William Blattner

Professor of Philosophy

A Lexicon of Kant-speak

"A parte priori infinite series of events:" the series of events that can be traced infinitely far back into the past.

A priori practical: capable of guiding choice independently of "sensible motivation" (i.e., desires and goals).

A priori knowledge or cognition or judgment: knowledge or cognition or judgment is a priori, if it can be justified independently of any appeal to what we learn through experience. Ant.: empirical.

Appearance/phenomenon: a thing as it reveals itself to our experience. Our perception of the thing.

Automaton materiale: material automaton, i.e., a physical thing that is entirely mechanical in its operation.

Automaton spirituale: spiritual automaton, i.e., a spiritual (mental) thing that is entirely mechanical in its operation.

Efficient cause: something that causally determines an effect. For our purposes, just read "cause" for "efficient cause."

Ideal/ideality: something is ideal, if it depends upon human powers of representation for its being. Thus, appearances (phenomena) are ideal, whereas things in themselves (noumena) are real. This is not the everyday sense of "ideal," as in, "It would be ideal, if my boss doubled my salary."

Imperative: a sentence that issues a command: e.g., "Clean up your room!" (Kant thinks of morality as consisting in a system of imperatives.)

Hypothetical Imperative: a sentence that commands a course of action given some desire or goal. "If you want to make money, invest in plastics!"

Categorical Imperative: a sentence that commands a course of action regardless of one’s desires or goals: "Do not steal!" (Note: Kant’s claim that morality is a system of categorical imperatives is highly controversial.)

The categorical imperative: the highest principle of morality in Kant’s system, from which all other moral imperatives are derived. "Act only according to the maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law."

Inner sense: the power to experience our own mental lives. Introspection. Kant speaks of things as being, e.g., "conformable to inner sense," by which he means that a thing is capable of appearing to the power of inner sense. That is, we can experience it as part of our mental lives.

Outer sense: the power to experience the physical world around us. Perception. Kant speaks of things as being, e.g., "conformable to outer sense," by which he means that a thing is capable of appearing to the power of outer sense. That is, we can experience it as part of the natural world around us

Representations: mental states by means of which we represent, cognize, or experience the world around us or ourselves.

Standing under temporal conditions: occurring in time and subject to the constraints that are placed upon anything that occurs in time. For Kant this means that the item in question is an appearance.

The intelligible world: the world that can only be thought by means of pure reason, i.e., the supersensible world, the world of things in themselves.

The world of sense: the world that can be experienced by means of the senses, i.e., the natural world, the world of appearances.

Thing in itself/noumenon: a thing as it is independently of how we experience it. How the thing really is.

Transcendental: two meanings:

1. that which transcends experience. Kant sometimes speaks of objects or things as being transcendental, when he means that they transcend experience, that is, are things in themselves.
2. knowledge, cognition, or judgment is transcendental, on the other hand, if it explains how we can have a priori knowledge, cognition, or judgment. So, knowledge of space and time is transcendental, because it is by means of them that we know the necessary truths about reality that we do know, such as that time only flows forward, never backward (despite the best efforts of science fiction). Knowledge of the grammar of thought (logic) is transcendental, because without it, we cannot know anything at all.