A Philosophical Model of the Relation between Things in Themselves and Appearances Forthcoming in

The question of how best to understand Kant’s distinction between things in themselves and appearances is one of the central interpretive questions concerning Kant’s theoretical philosophy, as well as one of the thorniest. By and large, philosophers have approached this distinction by recasting it in terms for which they antecedently believe they have a clearer understanding. In short, these philosophers provide what we can think of as translations of Kant’s technical jargon into the jargon of contemporary philosophy. In what follows, I will propose what I will call, for want of a better name, a non-translationist approach to this distinction, which stresses a methodology I will call philosophical modeling. I will then apply this methodology to one of the thorniest questions in Kant interpretation, specifically, to the question of what the distinction between things in themselves and appearances consists in.