Keele Research Repository

Kant’s Transcendental Aesthetic (TA) is a short, but immensely important part of the Critique of Practical Reason. A central claim that Kant aims to defend as “indubitably certain” in TA is a formulation of nothing less than the central thesis of his Critical philosophy, transcendental idealism, as applied to sensibility (with its two forms, space and time). In this chapter, I identify the argumentative structure of TA, reconstruct some of its elements, and examine, in the context of current debates, the extent to which Kant’s claim concerning the transcendental ideality of space can be vindicated with the resources available in TA. Overall, I defend a specific position, which can be called a quasi-deflationary theoretical (and logico-metaphysical) account of the transcendental ideality of space.