Transcendental Aesthetic and Dialectic in Kantian Philosophy

Transcendental Aesthetic

The term 'aesthetic' is Greek and means sensation. The term 'sensitivity' is often used in philosophy to describe the ability to receive sensations. Kant defined sensitivity as the ability of the subject to be affected by external realities; through sensitivity, the aforementioned objects are given to us. Sensitivity is the first step of all knowledge because only through it is our knowledge related immediately to the actual exterior. Sensations are given *a posteriori* and are the signals that meet at sensitivity. We do not receive raw feelings, but these are presented as ordered in certain relations. That is, how sensations appear is already an *a priori* form in the spirit. Kant also called this pure intuition, reserving the concept of empirical intuition for the feelings. It determines the order by which we represent objects in space and time. Space and time are pure intuitions. The synthesis of sensations or empirical data and space-time is the phenomenon. Transcendental aesthetic is the science of *a priori* principles or pure forms of sensibility: space and time. Space and time are therefore the conditions of possibility for all experience. Thanks to the *a priori* of space and time, synthetic *a priori* judgments are possible in geometry and arithmetic. Kant ultimately shows in aesthetics how synthetic *a priori* judgments are possible, and therefore mathematics is possible as a science.

Transcendental Dialectic

Kant returns to the problem of metaphysics; it is a critique in its pretension to provide empirical knowledge of extra items, outside of experience. Kant makes it look like metaphysics falls into contradictions and false reasoning.

Reason

If sensitivity operates on reasons and understanding acts on the sensitivity of reason, reason operates on understanding and thus on judgments by categories. Kant performs a thorough examination of the faculties of reason, showing how they tend to exceed the limits of experience based on the mode of being proper to reason.

Transcendental Ideas

Kant understood the term 'idea' in a way analogous to how Plato formulated it. Kant understands the ideas of reason in correspondence with three classes of possible rational judgments: categorical, hypothetical, and disjunctive, which correspond to the three categories of relation: substance, cause, and reciprocity.