RI Kant notes updated 2023

RI KI JC1 Term 2/Weeks 5-6 Sources of Knowledge 1 Kant on Rationalism and Empiricism: The "Copernican Revolution" in Philosophy The philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) is sometimes called the “Copernican revolution of philosophy” to emphasize its novelty and huge importance. Kant synthesized (brought together) rationalism and empiricism. After Kant, the old debate between rationalists and empiricists ended, and epistemology went in a new direction. After Kant, no discussion of reality or knowledge could take place without awareness of the role of the human mind in constructing reality and knowledge. Summary of Rationalism The paradigm rationalist philosophers are Plato (ancient); Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz (modern). 1. Don’t trust senses, since they sometimes deceive; and since the “knowledge” they provide is inferior (because it changes). 2. Reason alone can provide knowledge. Math is the paradigm of real knowledge. 3. There are innate ideas, e.g., Plato’s Forms, or Descartes’ concepts of self, substance, and identity. 4. The self is real and discernable through immediate intellectual intuition (cogito ergo sum). 5. Moral notions are comfortably grounded in an objective standard external to self — in God, or Forms. Kant says rationalists are sort of right about (3) and (4) above; wrong about (1) and (2). Kant would like (5) to be true. Summary of Empiricism The paradigm empiricist philosophers are Aristotle (ancient); Locke, Berkeley, Hume (modern). 1. Senses are the primary, or only, source of knowledge of world. Psychological atomism. 2. Mathematics deals only with relations of ideas (tautologies); gives no knowledge of world. 3. No innate ideas (though Berkeley accepts Cartesian self). General or complex ideas are derived by abstraction from simple ones (conceptualism). 4. Hume — there’s no immediate intellectual intuition of self. The concept of “Self” is not supported by sensations either.

RI KI JC1 Term 2/Weeks 5-6 Sources of Knowledge 2 5. Hume — no sensations support the notion of necessary connections between causes and effects, or the notion that the future will resemble the past. 6. Hume — “is” does not imply “ought”. Source of morality is feeling. Kant thinks empiricism is on the right track re (1), sort of right re (2), wrong re (3), (4), (5), and (6). Kant on Rationalism and Empiricism: Kant's Answers to his Predecessors Kant's answer to the problems generated by the rationalist and empiricist traditions 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 oc