Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is a towering and original work in the
philosophical cannon. Kant’s transcendental
idealism is designed to remove skeptical doubts about empirical science that
Hume had raised by asserting that space and time are conditions of experiences
that are internal to each of us.
However, Kant cautions that because space and time are internal
intuitions that condition our experience we can never know things in themselves
or noumena but only things as they appear to us or phenomena. If we forget this, Kant warns that we
will end up in endless philosophical muddles. Central to showing the necessity of transcendental idealism
are the antinomies of pure reason, which show that when we try to go beyond the
conditioned, that is experience within the bounds of space and time, we come to
intractably contradictory positions such as the universe in finite in time and
space and the universe is infinite in time and space. Kant wants to use the antinomies to motivate us to accept
transcendental idealism, because if we assume a transcendentally realistic view
of and think we can reach the things in themselves, we end up in the
intellectual mire of the antinomies.
