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: hi- i've got a major essay due on the 6th and i can't get around the question, which is: : "Kant claims that space and time are empirially real and transcendentally ideal. What does he mean by this? Critically discuss his arguments regarding either space OR time." : Forgetting the details... just think of the 'empirially real and transcendentally ideal' terms... : Transcendental and empirical are contrasting epistemological terms. Where empirical questions derive knowledge from some part of experience, transcendental claims concern the conditions of human knowledge itself, independently of its experience. We can take ‘real’ in the context of empiricism to mean mind-independent, and ‘ideal’ to mean mind-dependent. Taken in this context, ‘empirically real’ and ‘transcendentally ideal’ seem totally incorrigible epistemic-ontological claims. For it requires that the subject of knowledge, be both separate, and conditional to the existence of the human mind. : That is, if an object is empirically real then it is known though experience, independently of the subjective constitution of the observer, and if it is transcendentally ideal, then it is known independently of experience, that is a priori, but subject to my own existence (or dependent on the ‘cognitive structure of the mind’ or its representations). How does Kant maintain these two positions at once? I must be misunderstanding something fundamental or terminological. Or possibly it's something to do with the phenomenal-neumonal distinction? : HELLPPP!!

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