Concept

Noumenon

Overview

In philosophy, a noumenon (, ; from Ancient Greek: νοούμενoν; pl.: noumena) is knowledge posited as an object that exists independently of human sense. The term noumenon is generally used in contrast with, or in relation to, the term phenomenon, which refers to any object of the senses. Immanuel Kant first developed the notion of the noumenon as part of his transcendental idealism, suggesting that while we know the noumenal world to exist because human sensibility is merely receptive, it is not itself sensible and must therefore remain otherwise unknowable to us. In Kantian philosophy, the noumenon is often associated with the unknowable "thing-in-itself" (German: Ding an sich). However, the nature of the relationship between the two is not made explicit in Kant's work, and remains a subject of debate among Kant scholars as a result.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

In the original texts

Passages from public-domain books where Noumenon is discussed.

If, by the term noumenon, we understand a thing so far as it is not an object of our sensuous intuition, thus making abstraction of our mode of intuiting it, this is a noumenon in the negative sense of the word. But if we understand by it an object of a non-sensuous intuition, we in this case assume a peculiar mode of intuition, an intellectual intuition, to wit, which does not, however, belong to us, of the very…
Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason
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We look here only to the necessity of the connection of events in a time-series as it is developed according to the physical law, whether the subject in which this development takes place is called automaton materiale when the mechanical being is moved by matter, or with Leibnitz spirituale when it is impelled by ideas; and if the freedom of our will were no other than the latter (say the psychological and…
Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Practical Reason
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Still, the proposition as commonly understood does not assert that alone; it asserts that the Thing in itself, the _noumenon_ Socrates, was existing, and doing or experiencing those various facts during the same time. Co-existence and sequence, therefore, may be affirmed or denied not only between phenomena, but between noumena, or between a noumenon and phenomena. And both of noumena and of phenomena we may affirm…
John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive
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In knowing the latter, we know nothing of the former. Although the latter are called "phenomena," they do not really manifest the substantial reality; they conceal it. This absolute distinction between substance and quality, between reality and phenomenon, rests, in turn, upon the hypothesis that reality is _mere_ existence; that is, it is something which is, and that is all. It is a substratum; it lies under, in a…
John Dewey, Leibniz's New Essays Concerning the Human Understanding
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But, passing over this, we may say that with Kant the ethical principle appears as something quite independent of experience and its teaching; it is transcendental, or metaphysical. He recognises that human conduct possesses a significance that oversteps all possibility of experience, and is therefore actually the bridge leading to that which he calls the "intelligible"[2] world, the _mundus noumenôn_, the world of…
Arthur Schopenhauer, The Basis of Morality
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Noumenon

Overview

In the original texts

Philosophers who discussed Noumenon

Related ideas

Opposing perspectives

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