Grice e Zubiena

 Kant,as much concerned as Descartes with the foundations of science, seems, in a sense, to show no such prefer-ence.

He seems prepared to accord reality to all the general types of phenomena which we encounter in experience or, rather, to draw the distinction between the illusory and the real, as we normally do, within these types and not between them. Yet it is only a relative reality or, as he said, an empirical reality, that he was willing to grant in this liberal way to all the general classes of things we encounter.

For the whole world of nature, studied by science, was declared by him to be ultimately only appear-ance, in contrast with the transcendent and unknowable reality which lay behind it. So, in sense, he downgraded the whole of what we know in favour of what we do not and cannot know. this thoroughgoing contrast between appearance and reality was perhaps of less importance to him in connection with science than in connection with morality. The transcendent reality was of interest to us, not as scientific enquirers, but as moral beings, not as creatures faced with problems of knowledge, but as creatures faced with problems of conduct.

Kant was a very ambitious metaphysician, who sought to secure, at one stroke, the foundations of science and the foundations of morality.Kant is the supreme example of the second. The whole world of nature, including our ordinary human selves — the whole province of scientific knowledge, in fact — is declared to be mere appearance, in contrast with the world of transcendent reality, the world of things in themselves. Reality is set behind a curtain impenetrable to scientific enquiry, a removal which both guarantees its security and heightens its prestige.

But communications are not wholly severed. From behind the curtain Reality speaks - giving us, indeed, not information, but commands, moral imperatives. In some admittedly unintelligible way, Reality is within us, as rational beings; and, with unquestionable authority, it lays down the general form of the moral law which we ought, as ordinary human beings, to obey.