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...

art of Kant’s reason for writing the first Critique is to show the limits of theoretical reason; one of these limits is its inability to experience transcendence, to cognize supersensible objects, to intuit the sublime. But Kant doesn’t thereby want to make these experiences impossible—indeed, part of his reason for writing the second and third Critiques, along with such works as Religion withi...