Transcendental Aesthetics

Already the first correspondence between Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and René Descartes in 1643 inaugurated the discourse of the mind-body-distinction, which until today remains as one of the unresolved problems in modern epistemology. In her letter dated 6th May 1643, Princess Elisabeth raises a number of questions about the nature of the relation between the mind and the body, especially on the question of how the soul of man, being only a thinking substance, can determine his bodily spirits to perform voluntary actions. She argues that matter and extension should be attributed to the mind, which moves the body and is moved by it. The proposed work is an attempt to re-examine this discourse by initially emphasizing a contextual difference between the Cartesian notion, namely the distinction between the extended body and an immaterial soul, and the polemic of the Princess against it. This contextual difference refers primarily to a more fundamental distinction between the origin and the domain of a pre-logical and purely aesthetical subjectivity. With reference to our bodily volition and sensation, the Cartesian notion of "res cogitans" appears to have rooted in the origin of an aesthetical subjectivity alone. In contrast to it, the domain of our volition has invariably a bodily extension, and the domains of our sensations are, furthermore, extended bodily as well as spatially. The main objectives of this work are to discuss the ontic status of such bodily and spatially extended domains of our aesthetical subjectivity and to identify the epistemological mode of their unity with the objective, i.e. physical phenomena - also with reference to Kant's epistemology - as an aesthetic-synthetic nexus.

ABSTRACT
Together with other influential psychologists of the time, Wundt considers internal data as absolute evidence (unlike Kant), grounding psychology on this assumption. In opposition to his former mentor, Külpe aims at rehabilitating Kant’s transcendental aesthetics. Yet, he is far from embracing transcendentalism and rejects Kant’s skepticism as to the possibility of a scientific psychology. Nevertheless, Külpe believes that Kant is right in considering internal data as unreliable for scientific purposes: accordingly, psychology should share the same scientific methodology of any other science.

In this paper, I will argue that Immanuel Kant’s account of two separate analogies for space as an a priori form of intuition and time as an a priori intuition is a transcendental illusion of the capacity of human reason through the act of what he calls the “synthesis.” In his analysis of cognition within the Transcendental Aesthetic section of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant claims that the ultimate form of appearances – which he identifies as space and time – are “empirically real, but transcendentally ideal.” In this understanding, Kant treats “space” and “time” as two separately objective forms of a priori intuition, namely that of objects and that of occurrences. As a correction to his understanding, I will attempt to instead show that “space and time appear empirically separable (by illusion), but are transcendentally conjunctive (by necessity).” Nevertheless, this transcendentally conjunctive and necessary notion of “space and time” or spatiotemporality (and not “existence, therefore occurrence” or “occurrence, therefore existence”) may have metaphysical implications for Kant’s Doctrine of Elements – particularly the Schematism – along with Platonic Realism, the Refutation of Idealism, the First Analogy, the Second Analogy, the First Antinomy and several other areas of the Critique of Pure Reason.