Kant's Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense Book

A good middle of the road interpretation of the K.d.r.V. Allison's book is a good corrective to the ridiculously negative interpretations of Strawson, Bennett and others, who seem to have missed the point completely. The Anglo-Saxon way is to think that if an idea is not stated in a clear English tone of voice, in a practical, visually concrete way, stripped of all nuance, it isn't an idea. Hence the history of philosophy ends with Hume and starts again with Russell. Rubbish! German philosophy has its faults, clarity among them, but it is not trivial or irrelevant. People now understand this and Allison's book was helpful in refuting these misinterpretations. I have two quibbles: the thing in itself is not just things considered as they are or would be in themselves, i.e. by using the understanding without experiential input as pure thought. Hegel and others, Prauss most recently, held this. But consider that Kant says, quite clearly, in the Schematism that the matter of things in themselves is sensation, the pure strobe-like impressions of sense. He also says that these force-like impressions are also met with in nature. It is only their form that is unknown, for the same sensory impressions and moments of force in nature could be ordered in various non-spatial and temporal ways in addition to the way our understanding orders them. The schematism of snapshots of time depends on this. I published an article in Kant Studien in 2005 claiming this and nobody has contradicted me. (Perhaps no one has read it either.) Second, his take on the causality argument is generally good (by which I mean I agree with it). The kind of causality is strictly whatever would support a representation of space and time. Calling it a causal law is too strong. Consider that space and time representation would be possible strictly on a token particular to token particular form of causation. Not my idea of law, by any means. Finally, I think there are two notions of space and time operative in Kant. The a priori forms are like snapshots, or the space and time of individual frames of experience, like polaroid photos. The understanding plays no role as yet. They still have not been ordered into a representation of space and time to an observer. For example, you have several views of a coffee cup taken from different positions around a room. They are spatial and temporal in an instantanous sense, as snap shots, but they are not representations of an object until someone orders them into observations of an object to an observer, say someone walking around the room ordering his intuitions in time and in space. I think Allison is saying this too, but I didn't think he was as clear as he could be on the separation between the instantaneous snapshot space and time of sensibility, and the tracing out of space and time representation by the understanding under the categories. Nor do I think he realizes the inverse relaion between categories considered as rules for ordering snapshots into classes and objects, and the logical use of the categories to decompose these classes in judgments. The logical functions are just analytical in nature, they just take apart what the understanding has assembled in synthesis. In short, I agree with Allison in general and think this is a good read of the K.d.r.V. In the details, disagreements begin to surface.