This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Condition of possibility" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR(March 2016) (Learn how and when to remove this message)
In philosophy, condition of possibility (German: Bedingungen der Möglichkeit) is a concept made popular by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, 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. If an object is three-dimensional, then it is an extended object. But extension is an impossibility without space. 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.
Gilles Deleuze presented it as a dichotomy in contradistinction to the classical phenomenon/noumenon dichotomy.[citation needed] From Plato to Descartes, what was presented by the senses was deemed illusory and denigrated[clarification needed]. 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 apparition[clarification needed]/conditions-of-appearance[clarification needed]. There is no longer any higher essence behind the apparition[clarification needed]. 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 cognition of mathematics. But Kant wasa transitional thinker[clarification needed], so he still maintains the phenomenon/noumenon dichotomy, but what he did achieve was to render Noumena as unknowable and irrelevant.[1]
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'.[2]
^Deleuze: Kant: 14 March 1978. Archived 30 June 2007 at the Wayback Machine (in French)
^Foucault, Michel (2002), The Order of Things, p. xxiii-xxiv
and 22 Related for: Condition of possibility information
In philosophy, conditionofpossibility (German: Bedingungen der Möglichkeit) is a concept made popular by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, and is...
possibility, possible, or possibly in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. Wikiquote has quotations related to Possibility. Possibility is the condition or...
Awareness Conditionofpossibility Essence Electrical phenomena Experience Intuition List of cycles List of effects List of electrical phenomena List of geological...
Air conditioning, often abbreviated as A/C (US) or air con (UK), is the process of removing heat from an enclosed space to achieve a more comfortable interior...
Commensurability Common good Common sense Composition of causes Compossibility Conatus Concept Conditionofpossibility Conjecture Conscience Consent Construct Contingency...
A race condition or race hazard is the conditionof an electronics, software, or other system where the system's substantive behavior is dependent on the...
phenomena, are not assemblages of humans and nonhumans (as in actor-network theory). Rather, they are the conditionofpossibilityof 'humans' and 'non-humans'...
equal) part of a condition which is itself unnecessary but sufficient for the occurrence of the effect. So, the short circuit is an INUS condition for the...
opposed what is thought to what appears.') Always already Anatta Conditionofpossibility Essence–energies distinction Haecceity Hypokeimenon Ineffability...
effectivity of life, which it requires as a conditionofpossibility. This is the meaning of the title of the main work of Michel Henry, The essence of manifestation:...
distortion. The importance of the Heaviside condition is that it showed the possibilityof dispersionless transmission of telegraph signals.: 131 In some...
phenomena, are not assemblages of humans and nonhumans (as in actor-network theory). Rather, they are the conditionofpossibilityof "humans" and "non-humans"...
rivals of Persepolis, like Esteghlal, bought national team players under contracts from other teams. He also used the conditionof "possibilityof recruitment"...
Classical conditioning (also respondent conditioning and Pavlovian conditioning) is a behavioral procedure in which a biologically potent stimulus (e...
awareness of God in any experiences of limitation in knowledge or freedom as finite subjects. Because such experience is the "conditionofpossibility" for...
explores "Brocka's filmic engagement and critique of the Marcos politics provide the conditionofpossibility that allows for the dictatorship to cohere and...
is the conditionofpossibilityof experience), and transcendental naturalism: the thesis that "everything is explicable according to the laws of nature...
the stated event or condition occurs. The interest will revert to the grantor or the heirs of the grantor. Normally, a possibilityof reverter follows a...
1974. Tipler showed in his 1974 article "Rotating Cylinders and the Possibilityof Global Causality Violation" that in a spacetime containing a "sufficiently...
perpetrator of the 2012 Aurora theater shooting, received 12 consecutive life sentences plus 3,318 years without the possibilityof parole. In the case of mass...
there. If none of the above conditions hold, then the test fails. (Such a condition is not vacuous; there are functions that satisfy none of the first three...
student of Pococke. Philosophus Autodidactus also developed the themes of empiricism, tabula rasa, nature versus nurture, conditionofpossibility, materialism...