Kantian Humility: Our Ignorance of Things in Themselves
Rae Langton
Abstract
This book offers a new interpretation and defence of Kant's doctrine of things in themselves. Kant distinguishes things in themselves from phenomena, and in doing so he makes a metaphysical distinction between intrinsic and relational properties of substances. Kant says that phenomena—things as we know them—consist ‘entirely of relations’. His claim that we have no knowledge of things in themselves is not idealism, but epistemic humility: we have no knowledge of the intrinsic properties of substances. This humility has its roots in some plausible philosophical beliefs: an empiricist belief in ... More
Keywords: history of philosophy, humility, idealism, ignorance, Kant, Rae Langton, Leibniz, Locke, metaphysics, phenomena, properties, receptivity, scientific realism, thing in itself
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2001 | Print ISBN-13: 9780199243174 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2003 | DOI:10.1093/0199243174.001.0001 |
