalism . But a further, more important consequence...

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