Pre-postulate a priori intuition: Revisiting Kant's account of space

I first recognize the tension between the epistemological position of transcendental idealism put forward by Kant on the one hand and the incompatibility between consistent nonEuclidean geometries and Kant's account of geometry and its relation to space on the other. I point to the strength of Kant's transcendental idealism and highlight Kant's central theses concerning space and geometry: (1) the original representation of space is an a priori intuition and the form of all outer intuition; (2) the propositions of pure geometry are synthetic a priori; (3) the a priori intuition of space makes possible geometry as a synthetic a priori science. Michael Friedman points to the conflicts between Kant's theses and nonEuclidean geometries arguing that the polyadic logic of modern mathematics characterizes mathematics as analytic and obviates Kant's appeal to the intuition of space.;Defenses of Kant in light of these incompatibilities must address the construction and syntheticity of a priori geometry, but without treating Euclidean and nonEuclidean geometries equally these defenses remain incomplete; they defend a particular Kantian thesis but in so doing compromise another. To defend the unity of the three theses we must separate the claims of the theses from any specific geometry. This requires an elimination of postulates as a necessary characterization of the a priori intuition of space. On my view, any particular kind of outer attention directing does not constitute the original representation of space. As a result, this postulate independent interpretation paves the way for interpretations that offer further insight into the structure of Kant's critical philosophy. Similarly, this interpretation makes viable the use of the Kantian mechanism for structuralism in mathematics.