The Antinomies of Kant

Abstract

MY attention has been directed by a friend to an address by Prof. W. K. Clifford, in Macmillan's Magazine for this month, containing a curious misrepresentation of Kant's teaching, and therein an instructive instance of ultracrepidism. The professor remarks: “The opinion that at the basis of the natural order there is something which we can know to be unreasonable to elude the process of human thought... is set forth first by Kant, so far as I know, in the form of his famous doctrine of the antinomies or contradictions, a later form of which I will endeavour to explain to you.” “This doctrine,” he continues, “has been developed and extended to the great successors of Kant, and this unreasonable, or unknowable, which is also called the absolute and the unconditioned, has been set forth in various ways as that which we know to be the true basis of all things.”