Kant's Magic Lantern: Historical Epistemology and Media Archaeology

Abstract

This essay juxtaposes Kant's critical epistemology with the visual medium of the phantasmagoria and a contemporaneous debate about spirit apparitions. Kant's notion of Erscheinung as an appearance or apparition of a supersensory thing in itself draws on the previous hypothesis of genuine spirit apparitions from his Dreams of a Spirit Seer (1766). His doctrine of transcendental illusion, by contrast, adapts a second, skeptical explanation of spirit visions by describing speculative metaphysics as a “magic lantern of brain phantoms.” Kant thereby transforms the optical instrument into an epistemological figure, highlighting the unreliability and limits of philosophical knowledge.