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Project

Kant's Theory of Time and Inner Sense: Its Origins and Development

The aim of the thesis is to determine the origins and the development of Kant’s theory of time and inner sense from his first writings to the Critique of Pure Reason. I interpret this theory as the upshot of Kant’s long-lasting engagement with the metaphysical tradition. Kant engaged with this tradition both in the sense that, at the very beginning of his career, he developed a metaphysics which draws heavily on Leibnizian and post-Leibnizian thought, and in the sense that he very soon began to reflect on the problems that this metaphysical framework had. As a result of this process, he came to view time as an essential methodological element of the critique of metaphysics, rather than, as it was at the beginning, as one of the many items dealt with by metaphysics. Thus, the account of time as the form of inner sense in the first Critique is the outcome of such an engagement and part of the solution to the problem posed by metaphysics and its method.

By approaching Kant’s theory of time and inner sense from the perspective of metaphysics, I mean neither to deny nor downplay the role that the debates on natural sciences and the innovations in mathematical physics in the wake of Newton played for the development of philosophy and metaphysics in the 17th and 18th century. In fact, an historically documented study Kant’s philosophy and of its development (as the present aims to be) cannot avoid taking those issues into account. Precisely for this reason, however, it is crucial to bear in mind the theoretical framework within which the challenges posed by the natural sciences were envisaged, i.e., the metaphysical framework.

Date:1 Oct 2017 →  17 Nov 2023
Keywords:Kant, Imagination, Metaphysics, Inner Sense, Time, Self-Consciousness
Disciplines:Philosophy
Project type:PhD project