# Kant "idealist" or not?



## Claudiu (Apr 19, 2011)

Does Kant successfully explain how his doctrine that the things we perceive in space and time are "mere appearances" is not a version of "the mystical and visionary idealism of Berkeley" that would "reduce the whole sensible world to mere illusion"?


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## jwright82 (Apr 19, 2011)

Berkley was ahead of Kant in one very important sense. He doubted the existence of basically substances, he called it matter if I rememeber correctly. His point was that if matter, or substance, cannot be be percieved or even rationally known than why don't we get rid of the useless concept? It is here that he reduced all things to appearance because if you erase the underlying mystical "substance" of a thing you are left with only the things you can sense, appearances. Jean-Paul Sartre basically takes up the same point of view in his _Being and Nothingness_. Kant failed to acheive his goals and thus failed in his transcendental analysis. If we cannot know things as they are than we have no way of actually knowing them. His Transcendental Idealism is named because he pointed out that in his opinion the mind was active in forming the chaotic sense data of experience with the categories, as he called them (this is substance, causality, etc...), to form knowledge.


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