«Cosa significa realmente che il tempo è la forma del senso interno?»

This paper tries to explain the meaning of the Kantian thesis that time is the form of the internal sense, referring to the general horizon of transcendental philosophy, but working on a very limited choice of passages and themes pertinent to our topic. It confirms that transcendental idealism is understandable and consistent only as a theory which regards the subjective conditions of the possibility of an intentional consciousness of reality, i.e. as a theory of the empirical realism. As a first outcome, it proposes the view that the Kantian conception of time does not put immediate and binding constraints to the choice of one of the positions on the nature and the reality or unreality of time in the current debate, since the latter refers to a physical concept of time and not to a transcendental one. Finally it suggests, through an example of Kant and the words of Cassirer, that, if the synthesis advances toward more and more general forms of unity (so much in Kant’s opinion as in the progress of science), also the empirical conception of time can change and move away from the immediate conditions of the experience of things in space and time. This doesn’t imply a refutation of the transcendental idealism and of the empirical realism of time, which identify instead an horizon, wherein the construction of the scientific image of the world can take place.