Kantian Humility Our Ignorance of Things in Themselves

Rae Langton offers a new interpretation and defence of Kant's doctrine of things in themselves. Kant distinguishes things in themselves from phenomena, and in so doing he makes a metaphysical distinction between intrinsic and relational properties of substances. Kant says thatphenomena--things as we know them--consist 'entirely of relations'. His claim that we have no knowledge of things in themselves is not idealism, but epistemic humility: we have no knowledge of the intrinsic properties of substances. This humility has its roots in some plausible philosophicalbeliefs: an empiricist belief in the receptivity of human knowledge and a metaphysical belief in the irreducibility of relational properties. Langton's interpretation vindicates Kant's scientific realism, and shows his primary/secondary quality distinction to be superior even to modern-daycompetitors. And it answers the famous charge that Kant's tale of things in themselves is one that makes itself untellable.

Rae Langton is Professor of Philosophy at MIT. She has been affiliated with Monash University, the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University, Sheffield University, and the University of Edinburgh.