Things-in-themselves Sentence Examples

According to Kant the human mind is such that it can never penetrate by its speculative powers to things-in-themselves, but can only know phenomena.

Kant distinguishes as "transcendent" the world of things-in-themselves as being without the limits of experience; while "transcendental" is his term for those elements which regulate human experience, though they are themselves beyond experience; such are the categories of space, time, causality.

Here they are supposed to exist, dissevered from experience, and are allowed validity as determinations of things in themselves.

Those notions, according to the Dissertation, had no function save in relation to things-in-themselves, i.e.

Unquestionably certain of his remarks indicate the view that the origin is to be sought in things-in-themselves, but against hasty misinterpretations of such remarks there are certain cautions to be borne in mind.

Kant has pointedly declared that it would be a gross absurdity to suppose that in his view separate, distinct things-in-themselves existed corresponding to the several objects of perception.

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.

This idea of an intuitive understanding is the definite expression for the complete explanation which reason demands, and it involves the conception of a realm of objects for such an understanding, a realm of objects which, in opposition to the phenomena of our relative and limited experience, may be called noumena or things-in-themselves.

In our reflection we necessarily treat the objects, not as phenomena, as matters of positive, scientific knowledge, but as things-in-themselves, as noumena.

Kant held that " things-in-themselves " (beyond sensation) were in principle unknowable - only " phenomena " are knowable.

Kant perceives that " perception without conception is blind, conception without perception is empty," but if he goes so far ought he not to have gone still further and inquired whether there can be any perception at all without a concept, any concept which does not presuppose a precept, and, if this is impossible, whether the distinction between a world of appearance which is known and a world of things-in-themselves which is not, is not illusory ?

He borrows from Kant's "rationalism " the hypothesis of a spontaneous activity of the subject with the deduction that knowledge begins from sense, but arises from understanding; and he accepts from Kant's metaphysical idealism the consequence that everything we perceive, experience and know about physical nature, and the bodies of which it consists, is phenomena, and not bodily things in themselves.

The progress of thought may show it to be, in truth, relative, as when the nerve of Hume's scepticism is shown to be his thoroughgoing empiricism, or when the scepticism of the Critique of Pure Reason is traced to the unwarrantable assumption of things-in-themselves.

F His point was that there are no things in themselves different from minds or acting on them; that man is no product of things; nor does his thinking arise from passive sensations caused by things; nor is the end of his existence attainable in a world of things; but that he is the absolute free activity constructing his own world, which is only his own determination, his self-imposed limit, and means to his duty which allies him with God.

He carried metaphysical idealism to its height, by not only resolving the bodily into the mental, but also elevating the action of mind into absolute mental construction; not inferring things in themselves beyond, but originating things from within, mind itself.

But while he was in fundamental agreement with the first two positions of Kant, he differed from the third; he did not believe that the causes of sensible phenomena can be unknown things in themselves.

On this assumption he deduces that in being conscious of our mental states we are conscious of soul not merely as it appears, but as it is in itself, and therefore can infer similar souls, other psychical unities, which are also things in themselves.

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."

Riehl, who in Der philosophische Kriti .cis- mus (1876, &c.) proposes the non-Kantian hypothesis that, though things in themselves are unknowable through reason alone, they are knowable by empirical intuition, and therefore also by empirical thought starting from intuition.

He accepts the Kantian positions that unity of consciousness combines sensations by a priori synthesis, and that therefore all that natural science knows about matter moving in space is merely phenomena of outer sense; and he agrees with Kant that from these data we could not infer things in themselves by reason.

He rightly relies on the numerous passages, neglected by Lange, in which Kant regards things in themselves as neither phenomena nor ideas, but things existing beyond both.

He has a special relation to Fichte in developing the Kantian activity of consciousness into will and substituting activity for substantiality as the essence of soul, as well as in breaking down the antithesis between phenomena and things in themselves.

Nor can we find any difference, except the minute shade that Pearson takes up a position of agnosticism between Clifford's assertion of " mind-stuff " and Mach's denial of things in themselves.

That which is object of thought cannot be outside consciousness; just as in mathematics -V - is an unreal quantity, so "things-in-themselves" are ex hypothesi outside consciousness, i.e.

He never really establishes a relation between pure reason and things-in-themselves (Dinge an sick), but rather seeks refuge in a dualism within consciousness, the transcendental and the empirical.

In the Kantian system the term "noiimena" means things-in-themselves as opposed to "phenomena" or things as they appear to us.