RI Kant a short summary 2023

Short summary of Kant Kant wishes to address the problems faced by the R+E – knowledge, if it is to be absolutely certain, is minimal and restricted to Analytic A Priori. But AAPs are not meaningful knowledge since they are tautologies. Empiricism cannot give us knowledge because of Hume’s attack on Causation which discredited Newtonian science. (Not to mention the problem with the corrigibility of our beliefs regarding SD) So if there is to be meaningful knowledge, then it is to be found in Synthetic A Priori because a priori gives us necessity and universality whereas synthetic gives us new knowledge by the combining of 2 non-necessary concepts. Kant then offers us one body of knowledge that we all do think is knowledge – math – AND argues that math is SAP. So if math is SAP, then SAP, and thus meaningful knowledge, is possible. This is especially important in the realm of metaphysics and science which Hume had thrown doubt on with the Problem of Induction and Constant Conjunction. For Kant, metaphysical knowledge and science had to be knowledge that is necessary and universal (hence his need to ensure the a priori-ness of such claims). [Note: for Kant, it is the AXIOMS themselves that are SAP, not the move from axioms to theorem – that happens via deduction and thus is analytic -> nothing new is gotten from the move from axioms to theorems. Instead, the new knowledge comes from the axioms themselves when 2 hitherto unrelated concepts are put together like “shortest distance” and “straight line”.] Since SAP has been shown to be possible, Kant can then proceed to show how we obtain knowledge – it is via his Copernican turn in philosophy. Here, instead of proving conclusively that his epistemology is correct, Kant makes an IBE by ASSUMING that the mind is an active constituter of knowledge and then proceeding to show that if we were to assume so, we are able to recover Newtonian science from Humean scepticism by making causality (among other things) a necessary part of our experience. Thus, we can arrive at meaningful metaphysical knowledge that is certain because now, we can once again use causality to predict how things will turn out, for example. Yet how is Math both the result of R+E AND still be SAP? Well, even for AAPs like “a bachelor is an unmarried man”, one can only arrive at knowledge of this proposition via knowing what the object/subject is – in this case, a bachelor. But we can only know what the term, bachelor, means by ‘marrying’ the concept with experience – be it by learning about it in a dictionary or from someone else or encountering a real bachelor; otherwise, it will be, as Kant says, “empty” (concepts without intuitions are empty) or “noise” (intuitions without concepts are noise). Yet the proposition/definition of a bachelor is STILL a priori because the JUSTIFICATION for the proposition is a priori and not a posteriori – we do not need to prove that all bachelors are unmarried men by