Transcendental Idealism and Empirical Realism

Abstract

Trying to do justice to both poles of the sensual/conceptual dichotomy, Kant declared himself both Transcendental idealistic and Empirical realistic. The author of this paper —“Transcendental Idealism and Empirical Realism”— examines these two notions in the light of Leslie Stevenson’s criteria of demarcation according to the degree of independence of the judgement in relation to the object of knowledge. Next, García Serrano submits to critical exam and contrasts two theories of reference: Keith Donnellan’s “descriptivist theory”, on the one hand, and Saul Kripke’s “denotative theory'” of the reference of proper names, on the other. Finally, the author reformulates the Kantian argument of the transcendental deduction in “more familiar terms”, attending to the contemporary theories examined.
[Laura Lecuona]