Esetleges adottság-e az emberi nézőponttér-időbelisége? Egy vita a kortárs Kant-értelmezésbenés egy válaszkísérlet Plessner nyomán

While early debates surrounding Kant’s theory of space and time were mainly concerned with the thesis of transcendental ideality, recent discussion has focused on the claim that the a priori forms of our sensible intuition are contingent features of the human standpoint. Following a problem-oriented survey of recent arguments, I hazard a position on the philosophical problem at issue. I begin by clarifying why the threat of contingency poses a greater challenge with respect to our forms of intuition than our categories, even though the latter cannot be fully immunized against that threat. Since Kant’s central attempt to dispel the worry about the contingency of our forms of sensibility occurs in the second-edition version of the Transcendental Deduction, I turn to recent Kantian scholarship and John McDowell’s Hegel-inspired diagnosis in order to show why the problem arguably persists even in the wake of the B-Deduction. After briefly reviewing three proposed solutions to this problem, I consider and endorse Simon Gurofsky’s argument that the semblance of contingency vanishes in light of Kant’s constraints on what we can meaningfully think. I then extend Gurofsky’s argument with a line of thought that yields a substantively framed thesis about the necessity of space and time. Here I approach the limits of thinkability in view of a key feature of our standpoint seldom considered by Kant, namely, the fact that we are living beings. I develop relevant consequences of our aliveness by drawing on the radical reworking of Kantian insights in Helmuth Plessner’s philosophical anthropology. Since we can form no meaningful thought of a subject of knowledge except as an animal living being, and space and time are in the context of biological life not just phenomenal forms of sensibility but categorial determinations of what it is to be alive, I argue that we must conceive of any finite subject of knowledge as spatio-temporally experiencing. Space and time as forms of intuition are grounded in the categorial spatiotemporality of the living.