The Upsidedown World

of Merleau-Ponty

Jonah Bossewitch

PHI 333

Professor Beatrice Longuenese

Novemver, 1996

Space is often described as the final frontier, but stargazers and science-fiction buffs rarely realize the various sences which this assertion can be understood.

In the Transcendental Aesthetic, Kant attempts to answer the questions "What, then, are space and time? Are they real existences? Are they only determinations or relations of things, yet such as would belong to things even if they were not intuited?" (A23/B37) Kant then argues that both space and time must be (a) a priori and (b) nothing but the form of appearances. These proofs are presented for space and time in the Metaphysical Exposition of this Concept and the Metaphysical Exposition of the Concept of Time respectively. If these arguments were exactly parallel then they would be syntactically identical and differ only semantically. However, as careful analysis of the text demonstrates, the two arguments differ syntactically, and hence, are not exactly parallel.