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Letters
Letters
Representations of Reality • “But Officer, it’s clearly a plant!” • Against ‘Against Veganism’ • Existential Ethical Enquiries • Swift Responses • More Misquoting & Misdirection
Representations of Reality
Dear Editor: I have one or two thoughts about Paul Doolan’s ‘Get Real’ (Issue 146), in which he considers what ‘the real world’ is. First, Doolan says Immanuel Kant thinks our knowledge of the ‘thing-in-itself’ (Ding-an-sich) is ‘limited’ and ‘imperfect’, but for Kant, the Ding-an-sich is an idea of pure reason and we have no direct sensory knowledge of it, and never could have. It is also wrong to say that Kant thinks “We never observe causation directly.” Quite the opposite: causation is part of the order of our phenomenal (sensory) experience. On the other hand, for Kant there is no in-itself causation that our experience of causation somehow ‘represents’.
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