Kant’s Epistemology as a Theory of Alienated Knowledge

Abstract

Introduction. I cannot imagine anyone who has not had rather strange experiences while studying Kant. Kant’s theory of knowledge is bewildering, even paradoxical, and at the same time very conclusive and convincing. Let me remind you of some of the offensive traits of Kant’s theory. There is the thing-in-itself: Kant says that things in themselves are not accessible to our knowledge—but isn’t it just this that we need to know: what things are in themselves, not only how they might appear to us? Kant claims that we know some very important things about our objects of experience—but this independently of experience! Kant claims that we do not get any structural information about our objects through our senses, although empirical objects are the only ones about which we obtain any knowledge at all. Kant says that it is a scandal of philosophy that we have to take the existence of objects in the outer world for granted only on the basis of belief, but isn’t it a scandal of philosophy to demand a proof for the existence of external objects, as Kant himself does? And finally, Kant says that we prescribe laws to nature, but then, isn’t knowledge about nature merely a form of self-knowledge?

This paper is based on a lecture given in the Boston University series of Colloquia in Philosophy of Science. I am very much indebted to R. E. Butts for his careful editing of this version and even for the translation of parts of it.