The prevailing interpretation of Kant's First Critique in Anglo-American philosophy views his theory of a priori knowledge as basically a theory about the possibility of empirical knowledge (or experience), or the a priori conditions for that possibility (the representations of space and time and the categories). Instead, Robert Greenberg argues that Kant is more fundamentally concerned with the possibility of a priori knowledge--the very possibility of the possibility of empirical knowledge in the first place.

Greenberg advances four central theses: (1) the...

Analytic philosophy has leveled many challenges to Kant's ascription of necessary properties and relations to objects in his Critique of Pure Reason. Some of these challenges can be answered, it is argued here, largely in terms of techniques belonging to analytic philosophy itself, in particular, to its philosophy of language. This Kantian response is the primary objective of this book. It takes the form of a compromise between the real existence of the objects that we can intuit and that get our knowledge started - dubbed initiators - and the ideality of the necessary...

Greenberg tackles one of Kant s most difficult ideas: that we can be the cause of our actions only if the act of our will is free of everything that makes up who we are as individuals. This entails that our free will does not exist in the same time that includes our individuality.

The key is an analysis of Kant s concept of an action, which includes the will as the cause of the action; so included, the causal connection is atemporal.