Kant on Abstraction and Things in Themselves

Throughout the Transcendental Aesthetic as well as elsewhere in the first Critique, Kant characterizes things in themselves in terms of abstraction: to consider things as they are in themselves is to consider them in abstraction from the conditions of our sensibility. Despite Kant’s frequent appeal to the notion of abstraction, the view that our talk of ‘things in themselves’ should be understood in terms of abstraction (‘the abstraction analysis’) has not gained much traction among non-epistemological readers of transcendental idealism. In this paper, I give a systematic account of the notion of abstraction at work in Kant’s characterizations of things in themselves, arguing that while abstraction is a logical procedure, some of Kant’s background assumptions in the Transcendental Aesthetic warrant attributing some metaphysical import to the abstraction analysis. I also defend the abstraction analysis against the longstanding objection that it trivializes the non-spatiotemporality of things in themselves.