The world as it is: Kantian realism past and present

I first discuss Michael Devitt’s criticism of Kant's empirical realism. Devitt’s criticism helps to appreciate the contemporary relevance of empirical realism. Devitt profiles the kind of realism he advocates not least by criticizing Kant for his, as he coins it, ‘Weak, or Fig-Leaf, Realism’. According to ‘Weak, or Fig-Leaf, Realism’, ‘[s]omething objectively exists independently of the mental.’ For Devitt this kind of realism ‘is so weak as to be uninteresting’ such that in the end it turns out to be nothing over and above a kind of anti-realism. I argue that the ‘Fig-Leaf’-objection does not do justice to empirical realism and, as a first step of my overall argument, that Kantian empirical realism cannot be reproached with not being a genuine form of realism. This step is required to not let the consideration of empirical realism in the contemporary debate stop for the merely strategic allegation that Kantian realism cannot enter the debate because it is not realism (sec. 1). To show what empirical realism amounts to, I will then discuss the relation between empirical and transcendental realism. Kant’s juxtaposition of empirical and transcendental realism clarifies that for the natural and human sciences to be able to operate from a common ground these objects must be objects of the same kind, i.e., the same spatio-temporal system of experience. In the second step of my overall argument, I argue that unlike transcendental realism, empirical realism can provide the theoretical framework based on which the natural and human sciences contribute to the same common realist world view (sec. 2). At least until the late 1990ies, Hilary Putnam subscribes to major ideas of empirical realism. Putnam sees in Kant’s empirical realism the paradigm of his ‘internal realism’. Internal realism is the view that the question about the existence of the external world cannot be meaningfully formulated and answered from a god’s eye perspective but only relative to a conceptual system, i.e., to a theory or conceptual scheme. To further profile Kant’s concept of realism, I will enquire the connection between Kant’s and Putnam’s concepts of realism. Comparing empirical and internal realism is extremely helpful to understand in what sense Kant lays the foundation for our contemporary conception of a realist worldview that does not eliminate but has the potential to integrate the human sciences (sec. 3). The final step of my argument will be a sketch of how Kant conceives of a realist picture of an integrated science. More specifically, I will indicate at how Kant understands history as a human science and how the human sciences fit into the one realist picture of the world we live in (sec. 4).