James Conant on McDowell's Kant

[@clenchedfist17]

This is brilliant. But I wonder how Conant (and McDowell) would understand Kant's talk about the thing in itself. The thing in itself seems completely superfluous under this interpretation. Did Kant just not realize that it was superfluous?

[@GolumTR]

In my opinion, the thing-in-itself in the analytic interpretation has a dialectical purpose. That the dang-an-sich turns out after analysis to be superfluous is a theorem, a result, not an assumption. That the thing in itself turns out to be superfluous is a part Kant’s famous rejection of ontology as an independent science in the way Leibniz needed it to be.