Homenaje a Roberto Torretti

Abstract

In his extraordinary book Manuel Kant. Estudio sobre los fundamentos de la filosofía crítica (the latest edition of which is from 2013), in the part where he deals with transcendental deduction, Roberto Torretti included a section dedicated to "The reform of the notion of object" (pp. 318-332). In that text Torretti exposes the core of the so-called "Copernican turn" with great accuracy. Not all commentators have done it with such happiness. Not all have managed to remain, like him, free of any illusion of naive realism in the conception of the object. In my present communication I shall refer to only one aspect of his exposition; I would like to direct attention to a philological problem which may seem secondary, but which is decisive. It is situated in the definition of object present in A 104f. Torretti translates the Kantian definition with the following words: "for this [the object, MC] is considered as that which is against our knowledge being determined arbitrarily or at random [...]; insofar as these must refer to an object, they must also necessarily agree among themselves with respect to it, that is, they must possess that unity which constitutes the concept of an object" (p. 323). This translation is correct; but the German original hides a problem that has puzzled some expositors (but not Roberto Torretti) to the point of leading them to propose an interpretation that is, in my opinion, incompatible with the Copernican inversion of the way of thinking about the object.