Philosophy Dictionaries

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Change

[A187/B230] In the First Analogy Kant argues that "alteration can be perceived only in substances", meaning that we can only understand alteration as the change of states of an eternal substance. He argues that such substances "are the substrata of all determinations of time" if we did not relate successive appearances to (spatial) substances, we would be unable to make any temporal judgment; Kant concludes "permanence is thus a necessary condition under which alone appearances are determinable as things or objects in a possible experience".