Position

Transcendental Idealism

Space and time are forms of human sensibility through which objects appear, not features of things as they are in themselves.

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Classification

Position level
specific
Domains
Epistemology , Metaphysics , Philosophy of Mind

Overview

Kant's claim is not that objects exist only in the mind, as Berkeley held. It is that the spatial and temporal form under which any object can appear to us belongs to human sensibility rather than to the object as it is apart from being sensed. Objects are empirically real — genuinely out there, extended and located in time, knowable by science with objective necessity — but only as appearances, structured by forms of space and time that the mind supplies to whatever it experiences. What things are apart from any possible experience of them is not thereby denied to exist; it is placed beyond what human cognition, bound to the senses, can determine.

Kant himself distinguished this from Berkeley's idealism, which he rejected precisely because Berkeley denies the reality of matter in space while Kant affirms it. The rival he is arguing against on this map is transcendental realism, which treats space and time as belonging to things as they are independently of us. Transcendental realism then owes an account of how a mind-independent spatial and temporal order gets represented in cognition at all; Kant reverses the direction of fit and makes that order a contribution of the mind doing the cognizing.

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References