Abstract

This essay deals with Kant's relationship to the problem of our knowledge of the external world. It shows how the problem arises and considers various attempts to meet the challenge of tradition epistemological skepticism. ;Moore's dogmatic denial of the skeptics claim does not even touch the philosophical problem of the external world. Both Carnap's and Quine's attempts to neutralize the skeptical question are unsatisfactory. I argue that Kant's view blocks skepticism and supplants the traditional conception of knowledge as a true correspondence of our experience with transcendent reality. A subjectivistic or phenomenalistic reading of Kant ignores the transcendentally idealistic nature of his position, which assumes the transcendental conception of an object as the correlate of a certain mode of representation. ;Throughout the course of this essay, I try to show that Kant's sense of object is not the same as that of the non-critical philosophers. The idealism of transcendental philosophy brings up a radically new conception of an object. ;It is my major contention that Kant's transcendental idealism is not to be seen as an ontological doctrine about being of external things, but rather as a phenomenological theory about how we experience objects. An object is to be understood as whatever conforms to the minds conditions for the representation of it as an object. In this sense, a reference to the mind and its cognitive constitution is built into the definition of the term. Objects are the very structure of experience. We so organize our experience into objects that it does not even make sense to talk about experience except in terms of our experience of objects. An object is never such as to be out of relationship to consciousness, which is not the same as what is meant by "consciousness" in Cartesian or Berkeleyian idealism. Kant's "consciousness" is presence in front of objects, and thus the world outside of relationship to consciousness is not a possible theme for the philosopher. In this way we can see that skepticism regarding the existence of objects in general makes no sense