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4 - Schopenhauer, Kant, and the Methods of Philosophy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 May 2006

Christopher Janaway
Affiliation:
Birkbeck College, University of London
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Summary

TRANSCENDENTAL PHILOSOPHY WITHOUT TRANSCENDENTAL ARGUMENTS

As the title of his magnum opus, The World as Will and Representation, suggests, Schopenhauer held that we know the world in two different ways, through our representations of objects in space and time and through our experience of our ability to move our own bodies by willing to do so. In his account of our knowledge of the world through representation, he accepted the core of Kant's transcendental idealism, the view that the spatial and temporal forms in which experience presents objects to us, as well as the basic structure of the concepts by means of which we think about and judge these objects, above all the category of causality, are impositions of our own minds on our experience, that is, they reflect the structure of our own perception and conception of reality but not any structure that reality has in itself independently of our representation of it. In his account of our knowledge of the nature of reality through our own will, however, Schopenhauer rejected Kant's inference that transcendental idealism, while it allows us to conceive of certain features of how things may be in themselves by means of our categories, and even to adopt certain postulates about them for the sake of our practical reason, that is, morality, completely precludes us from having any actual knowledge of them.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1999

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