Kant’s Thing-in-Itself: Interpretation in Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

Analytic philosophy traditionally works with Kant’s system through the empirical approach. In this way the main difficulty arises from the ambiguous status of things-in-themselves. The ambiguity of this concept has traditionally led to an interpretation of Kant's philosophy as a dualism (substance dualism or property dualism). Dualism implicitly carries a contradiction: causal (and any other) interaction between a thing-in-itself and an appearance is impossible but Kant, however, insists on it. In this paper I will show that the notion of dualism does not apply to Kant's philosophy, and I will propose a solution to the problem of affection by establishing an ontological difference between a thing-in-itself and an appearance, where a thing-in-itself and an appearance are not two different kinds of entities; the difference between them is only in concepts. Then I will consider some basic interpretations of appearances and things-in-themselves in analytic philosophy to show that a purely empirical interpretation of Kant's doctrine proves to be untenable. Based on the results, the conclusion is also made about a thing-in-itself as a supersensible condition of appearances.