"What are We to Do, and What May We Hope for?" A Semi-Kantian Treatment of the Second and the Third of Kant’s Three Big Questions
"What are We to Do, and What May We Hope for?" A Semi-Kantian Treatment of the Second and the Third of Kant’s Three Big Questions

Summary/Abstract: I am not a Kantian. In fact, I consider the outlines of the Kantian system as he developed it in his first Critique as incoherent in several respects. Two of them are: First, as Fichte suggested, the very concept of a thing-in-itself causes an insurmountable problem for Kant; for how can one know that an entity supposedly totally unknown to us is the origin of the chaos of sense perception? Second, there is the well-known related difficulty with respect to causality, a category supposedly applicable only in the realm of phenomena, while at the same time, the non-phenomenal thing-in-itself somehow is to "give rise to" the chaos of sense perceptions. As a minimum, this comes dangerously close to a strictly forbidden transcendent application of causality2. I consider both problems as fatal to the Kantian system. [...]

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