The \thing in itself\ between theoretical and practical reason: a critical claim

Author(s)

Monique Hulshof

• Document type: Doctoral Thesis
• Press: São Paulo.
• Institution: Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH/SBD)
• Defense date: 2011-02-18

Examining board members

Maria Lucia Mello de Oliveira Cacciola; Vinicius Berlendis de Figueiredo; Gerson Luiz Louzado; Pedro Paulo Garrido Pimenta; Ricardo Ribeiro Terra

• Advisor: Maria Lucia Mello de Oliveira Cacciola

Abstract

The initial aim of this thesis is to investigate the apparently conflicting claims that Kant makes about the things in themselves, sometimes in a strictly negative sense, as a problematic representation of something completely undetermined, sometimes in a positive sense as the ground or the cause of the appearances. Starting with interpretations that understand this conflict between the claims about things in themselves as having its origin in two problems that the critical philosophy aims to solve the possibility of speculative knowledge and the moral foundation our first task is to reconstruct the link between the critique of reason and the different ways of representing things in themselves. We argue that the differentiation of the rational faculty in two activities or spontaneities understanding and reason which are presented by the critical view as producers of distinct concepts and laws, requires two ways to critically formulate the concept of noumenon. The first formulation is made by the understanding by abstraction of sensible conditions of application of the categories, given its originality in relation to sensibility. This concept must remain, however, in a strictly negative and problematic sense, since the categories consist only in synthetic functions of sensible representations and thus are limited to the empirical use. The second formulation, on the other hand, is made by the ideas of reason, which require an extension of the synthesis thought in the categories up to the unconditioned. Those ideas are needed especially in view of the practical use of reason, despite the fact they involve a \"transcendental appearance\". Turning our attention to Kant\'s effort to systematically articulate these different modes of representation of things in themselves within the critical philosophy, the second task of the thesis is to show how the concept of autonomy elaborated in the transition to practical use, provides a way to work with the transcendental appearance present in the ideas, without violating the limitation of the categories to empirical use. In this sense, we elucidate how the critique of reason in its practical use reveals a new path for the faculty of judgment, in which it is legitimately allowed to apply the category of causality with reference to noumena. (AU)