Kant’s Explanation of the Necessity of Geometrical Truths

Abstract

Kant was an idealist. His idealism was in some ways, it is true, less extreme than that of Berkeley. He distinguished his own by calling it ‘transcendental’. It is less extreme than Berkeley’s in two ways. First, Kant does not assert that everything which exists is essentially mental, as Berkeley does. Second, those things which he does hold to be essentially mental, he holds to be so in a weaker fashion. Nevertheless he was an idealist; he held that neither intuition nor thought could concern any object that was not essentially related to our minds. Since intuition and thought together provide knowledge, and since we can have no knowledge except through them, it follows that every object of which we have knowledge is essentially within our minds. Moreover, there is at least one respect in which his idealism is more extreme than that of Berkeley. He held that the objects of intuition were essentially within our minds, whereas Berkeley held only that they were essentially within some mind.