Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-94d59 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-28T15:29:59.639Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
This chapter is part of a book that is no longer available to purchase from Cambridge Core

3 - SPACE AND TIME AS FORMS OF HUMAN SENSIBILITY

James R. O'Shea
Affiliation:
University College Dublin
Get access

Summary

We can accordingly speak of space, extended beings, and so on, only from the human standpoint. If we depart from the subjective condition under which alone we can acquire outer intuition, namely that through which we may be affected by objects, then the representation of space signifies nothing at all. This predicate is attributed to things only insofar as they appear to us, i.e., are objects of sensibility.

(Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A26–7/B42–3)

Kant pulls no punches in the passage above. Certainly outside philosophy – for that matter, even inside philosophy – it must strike us as counter-intuitive to assert that spatial properties such as size, shape, location and distance are correctly attributed to, and hence possessed by, material bodies “only from the human standpoint”. For when we human beings speak truly about or mathematically represent the fact, for example, that a certain planet's average distance from the sun is approximately 5,869,660,000 kilometres, what is thereby represented is a fact about the spatial layout and temporal history of the material universe. And that is a fact that obtained long before any human beings intruded on the scene. Kant's ‘transcendental idealism and empirical realism’, as we saw in Chapters 1 and 2, is supposed to be compatible with any and all such empirical discoveries about the vast and limitless ‘age and size’ of the material universe in space and time.

Type
Chapter
Information
Kant's Critique of Pure Reason
An Introduction and Interpretation
, pp. 78 - 115
Publisher: Acumen Publishing
Print publication year: 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×