  Vaihinger certainly does not, however, accept Cohen’s interpretation tout court. Though Cohen too had emphasized the need for historical sensitivity in interpreting Kant, his aims were ultimately still polemical: he believed more careful attention to Kant’s texts could exonerate his system from some of the perennial charges of inconsistency. For example, Kant’s doctrine that things in themselves exist independently of us and causally affect our minds to produce our representations had long been thought to violate his doctrine that the categories have validity only for objects of possible experience. Another charge, very much alive at the time, was that Kant’s key arguments for the non-spatiotemporality of things in themselves failed on the grounds that they showed, at best, only the subjectivity of space and time, not their mere subjectivity. According to this criticism, Kant overlooked the possibility that space and time might be both subjective forms of intuition and objective properties of things in themselves (the classic statement of this criticism is [Trendelenburg 1867]). Cohen’s response to both charges was to argue that interpreters were wrong to read Kant’s doctrine of things in themselves as positing a class of entities ontologically distinct from appearances. Instead, he maintained, the Kantian thing in itself is a mere “limiting concept” (Grenzbegriff), to whose actual existence Kant was never committed (1871, 252, 268).