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 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." (Critique of Pure Reason, 1787) 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 in the Critique of Pure Reason reduces to "How are synthetic a priori judgments possible?" (Critique of Pure Reason, 1787). If we can answer that question, then we can determine the possibility, legitimacy, and range of all metaphysical claims.

RI KI JC1 Term 2/Weeks 5-6 Sources of Knowledge 3 Kant's Copernican Revolution: Mind Making Nature Kant's answer to the question is complicated, but his conclusion is that a number of synthetic a priori claims, like those from geometry and the natural sciences, are true because of the structure of the mind that knows them. "Every event must have a cause" cannot be proven by experience, but experience is impossible without it because it describes the way the mind must necessarily order its representations. We can understand Kant's argument again by considering his predecessors. According to the Rationalist and Empiricist traditions, the mind is passive either because it finds itself possessing innate, well-formed ideas ready for analysis, or because it receives ideas of objects into a kind of empty theater, or blank slate. Kant's crucial insight here is to argue that experience of a world as we have it is only possible if the mind provides a systematic structuring of its representations. This structuring is below the level of, or logically prior to, the mental representations that the Empiricists and Rationalists analyzed. Their epistemological and metaphysical theories could not adequately explain the sort of judgments or experience we have because they only considered the results of the mind's interaction with the world, not the nature of the mind's contribution. Kant's methodological innovation was to employ what he calls a transcendental argument to prove synthetic a priori claims. Typically, a transcendental argument attempts to prove a conclusion about the necessary structure of knowledge on the basis of an incontrovertible mental act. Kant argues in the Refutation of Material Idealism that "There are objects that exist in space and time outside of me," (Critique of Pure Reason, 1787) which cannot be proven by a priori or a posteriori methods, is a necessary condition of the possibility of being aware of one's own existence. It would not be possible to be aware of myself as existing, he says, without presupposing the existing of something permanent outside of me to distinguish myself from. I am aware of myself as existing. Therefore, there is something permanent outside of me. This argument is one of many transcendental arguments that Kant gives that focuses on the contribution that the mind itself makes to its experience. These arguments lead Kant to conclude that the Empiricists' assertion that experience is the source of all our ideas. It must be the mind's structuring, Kant argues, that makes experience possible. If there are features of experience that the mind brings to objects rat