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Immanuel Kant

Kant on Space

Pinhas Ben-Zvi thinks Kant was inconsistent in his revolutionary ideas about the nature of space and time.

In the first and second editions of his Critique of Pure Reason (A&B) Immanuel Kant asks: “What, then, are space and time? Are they real existences? Are they only determinations or relations of things, yet such as would belong to things even if they were not intuited?” (A23; B37).

At the time when he wrote that, conflicting theories of space dominated the scientific and philosophical world.

Sir Isaac Newton's averred an absolute and real space in the sense of Euclidean geometry. According to Newton, space was a self-subsistent reality, a container inside which all objects are placed; it was “God's boundless uniform sensorium.”

The expression ‘God's sensorium' added an unnecessary theological aspect to Newton's comprehensive theory and consequently attracted some criticisms like the one from Leibniz in his debate with Clarke.

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