Thing-in-itself | philosophy | Britannica (original) (raw)

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• epistemological rationalism
  • 
    In rationalism: Epistemological rationalism in modern philosophies
    …causality—represents an order holding among things-in-themselves (German Dinge-an-sich) cannot be known. Kant’s rationalism was thus the counterpart of a profound skepticism.
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Kant

• In noumenon
  …philosophy of Immanuel Kant, the thing-in-itself (das Ding an sich) as opposed to what Kant called the phenomenon—the thing as it appears to an observer. Though the noumenal holds the contents of the intelligible world, Kant claimed that man’s speculative reason can only know phenomena and can never penetrate to…
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• 
  In skepticism: The 18th century
  …possible to know about “things-in-themselves” or about the ultimate causes of experience.
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• epistemology

  • 
    In epistemology: Immanuel Kant
    That world consists of “things-in-themselves” (noumena), which do not exist in space and time and do not enter into causal relations. Because of his commitment to realism (minimal though it may have been), Kant was disturbed by Berkeley’s uncompromising idealism, which amounted to a denial of the existence of…
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• transcendental idealism

  • In transcendental idealism
    …but he held that such things-in-themselves must remain forever unknown. Human knowledge cannot reach to them because knowledge can only arise in the course of synthesizing the ideas of sense.
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• Kantianism

  • 
    In Kantianism: Nature and types of Kantianism
    …the Ding an sich (“thing-in-itself”), that more ultimate reality that presumably lurks behind the apprehension of an object; or with the relationship between knowledge and morality.
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  • 
    In Kantianism: Objections to Kantianism
    …them from the world of things-in-themselves but it also prevents them from granting objective reality to phenomena as such, inasmuch as the transcendental source is here viewed as playing a constructive role with respect to experience and the phenomenon.
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• Mach

  • 
    In positivism: The critical positivism of Mach and Avenarius
    , of the “thing in itself”—the ultimate entities underlying phenomena, which Kant had declared to be absolutely unknowable though they must nevertheless be conceived as partial causes of human perceptions. By contrast, Hermann von Helmholtz, a wide-ranging scientist and philosopher and one of the great minds of the…
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