Things in Themselves

Abstract

You may guess from my title that I am going to talk a good deal this evening about the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. While the guess is correct in that I will make frequent reference to Kant's writings and occasionally quote some of his remarks, I want to emphasize at the start that my primary concern is not that of a Kant scholar urging an interpretation of Kant. My concern is rather with epistemology and the approach to it that gives rise to the Kantian notion of a thing in itself. In my efforts to clarify this approach I will contrast it with others, and I will say quite a bit about the views of C.S. Peirce. When I speak of the approach as Kantian, I am not concerned to argue that it is the approach Kant himself always followed, but only that it is the one we should follow if we begin in epistemology as Kant did. For those of you who have a special interest in Kant's moral philosophy, let me add now that I distinguish sharply between the role of a thing in itself in epistemology and its role in Kant's moral philosophy. I comment briefly on this distinction near the end of my paper.