La cosa en sí como un postulado de la razón teórica

Abstract

The “Problem of the Thing in Itself” has its origin in a contradiction. On the one hand, the Kantian statement about the impossibility to know anything that exists beyond the limits of all possible experience. On the other hand, one can easily find explicit statements in the Kantian texts that violate this restriction (statements about the existence of the thing in itself, or about its capacity to affect our sensibility, etc.). In this article we state that the afore-mentioned contradiction is somehow inevitable, because it is right (at least in a Kantian way of thinking) that we cannot know the thing in itself, but it is impossible to completely disregard it in the investigation about our knowledge of the outer world. In order to look for an alternative, in this article we suggest that considering the thing in itself in the same way as the transcendental ideas, emphasizing their “regulative use”, could allow for the incorporation of the thing in itself into the investigation without crossing the limits of the knowable; since it would be incorporated as a necessary thinkable supposi-tion and not as a known datum.