A Critical Analysis of Immanuel Kant’s Transcendental Idealism

Abstract

Kant’s transcendental idealism is severally described as an ‘immanetist’ and ‘agnostic’ one. Couched mainly in his Critique of Pure Reason, critics have observed that it is bedeviled by many errors, violations of the principle of non-contradiction and incoherencies of method and content. His inability to bring to our full knowledge and understanding, his noumenal reality postulate, constitutes a weakness to the system he sets out to build. This paper consequently, situates Kant’s transcendental idealism within the stream of related philosophical idealistic postulations and with the aim of highlighting the special reconciliatory role it plays between two rival cognitive pathways of empiricism and rationalism. The researcher also attempts to show how this Kantian contribution, enriches human cognition. However, the literary analysis method of enquiry is adopted in this study.

Keywords: Transcendental idealism, Noumena, Phenomena, Cognition.