Arthur Melnick Ordre des livres

Exploring Kant's philosophy, this work delves into the evolution of his theories on space, time, thought, and substance across different stages of his intellectual development. It examines the descriptive representation of space and geometry, the unity of experience, and the nature of substance and its permanence. The text outlines Kant's early, middle, and late views, highlighting key concepts such as transcendental idealism and the mathematical antinomies. Through detailed sections and analyses, it provides a comprehensive understanding of Kant's complex ideas and their transformations over time.

The self for Kant is something real, and yet is neither appearance nor thing in itself, but rather has some third status. Appearances for Kant arise in space and time where these are respectively forms of outer and inner attending (intuition). Melnick explains the "third status" by identifying the self with intellectual action that does not arise in the progression of attending (and so is not appearance), but accompanies and unifies inner attending. As so accompanying, it progresses with that attending and is therefore temporal--not a thing in itself. According to Melnick, the distinction between the self or the subject and its thoughts is a distinction wholly within intellectual action; only such a non-entitative view of the self is consistent with Kant's transcendental idealism. As Melnick demonstrates in this volume, this conception of the self clarifies all of Kant's main discussions of this issue in the Transcendental Deduction and the Paralogisms of Pure Reason.

Intended for those interested in Kant's contribution to philosophy, this volume provides an overview of Kant's arguments concerning central issues in metaphysics and ethics.

We have thoughts of the world by having thoughts of spatio-temporal positioning which, as naturalized, are mechanisms for spatio-temporal constructive output. Even thoughts of past time are such thoughts of positioning by being mechanisms for being beyond stages of temporal constructions. This allows a naturalized realist semantics in which the content of thoughts that are in the head is purported existence anywhere in space and time. A correspondence theory of truth and a truth-conditional theory of meaning derive naturalistically from this basis.