Thing-in-itself Sentence Examples

This third position isarelic of ancient metaphysical realism; although it must be remembered that Kant does not go to the length of Descartes and Locke, who supposed that from mere ideas we could know bodies and souls, but suggests that beneath the phenomena of outer and inner sense the thing in itself may not be heterogeneous (ungleichartig).

As long as even the meagre realism of the Kantian thing in itself is maintained, the account of there being one sun is simply that one thing causes different phenomena in different minds.

He maintained that the physical and the psychical are two orders which are parallel without interference; that the physical or objective order is merely phenomena, or groups of feelings, or " objects," while the psychical or subjective order is both a stream of feelings of which we are conscious in ourselves, and similar streams which we infer beyond ourselves, or, as he came to call them, " ejects "; that, if we accept the doctrine of evolution at all, we must carry these ejective streams of feelings through the whole organic world and beyond it to the inorganic world, as a " quasimental fact "; that at bottom both orders, the physical phenomena and the psychical streams, are reducible to feelings; and that therefore there is no reason against supposing that they are made out of the same " mind-stuff," which is the thing-in-itself.

Admitting Kant's hypothesis that by inner sense we are conscious of mental states only, he holds that this consciousness constitutes a knowledge of the "thing-in-itself" - which Kant denies.

Since form cannot produce matter nor subject object, we are forced to assume a thing-in-itself.

As contrasted with the first it stood for the necessity of recognizing a universal or ideal element as a constitutive factor in all experience whether cognitive or volitional; as contrasted with the latter for the ultimate unity of subject and object, knowledge and reality, and therefore for the denial of the existence of any thing-in-itself for ever outside the range of experience.

In Germany, for example, Eugen Diihring (q.v.) was a realist, whose intention is to prove against Kant a knowledge of the thing in itself by attributing time, space and categories generally to the real world.

But as soon as the thing in itself is converted into something mental, metaphysical idealists must either say that there are as many suns as minds, or that there is one mind and therefore one sun.

Lastly, Fichte called this system realism, in so far as it posits the thing in itself as another thing; idealism, in so far as it posits it as a noumenon which is a product of its own thinking; and on the whole real idealism or ideal realism.

In reducing the thing in itself to a thought he projected the neo-Kantism of Lange and Cohen.

He admits, indeed, Kant's hypothesis that by inner sense we are conscious only of mental states, but he contends that this very consciousness is a knowledge of a thing in itself.

Taking, then, will to be the essential thing in itself of which we are conscious, he deduces that we can infer that the psychical things in themselves beyond ourselves are also essentially " wills."

But it follows Fichte in his revolt against the unknown thing in itself.

Thus they were thrown back on the limits of human knowledge prescribed by Kant, but purged of the unknown thing in itself by Fichte.

But his main reliance is on the passage in the Kritik, where Kant, speaking of the Cartesian difficulty of communication between body and soul, suggests that, however body and soul appear to be different in the phenomena of outer and inner sense, what lies as thing in itself at the basis of the phenomena of both may perhaps be not so heterogeneous (ungleichartig) after all.

Consequently, Kant's explanation of the unity of a thing is that there is always one thing in itself causing in us many phenomena, which as understood by us are objectively valid for all our consciousnesses.

Renouvier (q.v.)has worked out an idealism which he calls "Neo-criticisme," rejecting the thing-in-itself, while limiting knowledge to phenomena constituted by a priori categories.

Not so; like Kant himself, Hodgson supposes something beyond; not, however, an unknown thing in itself causing sensations, but a condition, or sine qua non, of their existence, without being a cause of their nature.

Bare or indeterminate being, for instance, the first of the determinations of Hegel's logic, as the being of that which is not anything determinate, of Kant's thing-in-itself, for example, positively understood, implicated at once the notion of not-being, which negates it, and is one with it, yet with a difference, so that we have the transition to determinate being, the transition being baptized as becoming.

The former accounts for his acceptance of Kant's phenomenalism, combined with rejection of the thing in itself.

If we wish, said Kant, to give a real existence to the thing in itself or the noumenon we can only do so by investing it with the attributes found in our own internal sense, viz.

And, finally, it is not at all difficult to understand why Kant should say that the affection of sense originated in the action of things-in-themselves, when we consider what was the thing-in-itself to which he was referring.

The thing-in-itself to which the empirical order and relations of sense-experience are referred is the divine order, which is not matter of knowledge, but involved in our practical or moral beliefs.

The metaphysics resulting from this epistemology is that the socalled thing in itself is not a cause of our sensations, but a product of one's own thinking, a determination of the Ego, a thing known to the Ego which constructs it.

In modern philosophy the phenomenon is neither the "thing-in-itself," nor the noumenon or object of pure thought, but the thingin-itself as it appears to the mind in sensation (see especially Kant; and Metaphysics).

He seizes upon the fundamental incompatibility of a consciousness which can apprehend, and yet is separated from, the "thing-in-itself."

A thing-in-itself which is not a thing to some consciousness is an entirely unrealizable, because self-contradictory, conception.