Karl Ameriks at the Transcendental Idealism workshop

Karl Ameriks gave a paper entitled 'Kant’s Idealism: Once More into the Breach'. In it he sought to find space for a coherent 'modest metaphysical' reading of Kant's theoretical philosophy, where 'metaphysical' means allowing some sort of sense to Kant's various ways of talking about things-in-themselves, and ‘modest’ means that such talk flows from the a priori structures of experience rather than dogmatic assumptions. Karl argued the key to making tenable such a reading is to reject the false choice between accepting talk of things-in-themselves but only in the context of neo-Berkeleyan phenomenalism, and denying such talk in the context of a neo-Strawsonian descriptive metaphysics.

Karl achieved this rejection via a 'multi-stage, multi-level' reading of Kant's Critical Philosophy. He argued that Kant’s Critical Philosophy is methodologically multistage because it starts from non-inferentially accepted core claims consonant with common sense realism (the subject matter of which are immediate ‘mental-sensory’ representings); moves inferentially through transcendental claims about a priori experience-structuring features that philosophical reflection reveals claims at the first level require; and then goes on to show that these a priori features are only possible if we deny transcendental reality to space and time. This multistage understanding of experience yields a multi-level ontology that is idealist but which does not undercut the common sense realism that the position began from.

Karl’s reasons for arguing that a multi-stage methodology yields a multi-level ontology (and thus TI) were complex and interesting, but I shall not go into them here. I will just mention a couple of points that came up in discussion. First, it was suggested that it was not at all clear that Kant’s talk of empirical reality being ‘mere representations’ at the third methodological level does not undercut the robust empirical realism reinforced at the second level. Second, it was suggested that once we give up the negative deflationary conception of things-in-themselves as merely what empirical reality would look like not from our perspective (or no perspective at all), we are unconstrained in the metaphysical positions available to us as positive characterisations of noumena. For example, what is to stop us postulating an infinite hierarchy of levels of the latter, all supporting each another, rather than viewing noumena as some sort of underlying ‘causal’ substrate to appearances? In other words, what is the Critical reason for taking the latter metaphysical line?