Question : Why does Kant say that existence is not a predicate?
(2010)
Answer : First, Kant never says that existence is not a predicate, which is an absurd claim, but that existence is not a REAL predicate. A predicate is that part of a statement that states information to the subject term; predicates inform us of the properties a thing has. Thus to say that existence is not a real predicate is to say that the statement’s subject term is not really informed by the presence of the predicate term; that is, the predicate “exists” is not conferring real existence on the subject term. This comes up in Kant’s analysis of the Ontological Argument (though this idea was anticipated by Gaunilo in his arguments against Anselm’s version back in the 11th century). Consider the following statement: “God exists.” Kant thinks the real existence of a thing, be it God or anything else, is presupposed in that thing’s having any properties at all, since anything having properties (which are determined by predicates) must exist in order to have them. Thus, to say that God exists is to assert a thing with properties God that also possess a further property existence. But since having any properties at all is only possible if the thing having those properties exists, it follows that existence is not an additional property of the thing, but presupposed. Hence, existence is not a predicate. It is important to note that many philosophers and theologians find Kant’s position to be problematic. One rebut that is interesting is G.E. Moore’s paper “Is Existence a Predicate?”
Question : Kant’s objections against the ontological argument for the existence of God.
(2009)
Answer : An ontological argument for the existence of God attempts the method of a priori proof, which uses intuition and reason alone. The ontological argument has been a controversial topic in philosophy. Many philosophers, including Gaunilo of Marmoutiers, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell, have openly criticized it. The argument examines the concept of God, and states that if we can conceive of the greatest possible being, then it must exist. The argument is often criticized as committing a bare assertion fallacy, as it offers no supportive premise other than qualities inherent to the unproven statement. This is also called a circular argument, because the premise relies on the conclusion, which in turn relies on the premise. The differences among the argument’s principal versions arise mainly from using different concepts of God as the starting point. Anselm, for example, starts with the notion of God as a being of which no greater can be conceived, while Descartes starts with the notion of God as being totally perfect, and Leibniz with something having all “perfections”. Immanuel Kant put forward a key refutation of the ontological argument in the Critique of Pure Reason. It is explicitly directed primarily against Descartes but also against Leibniz.
Kant first questions the intelligibility of the very concept of an absolutely necessary being, considering “whether I am still thinking anything in the concept of the unconditionally necessary, or perhaps rather nothing at all”. He examines one way of understanding the concept, which looks to examples of necessary propositions, e.g. “a triangle has three angles”. But he rejects this account for two related reasons. First, no absolutely necessary judgments will ever yield an absolute necessity for things and their existence: e.g., “a triangle has three angles” yields only the conditioned necessity that, if a triangle exists, then necessarily three angles exist. Thus even if we defined a concept of a thing X so that “X exists” were a necessary judgment, all that would follow is the conditioned necessity that, if X exists, then necessarily X exists. Second, since contradictions arise only when we keep the subject and cancel the predicate (e.g., keeping God and canceling omnipotence), and since judgments of nonexistence cancel both the subject and the predicate, therefore no judgment of nonexistence can involve a contradiction. Kant concludes that there is a strong general case against the intelligibility of the concept of an absolutely necessary being. Second, Kant argues that if we include existence in the definition of something, then asserting that it exists is a tautology.
If we say that existence is part of the definition of God, in other words an analytic judgment, then we are simply repeating ourselves in asserting that God exists. Third, Kant argues that “‘being’ is obviously not a real predicate” and cannot be part of the concept of something. That is, to say that something is or exists is not to say something about a concept, but rather indicates that there is an object that corresponds to the concept, and “the object, as it actually exists, is not analytically contained in my concept, but is added to my concept”. But, fourth, Kant argues that the concept of God is in any case not the concept of one particular object of sense among others but rather an “object of pure thought”, of something that by definition exists outside the field of experience and of nature.
Question : Nature of Synthetic a-priori judgment.
(2007)
Answer : In the Introduction to the Critique, Kant discusses the generally accepted classes of knowledge using the terms a priori, empirical (which is his preferred term for a posteriori), analytic, and synthetic. Prior to the Critique it was generally accepted that a priori was coincident with analytic and a posteriori (Kant’s empirical”) was coincident with synthetic. By careful definition and discussion of the terms, Kant argues that we should abandon this notion of coextension, and recognise the necessary existence of synthetic a priori judgment; a novel classification.
Kant defines a prior knowledge as that kind of knowledge which is held independently of all experience, whereas emperical knowledge is possible only through experience. He further qualifies a priori with the adjective pure when the proposition in question contains no empirical elements, citing “every alteration has its cause” as a proposition which is a priori but not pureon the grounds that “alteration” is an empirical concept. Only a priori concepts, says Kant, can have properties like strict necessity and strict universality since these properties could never be ascertained empirically. All mathematical propositions, for example, are a priori. Similarly, Kant distinguishes between analytic, and synthetic judgments, describing analytic judgments as those in which the subject overtly or covertly contains (or excludes) the predicate, such that the truth of the proposition is determined entirely by (the meanings of) the terms themselves. Synthetic judgments are those which are not analytic, meaning that the terms alone are insufficient to determine the truth of the proposition. As examples, Kant suggests, “all bodies are extended” as an analytic judgment, and “all bodies are heavy” as a synthetic judgment. Regardless of how compelling (or not) the examples are, the analytic/synthetic distinction itself was not controversial (or even novel) at the time.
It seems necessary that analytic judgments be a priori; once a judgment has been recognised as analytic, surely no reference to experience is needed, as the truth of the proposition can be determined simply by examining the terms. But do synthetic a priori judgments exist, and when (if at all) are we actually justified in calling them “knowledge”? Indeed, they do exist; it’s not unreasonable to say that all the really “interesting” judgments are exactly of this kind. “Every event has a cause” is an example one that is immediately recognisable as the kind of judgment accepted as knowledge by the rationalists (although they failed to recognise it as synthetic). But the antithesis, “no event has a cause”, is also a synthetic a priori judgment: the fact that I can phrase it negatively without producing a contradictory or meaningless statement is sufficient to demonstrate that it is synthetic, and its claims to universality and necessity preclude it from being determined empirically.
Question : How is synthetic a-priori judgement possible.
(2007)
Answer : Kant’s answer to the problems generated by the two traditions mentioned above changed the face of philosophy. First, Kant argued that that old division between a priori truths and a posteriori truths employed by both camps was insufficient to describe the sort of metaphysical claims that were under dispute. An analysis of knowledge also requires a distinction between synthetic and analytic truths. In an analytic claim, the predicate is contained within the subject. In the claim, “Every body occupies space,” the property of occupying space is revealed in an analysis of what it means to be a body. The subject of a synthetic claim, however, does not contain the predicate. In, “This tree is 120 feet tall,” the concepts are synthesized or brought together to form a new claim that is not contained in any of the individual concepts.
The Empiricists had not been able to prove synthetic a priori claims like “Every event must have a cause,” because they had conflated “synthetic” and “a posteriori” as well as “analytic” and “a priori.” Then they had assumed that the two resulting categories were exhaustive. A synthetic a priori claim, Kant argues, is one that must be true without appealing to experience, yet the predicate is not logically contained within the subject, so it is no surprise that the Empiricists failed to produce the sought after justification. The Rationalists had similarly conflated the four terms and mistakenly proceeded as if claims like, “The self is a simple substance,” could be proven analytically and a priori. Synthetic a priori claims, Kant argues, demand an entirely different kind of proof than those required for analytic, a priori claims or synthetic, a posteriori claims. Indications for how to proceed, Kant says, can be found in the examples of synthetic a priori claims in natural science and mathematics, specifically geometry. Claims like Newton’s, “the quantity of matter is always preserved,” and the geometer’s claim, “the angles of a triangle always add up to 180 degrees” are known a priori, but they cannot be known merely from an analysis of the concepts of matter or triangle.
We must “go outside and beyond the concept joining to it a priori in thought something which I have not thought in it.” A synthetic a priori claim constructs upon and adds to what is contained analytically in a concept without appealing to experience. So if we are to solve the problems generated by Empiricism and Rationalism, the central question of metaphysics is “How are synthetic a priori judgments possible?” If we can answer that question, then we can determine the possibility, legitimacy, and range of all metaphysical claims.Question : Explain Kant’s criticism of the proofs for the existence of God.
(2006)
Answer : Kant locates the order of nature in reason. Reason does for the understanding what understanding does for the manifold of intuition - “the understanding is an object for reason, just as sensibility is for the understanding.” Reason’s regulative capacity renders the unconditioned totality of objects systematic. There are three ideas of reason: self, world and God. God is the Ideal of Reason, whose concept aims at complete determination in accordance with a priori rules. Accordingly it thinks for itself an object which it regards as being completely determinable in accordance with principles.
Kant argues that there are three, and only three, possible ways in which speculative reason can argue for the existence of God, characterized as the Ideal of Reason. But all fail to prove God’s existence. Reason, according to Kant’s analysis, can attempt to prove God’s existence by either an empirical or a transcendental path, both of which involve going beyond the scope of reason to the transcendental concept. Consequently, Kant first discusses the transcendental proof of God’s existence, arguing that the other proofs ultimately depend on it. The ontological argument moves from idea to existence, arguing that the essence of a supreme and perfect being involves existence. Kant argues that this type of proof fails to recognize that existence is not a predicate, and that to call it so is to claim that there is a quality in the world corresponding to it.
Kant’s criticism of the ontological argument is not original. Kant himself, in two pre-critical works, The One Possible Basis for a Demonstration of the Existence of God, and Nova Dilucidatio, puts forth the same argument. The difference between the argument found in these earlier works and the Critique is that in the Critique, Kant denies the possibility of any a priori proof of God’s existence from the side of reason. In the pre-critical works, Kant, after rejecting the ontological argument, puts forth his own synthetic a priori proof of God, a proof centring on the notions of possibility and actuality.
Question : The significance of Kant’s distinction between phenomena and noumena.
(2004)
Answer : According to Kant, it is vital always to distinguish between the distinct realms of real and empirical. Phenomena are the appearances, which constitute our experience; noumena are the (presumed) things themselves, which constitute reality. All of our synthetic a priori judgments apply only to the phenomenal realm, not the noumenal. (It is only at this level, with respect to what we can experience, that we are justified in imposing the structure of our concepts onto the objects of our knowledge.) Since the thing in itself would by definition be entirely independent of our experience of it, we are utterly ignorant of the noumenal realm.
Thus, on Kant’s view, the most fundamental laws of nature, like the truths of mathematics, are knowable precisely because they make no effort to describe the world as it really is but rather prescribe the structure of the world as we experience it. By applying the pure forms of sensible intuition and the pure concepts of the understanding, we achieve a systematic view of the phenomenal realm but learn nothing of the noumenal realm. Math and science are certainly true of the phenomena; only metaphysics claims to instruct us about the noumena. Kant now introduces the terms “phenomena” and “noumena.” The distinction made in the Aesthetic between appearances and things in themselves yields the notion of “beings of sense,” phenomena. An appearance is a thing considered with respect to the way in which it is intuited. If we classify an appearance as a special kind of object, then we consider it as a phenomenon.
When we abstract from the way in which objects are intuited, they remains the notion of the “character that they have in themselves”. Since appearances are thought of as special kinds of objects, there is a temptation to think that there is a contrasting kind of object, a being of the understanding or noumenon. Such an object would either have the character that objects of the senses have in themselves, or even not be an object of the senses at all. Now if we can frame a notion of “an object in itself” in this way, we are tempted to think that we can frame concepts of an object in it. These could only be the categories, since the categories are the only concepts provided by the pure understanding. But if the categories apply to the noumenon, then they determine it. And this is a mistake, because the notion of noumenon is completely indeterminate. It is a negative notion, formed by abstraction from the only thing that would allow us to determine it. A positive notion a noumenon would be that of a determinate object, and such an object would have to be given in an intellectual intuition to the understanding itself. Since intellectual intuition “lies absolutely outside our cognitive power,” Kant concludes that there is no basis for applying categories to noumena. “Hence what is called noumenon by us must be meant as such only in the negative signification”. We can still think of “objects as such” by abstraction from intuition, but this is not to think of “beings of the understanding.”
Question : How is synthetic a-priori judgement possible.
(2003)
Answer : Kant’s answer to the problems generated by the two traditions mentioned above changed the face of philosophy. First, Kant argued that that old division between a priori truths and a posteriori truths employed by both camps was insufficient to describe the sort of metaphysical claims that were under dispute. An analysis of knowledge also requires a distinction between synthetic and analytic truths. In an analytic claim, the predicate is contained within the subject. In the claim, “Every body occupies space,” the property of occupying space is revealed in an analysis of what it means to be a body. The subject of a synthetic claim, however, does not contain the predicate. In, “This tree is 120 feet tall,” the concepts are synthesized or brought together to form a new claim that is not contained in any of the individual concepts.
The Empiricists had not been able to prove synthetic a priori claims like “Every event must have a cause,” because they had conflated “synthetic” and “a posteriori” as well as “analytic” and “a priori.” Then they had assumed that the two resulting categories were exhaustive. A synthetic a priori claim, Kant argues, is one that must be true without appealing to experience, yet the predicate is not logically contained within the subject, so it is no surprise that the Empiricists failed to produce the sought after justification. The Rationalists had similarly conflated the four terms and mistakenly proceeded as if claims like, “The self is a simple substance,” could be proven analytically and a priori. Synthetic a priori claims, Kant argues, demand an entirely different kind of proof than those required for analytic, a priori claims or synthetic, a posteriori claims. Indications for how to proceed, Kant says, can be found in the examples of synthetic a priori claims in natural science and mathematics, specifically geometry. Claims like Newton’s, “the quantity of matter is always preserved,” and the geometer’s claim, “the angles of a triangle always add up to 180 degrees” are known a priori, but they cannot be known merely from an analysis of the concepts of matter or triangle.
We must “go outside and beyond the concept joining to it a priori in thought something which I have not thought in it.” A synthetic a priori claim constructs upon and adds to what is contained analytically in a concept without appealing to experience. So if we are to solve the problems generated by Empiricism and Rationalism, the central question of metaphysics is “How are synthetic a priori judgments possible?” If we can answer that question, then we can determine the possibility, legitimacy, and range of all metaphysical claims.
Question : Kant’s “critical philosophy” of is a reconciliation between Rationalism and Empiricism. Elucidate the remark fully and bring out the consequence of such reconciliation for the possibility of traditional metaphysics.
(2002)
Answer : The philosophy of Immanuel Kant, a watershed figure who forever altered the course of philosophical thinking in the Western tradition. Long after his thorough indoctrination into the quasi-scholastic German appreciation of the metaphysical systems Kant said, it was a careful reading of David Hume that “interrupted my dogmatic slumbers and gave my investigations in the field of speculative philosophy a quite new direction.” Having appreciated the full force of such arguments, Kant supposed that the only adequate response would be a “Copernican Revolution” in philosophy, a recognition that the appearance of the external world depends in some measure upon the position and movement of its observers. This central idea became the basis for his life-long project of developing a critical philosophy that could withstand them.
Kant’s aim was to move beyond the traditional dichotomy between rationalism and empiricism. The rationalist had tried to show that we can understand the world by careful use of reason; this guarantees the indubitability of our knowledge but leaves serious questions about its practical content. The empiricists on the other hand, had argued that all of our knowledge must be firmly grounded in experience; practical content is thus secured, but it turns out that we can be certain of very little. Both approaches have failed, Kant supposed, because both are premised on the same mistaken assumption. Progress in philosophy, according to Kant, requires that we frame the epistemological problem in an entirely different way. The crucial question is not how we can bring ourselves to understand the world, but how the world comes to be understood by us. Instead of trying, by reason or experience, to make our concepts match the nature of objects, Kant held, we must allow the structure of our concepts shape our experience of objects.
This is the purpose of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason to show how reason determines the conditions under which experience and knowledge are possible. In the Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysic Kant presented the central themes of the first Critique in a somewhat different manner, starting from instances in which we do appear to have achieved knowledge and asking under what conditions each case becomes possible. So he began by carefully drawing a pair of crucial distinctions among the judgments we do actually make. The first distinction separates a priori from a posteriori judgments by reference to the origin of our knowledge of them. A priori judgments are based upon reason alone, independently of all sensory experience, and therefore apply with strict universality. A posteriori judgments, on the other hand, must be grounded upon experience and are consequently limited and uncertain in their application to specific cases.
Thus, this distinction also marks the difference traditionally noted in logic between necessary and contingent truths. But Kant also made a less familiar distinction between analytic and synthetic judgements, according to the information conveyed as their content. Analytic judgements are those whose predicates are wholly contained in their subjects; since they add nothing to our concept of the subject, such judgments are purely explicative and can be deduced from the principle of non-contradiction. Synthetic judgments, on the other hand, are those whose predicates are wholly distinct from their subjects, to which they must be shown to relate because of some real connection external to the concepts themselves. Hence, synthetic judgments are genuinely informative but require justification by reference to some outside principle.
Kant supposed that previous philosophers had failed to differentiate properly between these two distinctions. Both Leibniz and Hume had made just one distinction, between matters of fact based on sensory experience and the uninformative truths of pure reason. In fact, Kant held the two distinctions are not entirely coextensive; we need at least to consider all four of their logically possible combinations:
Question : Kant’s conception of time and space.
(2001)
Answer : Trying to reconcile the metaphysics of Newton and Leibniz, Kant proposed that space and time exist at one level of reality but not at another. Kant proposes that space and time do not really exist outside of us but are “forms of intuition,” i.e. conditions of perception, imposed by our own minds. This enables him to reconcile Newton and Leibniz: agreeing with Newton that space is absolute and real for objects we perceive, i.e. for phenomenal objects open to science, but agreeing with Leibniz that space is nothing in terms of objects as they exist apart from us, i.e. with things in themselves. Kant does not believe that the axioms of geometry are self-evident or true in any logically necessary way. They are logically “synthetic,” which means that they may be denied without contradiction. That is a significant claim because it would mean that consistent non-Euclidean geometries are possible. Nevertheless, Kant did believe that the axioms of geometry are known “a priori,” i.e. that they are known to be true prior to all experience, because Euclidean axioms depend on our “pure intuition” of space, namely space as we are able to imaginatively visualize it.
Only if non-Euclidean space can be visualized would Kant be wrong. Kant is not wrong. Those who think he is can only cite models and projections of non-Euclidean geometries as visualizations. Kant does not think we can know, or even imagine, the universe as either finite or infinite, in space or in time, because space and time are only forms of perception and cannot be imagined or visualized as absolute wholes. The universe, as the place of things in themselves, is not in space or in time and so is neither finite nor infinite in space or in time. Thus there cannot be an a priori, rational or metaphysical, cosmology. Kant’s Antinomies are intended to show that contradictory metaphysical absolutes can be argued and justified with equal force, meaning that neither can actually be proven. It can be argued however, that Einstein answered Kant by proposing a non-Euclidean (Riemannian) universe that is finite but unbounded.
Question : State and examine Kant’s criticism of the proofs for the existence of God.
(2000)
Answer : According to Kant reason does for the understanding what understanding does for the manifold of intuition - “the understanding is an object for reason, just as sensibility is for the understanding.” Reason’s regulative capacity renders the unconditioned totality of objects systematic. There are three ideas of reason: self, world and God. God is the Ideal of Reason, whose concept aims at complete determination in accordance with a priori rules. Accordingly it thinks for itself an object which it regards as being completely determinable in accordance with principles, Kant argues that there are three, and only three, possible ways in which speculative reason can argue for the existence of God, characterized as the Ideal of Reason. But all fail to prove God’s existence. Reason, according to Kant’s analysis, can attempt to prove God’s existence by either an empirical or a transcendental path, both of which involve going beyond the scope of reason to the transcendental concept. Consequently, Kant first discusses the transcendental proof of God’s existence, arguing that the other proofs ultimately depend on it.
The ontological argument moves from idea to existence, arguing that the essence of a supreme and perfect being involves existence. Kant argues that this type of proof fails to recognize that existence is not a predicate, and that to call it so is to claim that there is a quality in the world corresponding to it. Kant’s criticism of the ontological argument is not original. Kant himself, in two pre-critical works, puts forth the same argument. The difference between the argument found in these earlier works and the Critique is that in the Critique, Kant denies the possibility of any a priori proof of God’s existence from the side of reason. In the pre-critical works, Kant, after rejecting the ontological argument, puts forth his own synthetic a priori proof of God, a proof centring on the notions of possibility and actuality. Despite Kant’s insistence that cognition is limited to possible experience, he does not reject the notion of the thing in itself, that is, of something beyond cognition. He argues that the concept if a noumenon that is, of a thing which is not to be thought as object of the senses but as a thing in itself, solely through a pure understanding is not in any way contradictory. We cannot assert of sensibility that it is the sole possible kind of intuition.
The possibility of such a noumenon, however, is incomprehensible because a thing-in-itself, by definition, would lie outside the domain of sensation. This does not mean that the understanding is limited to sensation. Rather, the understanding itself limits sensation by positing something beyond it. At the same time, though, the understanding recognizes that it cannot cognize any thing-in-itself through the categories. Noumena lack the principles that would make their application possible, since there is no way for them to be given in experience. Kant’s rejection of all possible proofs the existence of God and his moving God out of the sphere of ontology rules out the traditional ground of a systematic universe. He therefore must provide some other explanation of how we perceive the world as systematic and purposive. Some principle of systematicity is necessary to account for the interconnectedness or coherence we perceive in nature. Kant explains systematicity in terms of epistemology. For Kant, systematicity is the creative organization of our cognition of nature in accordance with certain regulative principles. These principles are the ideas of reason. Kant moves from systematicity to purposive ness. He argues that saying that all things are part of a system is tantamount to saying that all things have a purpose within that system. To see things as systematic, for Kant, is to see them as in “seemingly purposive arrangements.” A move cannot be made from purposive order to God, because God has no matter of intuition, that is, God is not ‘given’ to sensibility and so does not conform to the transcendental conditions. But there is an analogical correspondence between systematicity and God.
They are logically equivalent and “it must be a matter of complete indifference to us, when we say we perceive unity, whether we say that God in his wisdom has willed it to be so, or that nature has wisely arranged it thus.” From a philosophical point of view, God as creator corresponds to system. The principle of God is not needed to explain nature. All that is needed is the principle of systematicity. Analogy between teleology and theology gives meaning or content to our idea of God. But to designate what the relationship is between God and the world in itself is completely outside the conditions of possible experience. Kant claims that we need the idea of systematic unity, that we “must” assume it. This is, in Kant’s eyes, the strongest possible argument for God - not for the existence of God in the constitutive or formal sense, as no such proof is possible, but for the meaningfulness of the idea of God in the cognitive sphere.
Kant defines God as simply the idea (in his technical sense of idea) or analogical image of systematic unity. As an existent, ‘God’ is a natural illusion. We can have no cognition of God or an underlying substratum because such concepts transcend the conditions of possible experience. In the phenomenal realm, God or an individual being containing “the sum-total of all possibilities” or all predicates of things in general can be characterized only negatively. God is not an object and as such can be cognized only by analogy with nature. It is by means of this analogy that there remains a concept of the Supreme Being sufficiently determined for us, though we have left out everything that could determine it absolutely and it itself. This regulative principle can be seen as a theological dimension only in the limited sense that we can and must think of nature as if it were designed by God.
Kant moves God as a principle of explanation out of the empirical world. An a priori regulative principle is all that is required to explain systematicity. But the very first step which we take beyond the world of sense obliges us, in seeking for such new cognition, to begin with an enquiry into absolutely necessary being, and to derive from the concepts of it the concepts of all things in so far as they are purely intelligible. This preserves the concept of God as a regulative principle or model. In the Critique, Kant allows the concept of God to remain meaningful in the context of cognition, but only as an investigative fiction.
Question : Kant’s ideas of reason.
(1999)
Answer : The faculty of reason has two employments. Theoretical reason, Kant says, makes it possible to cognize what is. But reason ought its practical employment in determining what to be as well. This distinction roughly corresponds to the two philosophical enterprises of metaphysics and ethics. Reason’s practical use is manifest in the regulative function of certain concepts that we must think with regard to the world, even though we can have no knowledge of them. Kant believes that, “Human reason is by its nature architectonic.” That is, reason thinks of all cognitions as belonging to a unified and organized system. Reason is our faculty of making inferences and of identifying the grounds behind every truth. It allows us to move from the particular and contingent to the global and universal. I infer that “Caius is mortal” from the fact that “Caius is a man” and the universal claim, “All men are mortal.” In this fashion, reason seeks higher and higher levels of generality in order to explain the way things are.
The entire empirical world, Kant argues, must be conceived of by reason as causally necessitated (as we saw in the Analogies). We must connect, “one state with a previous state upon which the state follows according to a rule.” Each cause, and each cause’s cause, and each additional ascending cause must itself have a cause. Reason generates this hierarchy that combines to provide the mind with a conception of a whole system of nature. Kant believes that it is part of the function of reason to strive for a complete, determinate understanding of the natural world. But our analysis of theoretical reason has made it clear that we can never have knowledge of the totality of things because we cannot have the requisite sensations of the totality, hence one of the necessary conditions of knowledge is not met. Nevertheless, reason seeks a state of rest from the regression of conditioned, empirical judgments in some unconditioned ground that can complete the series. Reason’s structure pushes us to accept certain ideas of reason that allow completion of its striving for unity. By denying the possibility of knowledge of these ideas, yet arguing for their role in the system of reason, Kant had to, “annul knowledge in order to make room for faith.”
Question : Kant reconciles rationalism with empiricism by superseding them.
(1997)
Answer : In order to understand Kant’s position, we must understand the philosophical background that he was reacting to. There are two major historical movements in the early modern period of philosophy that had a significant impact on Kant: Empiricism and Rationalism. Kant argues that both the method and the content of these philosophers’ arguments contain serious flaws. A central epistemological problem for philosophers in both movements was determining how we can escape from within the confines of the human mind and the immediately knowable content of our own thoughts to acquire knowledge of the world outside of us.
The Empiricists sought to accomplish this through the senses and a posteriori reasoning. The Rationalists attempted to use a priori reasoning to build the necessary bridge. A posteriori reasoning depends upon experience or contingent events in the world to provide us with information. A priori reasoning, in contrast, does not depend upon experience to inform it. Kant believed that this twofold distinction in kinds of knowledge was inadequate to the task of understanding metaphysics for reasons. Empiricists, such as Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, argued that human knowledge originates in our sensations. Locke, for instance, was a representative realist about the external world and placed great confidence in the ability of the senses to inform us of the properties that empirical objects really have in them. The Rationalists, principally Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz, approached the problems of human knowledge from another angle. They hoped to escape the epistemological confines of the mind by constructing knowledge of the external world, the self, the soul, God, ethics, and science out of the simplest, indubitable ideas possessed innately by the mind. Kant had also come to doubt the claims of the Rationalists because of what he called contradictory, but validly proven pairs of claims that reason is compelled toward. From the basic principles that the Rationalists held, it is possible, Kant argues, to prove conflicting claims like, “The world has a beginning in time and is limited as regards space,” and “The world has no beginning and no limits in space.” Kant claims that antinomies like this one reveal fundamental methodological and metaphysical mistakes in the rationalist project. The contradictory claims could both be proven because they both shared the mistaken metaphysical assumption that we can have knowledge of things as they are in themselves, independent of the conditions of our experience of them.
The Antinomies can be resolved, Kant argues, if we understand the proper function and domain of the various faculties that contribute to produce knowledge. We must recognize that we cannot know things as they are in themselves and that our knowledge is subject to the conditions of our experience. The Rationalist project was doomed to failure because it did not take note of the contribution that our faculty of reason makes to our experience of objects. Their a priori analysis of our ideas could inform us about the content of our ideas, but it could not give a coherent demonstration of metaphysical truths about the external world, the self, the soul, God, and so on.
Question : What do you understand by Kant’s claim that space and time are forms of pure intuition? Explain the arguments he gives in support of his position in this regard.
(1996)
Answer : Kant offered another theory of Transcendental Aesthetic where there were two pure intuitions of space and time, necessary for any experience even to begin, because all possible experiences occur in space and in certain sequences (time). There were also empirical intuitions, “but all our intuition (of the kind) is nothing but the representation of appearance; the things that we intuit are not in themselves what we intuit them to be, nor are their relations so constituted in themselves as they appear to us: and if we remove our own subject or even only the subjective constitution of the senses in general, then all constitution, all relation of objects in space and time, indeed space and time themselves would disappear, and as appearances they cannot exist in themselves, but only in us”. For all empirical cognitions we need immediate intuitions in space and concepts which are built in the frame of time. And still, all those are about mere appearances, the nature of the latter being objective. Now, Kant felt that it was necessary to defend his foundational judgments about space:
And he concluded: ”Therefore the original representation of space is an a priori intuition, not a concept” He also defended his judgments about time:
Space is not a posteriori in our cognition, because we need it already in place to have any empirical cognition (which happens in space and never otherwise) at all. Time is also a necessary precondition for any perception of change: first state A then state B. When we judge first-then, already we are using the foundation (time) which allows us to do so. Space and time are not analytic concepts, because we do not deduce them from any other concept, but simply accept axiomatically as a necessary ground for all empirical cognition.
Kant’s contention that space and time are (l) intuitions, rather than concepts, (2) a priori, rather than a posteriori. (In what sense, exactly, are they supposed to be “prior” to objects of experience?)
We intuit inner and outer space in our inner and outer experiences, in imagination and contemplation of mental and physical objects. We think (about things) and percept them invariably in space, and their transformations and interactions consequentially (in time). They are prior to objects in the sense that we already need them to perceive objects, which always possess their characteristics and do not take those intuitions away with them when we dismiss objects.
Transcendental ideality of S & T means that those are not objects, not their appearances, but rather conditions (deduced by pure reason) of all appearances (objects of cognition). They are necessary for our understanding of our experiences of objects at all.
Moreover Kant says: “I understand by a transcendental exposition the explanation of a concept as a principle from which insight into the possibility of other synthetic a priori cognitions can be gained. For this aim it is required 1) that such cognitions actually flow from a given concept, and 2) that these cognitions are only possible under the presupposition of a given way of explaining this concept.” He thinks that other concepts of space do not satisfy these conditions, and his does. Using the example of Geometry, he argues that it must originally be intuition; for from a mere concept no propositions can be drawn that go beyond the concept, which however happens in geometry. Geometrical propositions are all apodictic. Hence, space must be not an empirical intuition. It has its seat merely in the subject, as its formal constitution for being affected by objects and thereby acquiring immediate representation, i.e., intuition, of them, thus only as the form of outer sense in general. Kant thinks that his “explanation alone makes the possibility of geometry as a synthetic a priori cognition comprehensible.” So, his theory solves the problem of how geometry is possible, while others (he believes) don’t.
Question : Kart’s doctrine of Transcendental Deduction.
(1995)
Answer : Transcendental deduction is a doctrine founded by Kant in the eighteenth century. The doctrine maintains that human experience of things consists of how they appear to us implying fundamental subject based component, rather than being an activity that directly comprehends the things as they are in and of themselves. Despite influencing the course of sub segment German philosophy dramatically, exactly how to interpret this concept was a. subject of some debate among of 20th century philosopher. Kant first describes it in his Critique of Pure Reason and distinguished his view from contemporary views of realism and idealism, but philosophers do not agree how sharply Kant differs from each of these position. But perhaps the best way to approach transcended deduction (idealism) is by looking at Kant’s account of how we intuit object, and that task demands looking at his accounts of space and time. Before Kant, some thinkers such as Leibniz had decided that time and space was not thing but only the relations among things. Other thinkers including Newton maintained that space and time were real thing or substances. Kant was aware of this problem with both these position. Kant argued that empirical reality involves transiently ideal and pure and time and space are forms of human intuition and they can only be proved valid for things as they are in themselves. The salient element here is that time and space rather than being real things-in-themselves or empirical appearances are the very forms of intuition by which we must perceive objects. They are hence neither to be considered properties that we may attribute to objects in perceiving them, not substantial entities of themselves. They are in that sense subjective. Yet, necessary preconditions of any given object insofar as this object is concerned an appearance and not a thing-in-itself. Kant’s observations from a logical and philosophical point of view are supported in modern thought by some empirical findings that go beyond the. Science available to Kant in his time, is based on what might be called a Kantian ideology, and yet supports Kant’s conditions on the grounds of other discoveries.
