Philosophers since Descartes have questioned whether our experience reflects a reality outside of our minds. In this instalment of our idealism series, in partnership with the Essentia Foundation, Paul Franks argues that Kant’s approach harmonizes far better with our ordinary experience of the world, and with Einstein’s relativistic physics, than Berkeley’s immaterialist view.  For all I know on the basis of my current experience alone, I could be living in the matrix instead of inhabiting the mind-independent world. My experience could seem just as it seems right now, but it could be caused by something other than the mind-independent world in which I take myself to perceive and act. This familiar thought may be motivated by consideration of dreams, as it was for Descartes, or by more contemporary reflections on virtual reality. From this thought, many philosophers ha…

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