Kant and the limits of knowledge: The problem of the “thing in itself”

We often enter philosophy indirectly, through chance circumstances that sometimes prompt us to “question.” Thus, Plato the philosopher followed in Socrates' footsteps to resolve the arbitrariness that took the life of such a great teacher. Our interest in Kant, it must be admitted from the outset, is rooted in the desire to know what we can know together beyond our particular, and sometimes decisive, “experiences” of race, culture, religion, and gender. To understand and resolve the problems created by the plurality of so-called legitimate differences, we have deliberately chosen Kant's problem of the limits of knowledge, based on a very specific issue: the problem of the thing-in-itself. There are two reasons for this choice: first, with the thing-in-itself, we are confronted with the “concept without which it is impossible to enter Kant's system, but with which it is impossible to remain in it,” according to Jacobi; second, in a singular way, the problem of the thing-in-itself radically raises the issue at stake in the Critique, namely the “power of reason in general with regard to all knowledge.”