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Kant's Transcendental Idealism. An Interpretation and Defense (review)
- Journal of the History of Philosophy
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 23, Number 3, July 1985
- pp. 439-441
- 10.1353/hph.1985.0065
- Review
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
BOOK REVIEWS 439 we might legitimately appeal to his own hermeneutic as expressed in his numerous theological writings. I would like to report that the book is more of a pleasure than a task to read; but Richetti's own style becomes at points dense, not to say impenetrable, with main clauses, for instance, occasionally swamped by the weight of qualifications. (What are we to make of this sentence describing Locke's notion of 'Reflection': it "seems to be a metaphorical retreat in some sense, but here it is almost a literal mirroring of what 'sense' offers, even though introspection of this sort is elsewhere elaborated by Locke as a more powerful mental act" [84]?) I still must say, nevertheless, that it is an interesting project even if it comes frustratingly short of its declared intentions; it does yield some sophisticated readings of three great British philosophers, considered as the literary artists they are. They deserve this sort of intelligent appraisal, one which they have, sadly, rarely received. RICHARD W. F. KROLL University of California, Los Angeles Henry E. Allison. Kant's Transcendental Idealism. An Interpretationn and Defense. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983. Pp. ix + 389 . $3~.5o. Henry Allison's book is a major contribution to the study of Kant's theoretical philosophy . Building on a decade and a half of careful analyses of specific aspects of the problem, Allison has produced a comprehensive, yet remarkably plausible and uncluttered account of transcendental idealism. The key to Allison's interpretation of transcendental idealism is the notion of an "epistemic condition"(lo). Allison's characterization of "epistemic conditions," which contrasts the epistemic prerequisites of human knowledge with the physiological, the psychological, and perhaps the logical prerequisites, is not as precise as he or his readers might like. Because this notion is the centerpiece of Allison's interpretation, it will be helpful to try to clarify it at the start. I think we can develop a positive characterization of "epistemic condition" by appealing to a notion introduced by Allen Newell and Herbert Simon. In discussing their analyses of problem-solving in chess and other games, Newell and Simon admit that they have discovered more about the "task environment" of chess than about the actual psychologies of chess players.' That is, they have not discovered the particular sequences of psychological states that chess players go through; rather, they have dissected the task of playing chess into component tasks thereby revealing the general capacities and specific operations required for playing the game. An epistemic condition is, I believe, a capacity or operation that any thinker relevantly like us must have or perform if that being is to have objective knowledge. Kant uncovers epistemic conditions by analyzing the task environment of objective knowledge. This characterization explains how ' Human ProblemSolving (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1973), 53-55. 44 ~ JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 23:3 JULY 1985 Kant's critics can justifiably charge that he is doing a kind of psychology, while Kant can justifiably maintain that he is doing epistemology, and neither empirical nor rational psychology. Still, Allison might find my gloss too psychological. He claims, for example, that the representation of space is an epistemic condition (86). On my reading , the capacity for representing space, or the operation of representing space, would be epistemic conditions. This seems right, however. For how could a representation of space enable me to locate or identify objects unless that representation were mine? Allison reads transcendental idealism as the thesis that there are epistemic conditions . This wonderfully simple and straightforward theory casts a bright light over significant global and local themes of the Critique. While Allison only hints at this result (33t), his account implies that many of the attempts at "meta-critique" are misguided. Meta-critiquers assume that Kant was looking for an Archimedean point, a presuppositionless stance from which all suppositions could be judged. As Kant critiqued the theories of others from his transcendental perspective, so his true disciples should find some even more remote point from which to critique his own assumptions, particularly all those puzzling claims about psychological faculties. I take Allison's reading of transcendental idealism to show that...