  A growing number of commentators have, in recent years, noted the important
affinities in the views of Immanuel Kant and Niels Bohr. While these
commentators are correct, the picture they present of the connections between
Bohr and Kant is painted in broad strokes; it is open to the criticism that
these affinities are merely superficial. In this essay, I provide a closer,
structural, analysis of both Bohr's and Kant's views that makes these
connections more explicit. In particular, I demonstrate the similarities
between Bohr's argument, on the one hand, that neither the wave nor the
particle description of atomic phenomena pick out an object in the ordinary
sense of the word, and Kant's requirement, on the other hand, that both
'mathematical' (having to do with magnitude) and 'dynamical' (having to do with
an object's interaction with other objects) principles must be applicable to
appearances in order for us to determine them as objects of experience. I argue
that Bohr's 'Complementarity interpretation' of quantum mechanics, which views
atomic objects as idealizations, and which licenses the repeal of the principle
of causality for the domain of atomic physics, is perfectly compatible with,
and indeed follows naturally from a broadly Kantian epistemological framework.
