Real Existence, Ideal Necessity

by Greenberg, Robert

• ISBN13: 9783110206906
• ISBN10: 3110206900
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-10-30
• Publisher: De Gruyter

Summary

"Analytic philosophy has leveled many challenges to Kant's ascription of necessary properties and relations to objects in his Critique of Pure Reason. Some of these challenges can be answered, it is argued here, largely in terms of techniques belonging to analytic philosophy itself, in particular, to its philosophy of language. This Kantian response is the primary objective of this book. It takes the form of a compromise between the real existence of the objects that we can intuit and that get our knowledge started - dubbed initiators - and the ideality of the necessary properties and relations that Kant ascribes to our sensible representations of initiators, which he entitles appearances. Whereas the real existence of initiators is independent of us and our senses, the necessity of these properties and relations of appearances is due to their origins in the mind."--BOOK JACKET.

Table of Contents

General Review	p. 1
Existence
How Our Knowledge Begins	p. 17
A Criterion of Existence in General	p. 41
Sensation and Existence	p. 61
Presupposition and Existence	p. 72
Necessity
Kant's Referential Ambiguity	p. 91
Kaplan's Referential Ambiguity	p. 104
Kaplan's Interpretation Adapted to Kant	p. 114
Geometry and Causality	p. 124
Presupposition and Real Necessity	p. 147
Derivations of the Real Modalities	p. 173
Conclusion	p. 192
References	p. 199
Index	p. 202
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