Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason Reading Guide

1. Kant uses the terms perception, appearance, object, thing, and thing in itself throughout this book. Many of the most common misinterpretations of Kant arise from mistakenly reading the term “appearance” to mean something like “mere appearance,” that is, an illusion of a thing, or just an idea of a thing, or a perception of a thing. For Kant, the term “appearance” is synonymous with the term “object,” and means “a thing that can appear.” Thus, for example, Kant emphasizes that appearances are “real (i.e. objectively valid)” (A28/B44) that calling something an “appearance in space” is a way of referring to “external objects” in space (A30/B45). What is complicated about all of this is that Kant emphasizes that these appearances/objects are not “things in themselves.” Thus Kant sets up a trichotomy between (to use his example from p. 733a): a. Merely subjective properties such as the color of the rose, which are “not...properties of things, but merely...changes in ourselves as subjects”. b. The objectively real objects/appearances/things that have those properties (the objectively real rose) c. The “thing in itself,” that is, what would be left of the rose were one to abstract from it everything that makes it possible for it to be an object of possible experience. 2. Kant uses the term “experience” as a synonym for “empirical cognition,” that is, anything that we can know from experience. Thus we can “experience” subatomic particles or dinosaurs, since we can have empirical cognition of them. But a mere flurry of sensations passing over one (as when very dizzy, for instance) isn’t a real “experience,” since it involves no cognitions of objects. 3. Kant uses the term “transcendental” in a variety of ways throughout this book. Don’t assume that you know what the word means, and don’t assume that it means the same thing as “transcendent.”