Monday, September 5, 2016

Coffey Critiques Kant #3

More from Peter Coffey's Epistemology; Or the Theory of Knowledge follows.

After routing Kant's ideas about space, he does the same with Kant's notion of time. Kant didn't have near as much to say about time as he did space, but he considered time to be no more a characteristic of things than space. Like space it is a priori form of perception, but he regarded space as an external form and time as an internal form (Vol. 2, p. 202).

"One final and fatal flaw in Kant's thesis that time is a form of our perception of events is this. He himself is forced to recognize that some temporal relations belong to the physical events which we perceive: that there are, in these, temporal successions, which by virtue of their irreversibility, differ from mere successions (e.g. that of the moon moving around the earth), as objective, from other successions (e.g. of  our impressions as we survey the parts of a house) as subjective. Hence time would not be a form or character of our perceptions exclusively, but also of things perceived" (Vol. 2, p. 207).

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