Kant: Philosophy in an Hour

Paul Strathern

• Publisher: HarperPress
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9780007466153
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Philosophy for busy people. Read a succinct account of the philosophy of Kant in just one hour.

Further Information

A Dialogue on Kant and Metaphysics

QUESTION: What is Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason about?

ANSWER: Metaphysics.

Q: What exactly is metaphysics?

A: This word began as a mistake and has ended up by being regarded as a mistake. In between times it was the main topic of philosophy.

Q: This still doesn’t answer the question. What precisely does metaphysics mean?

A: Nothing at all, according to most modern philosophers.

Q: Well, what did it originally mean?

A: This word was first used to refer to certain philosophical works of Aristotle – the ones in his collected works that came after his great work on physics. They became known as the “beyond Physics” works, which in Greek was meta-physics.

Q: But this still doesn’t tell me what it means.

A: In these works “beyond Physics,” Aristotle dealt with “the science of things transcending what is physical or natural.”

Q: And what does that mean?

A: It is the science that deals with the first theoretical principles over and above the physical world. These are the principles that govern our knowledge of that same physical world. In other words, metaphysics deals with whatever transcends the physical world we experience.

Q: But how do we know there is anything beyond the physical world we experience?

A: We don’t. Which is why most modern philosophers dismiss such metaphysics as a mistake.

Q: But Kant didn’t?

A: Kant was determined to create a new metaphysics. Before him, Hume had arrived at much the same conclusion as those modern philosophers. Hume thought he had destroyed the possibility of metaphysics.

Q: How?

A: By doubting everything that he couldn’t confirm from his own experience. This extreme skepticism ruled out all kinds of things that humanity had believed in through the centuries but had never actually experienced.

Q: Such as?

A: God, for instance.

Q: But what Hume said didn’t seem to make much difference. People still went on believing in God.

A: Yes, but it was not increasingly understood that they did this through a leap of faith, rather than as a result of direct experience or rational argument.

Q: So Hume’s “disproof” of metaphysics didn’t make any difference at all?

A: In fact, it made a huge difference. Especially to scientists and philosophers.

Q: How?

A: In ruling out everything except what we can verify through experience, Hume ruled out a lot more than God. More important for the scientists and philosophers, he ruled out causality.

Q: How?

A: According to Hume, all we know from experience is that one thing follows another. We can never know that one thing causes another. We cannot go beyond our experience and say that. We never actually experience one thing causing another, only one thing following another.

Q: So?

A: This strikes at the heart of all our scientific knowledge. According to Hume, science based on causality is metaphysical, not empirical. It can never be verified. And verification is the very basis of our knowledge. Likewise philosophy. According to Hume, we can never prove the statements of philosophy, unless they are a result of direct experience.

Q: Such as?

A: Such as the statement, “This apple is green.”

Q: But that means philosophy can say practically nothing.

A: Precisely. And this is the extreme difficulty that Kant tried to overcome in his philosophy.

Q: How?

A: He tried to show that despite Hume’s devastating skepticism, it was still possible to build a metaphysics. This would be the basis for a universal and logically necessary form of knowledge – one that would remain impervious to Hume’s skepticism. Kant first set this down in his Critique of Pure Reason.

Q: So Kant’s metaphysics was an attempt at some kind of ultimate science which guarantees the truth of our knowledge?

A: Precisely.

Q: And how did he set about this?

A: Kant put forward what he called his “critical philosophy.” This undertook a profound analysis of epistemology – a study of the very basis on which our knowledge rests. According to Kant, we make certain judgments that are indispensable to all knowledge. These judgments he classified as “synthetic a priori.” By synthetic he meant they were not analytic, and the knowledge they contained was not implied in the original concept. For instance, “The ball is round” is an analytic statement because the concept “roundness” is contained within the concept “ball.” But “The ball is shiny” is a synthetic judgment. It says something more about the ball than is contained in the original concept, in the same way as an empirical statement. By a priori, Kant meant judgments that are necessary and universal. They had to be true prior to any experience, and are made by the use of reason alone. Unlike judgments made as a result of experience, they are not particular and contingent. That is, they don’t just apply to one instance and have no logical necessity – such as statements like “This horse has won the Derby” and “That horse is brown.”

Like any scientific judgment, these synthetic a priori statements must be undeniable and universally true. In other words, they must have the same force and strength as an analytic statement, though they are synthetic. And they must be applicable to experience while remaining prior to it.

Kant’s basic question was, “How are synthetic a priori statements possible?” He now applied this question to mathematics, physics, and metaphysics. According to Kant, mathematics deals with space and time. Kant argued that, contrary to appearances, space and time are in fact a priori – that is, they are not part of our experience but a necessary prior condition of that experience. We could have no experience without these “forms of our sensibility.”

Kant then goes on to argue that statements of physics are a priori judgments. They classify empirical judgments (and are thus synthetic) but use concepts that are prior to experience (and are thus a priori). These concepts, or “categories of our understanding” as Kant called them, are much like space and time in mathematics. The “categories” are the essential framework of our knowledge. They consist of such things as quality, quantity, relation (including causality), and modality (such as existence or nonexistence). They are not part of our experience, yet we could not have any experience without them.

When we come to metaphysics, however, the opposite is true. Metaphysics has nothing to do with experience (as it is “beyond physics”). This means we cannot apply “categories” such as quantity and quality to metaphysics, because these are the framework of our knowledge of experience. Thus metaphysics excludes itself from the realm of synthetic a priori judgments and has no scientific basis. So if we take a metaphysical concept, such as God, we cannot make any scientific (or verifiable) statement about him, because any categories we might apply are relevant only to experience. Thus to talk of the existence (or nonexistence) of God is to misapply the categories.

In this way Kant dismissed metaphysics. Yet in doing so he built up his own alternative metaphysical system. The way Kant saw them, the “forms of our understanding” (space and time), as well as the “categories of our understanding” (including existence, necessity, and so on), are undeniably metaphysical. We may consider space and existence to be “out there” in the physics of our experience, but Kant did not. So his argument against metaphysics applies equally to them. We can make no synthetic a priori statements about them. They are not scientific, they are not analytic, and they are not logically necessary: they are me...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Kant’s Life and Works
• Further Information
• About the Author
• Copyright
• About the Publisher