On the Semantics of Kant’s Concept of Substance

Josep Clusa Capell

doi:10.7203/REK.9.1.28240

On the Semantics of Kant’s Concept of Substance

Josep Clusa Capell

Resumen

This paper examines the debate about the referential meaning of Kant’s concept of substance. In the Critique of Pure Reason and other works such as the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, the category or concept of substance appears quite uncontroversially to have both a logical meaning (by which it means roughly ‘a thing that is the ultimate subject of predication’) and an objective meaning (by which it means roughly ‘a thing that is permanent’, or, equivalently, ‘a thing existing at all times’). However, it is highly contested what kind of object, or objects, are supposed to meet, in experience, the criteria imposed by the conjunction of these two distinct meanings. I discuss two examples of the main interpretations to be found in the literature (Peter Strawson’s, 2000, who thinks that the reference of substance is only matter, and Claudia Jáuregui’s, 2021, who also counts ordinary particular objects as substances) and scrutinize their fit with some of the textual evidence, primarily from the First Analogy of Experience.

Palabras clave

substance, meaning, matter, ordinary objects, First Analogy of Experience

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