Kant’s Idealism: New Interpretations of a Controversial Doctrine ed. by Dennis Schulting, Jacco Verburgt (review)

The literature on transcendental idealism is vast and controversy-ridden. Some interpreters view this puzzling doctrine as detracting from Kant’s real contribution—his theory of experience. Those who take the doctrine seriously debate whether or not appearances and things-in-themselves constitute two ontologically discrete worlds. Currently, the discussion centers around whether the appearance/thing-in-itself distinction should be read epistemologically, as referring to two different aspects of the same object, or as a metaphysical distinction, since Kant thinks of appearances as non-ultimate reality.

The essays in this engaging volume fill a lacuna in the existing literature by addressing Kant’s idealism from the perspective of Kant’s views on logic and the discursivity of judgment. This interpretive strategy, as the editors rightly point out, marks a departure from the many studies that have focused primarily on Kant’s statements on the ideality of space and time in order to understand his idealism.

In his argumentative introductory essay, Dennis Schulting provides a comprehensive survey of contemporary reflection on transcendental idealism. The remaining contributions are divided into three parts. Part I consists of general interpretations of transcendental idealism, opening with Karl Ameriks’s moderate view. Ameriks takes the metaphysical approach to transcendental idealism, without positing a one-to-one correspondence between appearances and things-in-themselves. In his view, while appearances are subjectively constituted, they nevertheless also imply things-in-themselves. From this perspective, he criticizes Robert Hanna’s interpretation of transcendental idealism for being too humancentric, and for failing to account for Kant’s notion of noumenal freedom in a “positive spontaneous sense.” Manfred Baum argues in his essay that Kant’s first Critique does not present a system of transcendental idealism, but investigates the a priori cognition of objects. For Baum, transcendental idealism is the position that cognized objects cannot resemble things-in-themselves; it follows from Kant’s thesis of the ideality of space and time, and cannot be further supported by examining Kant’s logic. Finally, drawing on the third Critique, Ido Geiger argues that experience must be considered mind-dependent (or ideal), since experience requires the regulative idea of the supersensible ground of appearances—the presupposition that nature is aesthetically and logically purposive.

The second part deals with the relationship between Kant’s transcendental logic and his idealism. Lucy Allais makes the case that one key argument of the transcendental deduction—that the conceptualization of objects requires necessary a priori rules that cannot be gained from experience—does not depend on transcendental idealism. Allais points out that this argument of the deduction need not be taken as metaphysically establishing the existence of objects. Rather, it could be understood as an epistemological point about how we should think about objects. Next, Gary Banham interprets transcendental idealism as the “idealism of apperception.” He believes that the apperceptive unification of the spatiotemporal manifold via the transcendental imagination is prior to both the application of the categories and the appearance/thing-in-itself distinction. Steven Bayne’s essay comes “very close to concluding” that the theory of concepts-as-rules is necessary for transcendental idealism.

In their contributions, Marcel Quarfood and Schulting both argue that transcendental idealism follows from Kant’s characterization of discursive, or concept-using, understanding. Distinguishing discursive and non-discursive understanding, Quarfood argues that the thing-in-itself is not a thing, but a concept emerging from the analysis of the discursive understanding. Abstraction from spatiotemporality does not yield the thing-in-itself for Quarfood, because the representation of it must still be conditioned by discursive conceptuality. For Schulting, the thing-in-itself is the completely determined ground of all appearances, while appearances represent the less-than-complete determination by the categories, specifically the category of limitation. Hence, contra all two-aspects interpretations of transcendental idealism, phenomenal and noumenal objects cannot be numerically identical; and the latter must remain beyond discursive understanding.

The final part contains essays on...