A Proper Regulation of the Science of Reason as the Key to Interpreting Transcendental Idealism

The interpretation of the relation between appearances and things in themselves in Kant’s transcendental idealism is a much-debated topic in Kant scholarship. Here I explore the idea that certain biases in Kant’s ultimate philosophical interests prevented him from seeing that this relation should form the content of a regulative principle. After noting the biases in the regulative principles of the Antinomy chapter’s theses, I propose correcting one of them so that it regulates the domain of knowledge circumscribed by Kant’s theoretical critical philosophy, i.e. the Science of Reason. Such a principle is required because the claim of transcendental affection (reformulated in various places in terms of grounding claims) must be unified with the results of this critical investigation to avoid being purely dogmatic. Such a principle can be seen to emerge from the resolution of the third antinomy in its cosmological dimension which Kant, with his focus upon the possibility of free agency, pays little attention to. Indeed, the major unification problem created by transcendental affection, namely the spectre of double affection, is directly addressed by this resolution. This leads to justifying a double-aspect theory of reality-in-itself whereby the latter must be thought from our perspective as grounding empirical causality.