"Inner Sense and Self-Knowledge in the Kantian Refutation of the Problematic Idealism"

CLAUDIA JÁUREGUI

Berlin

Congreso; IX International Kant-Kongress; 2000

Kant-Gesellschaft

In this paper, I analyse the ‘Refutation of Idealism’ in order to show that if we accept some Kantian theses about time and self-consciousness that are involved in the premises of the argument, we must conclude that there is an asymmetric relationship between inner experience and outer experience, in the sense that the former consists of merely subjective representations and the latter consists of strictly objective representations. This asymmetry plays a very important role in the refutation of some sceptical positions about the existence of the external world, but it leads, at the same time, to a sceptical point of view about the possibility of self-knowledge based in some difficulties concerning the application of the categories to the empirical self.