The Ideal and the Real: An Outline of Kant's Theory of Space, Time and Mathematical Construction

ISBN-13: 9789401071338 / Angielski / Miękka / 2013 / 139 str.

A. Winterbourne

Opis

Many students coming to grips with Kant's philosophy are understandably daunted not only by the complexity and sheer difficulty of the man's writings, but almost equally by the amount of secondary literature available. A great deal of this seems to be - and not only on first reading - just about as difficult as the work it is meant to make more accessible. Any writer deliberately setting out to provide an authentically introductory text thus faces a double problem: how to provide an exegesis which would capture some of the spirit of the original, without gross and misleading over-simplification; and secondly, how to anchor the argument in the best and most imaginative secondary literature, yet avoid the whole project appearing so fragmented as to make the average book of chess openings seem positively austere. Until fairly recently, matters were made even more difficul t, in that commentaries on Kant were very often of a whole work, say, The Critique of Pure Reason, with the result that students would have to struggle through a very great deal of material indeed in order to feel any confidence at all that they had begun to understand the original writings. Recently, things have changed somewhat. There are now excellent commentaries on "Kant's Analytic", "Kant's Analogies" etc. . We have also seen, (at least as reflected in book titles), a resurgence of interest in what is perhaps the most controversial and far-reaching Kantian claim, viz.

Spis treści

One Prologue: Newton and Leibniz.- 1.1. Newton on Space, Time and Metaphysics.- 1.2. Leibniz: The Ideal and the Real.- Two Kant’s Theory of Space and Time.- 2.1. Introduction.- 2.2. Concepts and Definitions.- 2.3. Kant’s Anti-logicist programme.- 2.4. Transcendental Aesthetic.- 2.5. Construction and Schematism.- 2.6. Spaces and Geometries.- 2.7. Incongruent Counterparts & the Intuitive Nature of Space.- 2.8. Infinity: Reason and Experience.- 2.9. Transcendental Idealism.- Three Acts, Intuitions and Constructions.- 3.1. Introduction.- 3.2. Concepts, Intuitions and the Schematism.- 3.3. Kant’s Constructivism.- 3.4. Incongruity and Constructions.- 3.5. Indirect Proof.- Notes.- Notes on Further Reading.