philosophy Philosophy ('love of wisdom' in Ancient Greek) is a systematic study of general and fundamental questions concerning topics like existence, reason, knowledge, Value (ethics and social sciences), value, mind, and language. It is a rational an ...

, condition of possibility () is a concept made popular by the German philosopher

Immanuel Kant Immanuel Kant (born Emanuel Kant; 22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804) was a German Philosophy, philosopher and one of the central Age of Enlightenment, Enlightenment thinkers. Born in Königsberg, Kant's comprehensive and systematic works ...

, and is an important part of his philosophy. A condition of possibility is a necessary framework for the possible appearance of a given list of entities. It is often used in contrast to the unilateral causality concept, or even to the notion of '' interaction''. For example, consider a cube made by an artisan. All cubes are

three-dimensional In geometry, a three-dimensional space (3D space, 3-space or, rarely, tri-dimensional space) is a mathematical space in which three values (''coordinates'') are required to determine the position (geometry), position of a point (geometry), poi ...

. If an object is three-dimensional, then it is an extended object. But extension is an impossibility without

space Space is a three-dimensional continuum containing positions and directions. In classical physics, physical space is often conceived in three linear dimensions. Modern physicists usually consider it, with time, to be part of a boundless ...

. Therefore, space is a ''condition of possibility'' because it is a necessary condition for the existence of cubes to be possible. Note, however, that space did not cause the cube, but that the artisan did, and that the cube and space are distinct entities, so space is not part of the definition of cube. From

Plato Plato ( ; Greek language, Greek: , ; born BC, died 348/347 BC) was an ancient Greek philosopher of the Classical Greece, Classical period who is considered a foundational thinker in Western philosophy and an innovator of the writte ...

to Descartes, what was presented by the senses was deemed illusory and . It was believed that the perceptions ought to be overcome to grasp the thing-in-itself, the essential essence, also known as Plato's allegory of the cave. With Kant comes a transition in philosophy from this dichotomy to the dichotomy of the /. There is no longer any higher essence behind the . It is what it is, a brute fact, and what one must now examine is the conditions that are necessary for its appearance. Immanuel Kant does just this in the Transcendental Aesthetic, when he examines the necessary conditions for the synthetic ''

a priori ('from the earlier') and ('from the later') are Latin phrases used in philosophy to distinguish types of knowledge, Justification (epistemology), justification, or argument by their reliance on experience. knowledge is independent from any ...

'' cognition of

mathematics Mathematics is a field of study that discovers and organizes methods, Mathematical theory, theories and theorems that are developed and Mathematical proof, proved for the needs of empirical sciences and mathematics itself. There are many ar ...

. But Kant ''was'' , so he still maintains the phenomenon/noumenon dichotomy, but what he did achieve was to render Noumena as unknowable and irrelevant. Foucault would come to adapt it in a historical sense through the concept of " episteme":

what I am attempting to bring to light is the epistemological field, the ''épistémè'' in which knowledge, envisaged apart from all criteria having reference to its rational value or to its objective forms, grounds its positivity and thereby manifests a history which is not that of its growing perfection, but rather that of its conditions of possibility; in this account, what should appear are those configurations within the space of knowledge which have given rise to the diverse forms of empirical science. Such an enterprise is not so much a history, in the traditional meaning of that word, as an 'archaeology'.

References

* . {{DEFAULTSORT:Condition of Possibility Concepts in metaphysics Possibility Concepts in epistemology Conditionals Kantianism