(For my MCCC Western Philosophy Students)
Kant
QUESTIONS
1.
Explain
how Hume Gave Kant a wake-up call.
a. Cause
and effect do not exist in the empirical world.
b. Cause
and effect are things in the mind.
2.
Explain
Kant’s “Copernican Revolution.”
a. Instead
of the mind conforming to sense impressions, Kant sees sense impressions
conforming to the mind.
3.
Explain
Kant’s distinction between matter and form.
a. The
“form” of space and time is there prior to sense experience.
Hume’s
attack on metaphysics woke Kant up.
Hume placed cause and effect as merely an idea, and not
as a reality of the external world.
Hume said that ideas that have their origin in experience
(e.g., green, warm, solid) can go no further than experience.
And ideas that don’t (e.g.,
cause) are mere illusions.
This makes sense if:
1) We
are acquainted only with the ideas in our experience.
2) Objects
are thought to exist independently of our experience.
3) Knowledge
requires that we find a correspondence between ideas and objects.
BUT… what if this has it exactly backwards? That’s
what Kant discovered.
Kant’s
Copernican Revolution
Copernicus placed the sun, rather than the earth, at the
center of the universe.
“Copernicus showed that when
we think we are observing the motion of the sun around the earth, what we see
is in fact the consequence of the rotation of our own earth.” (276)
Kant makes a revolutionary suggestion.
It has
been assumed that all our knowledge must conform to objects.
That is, it is assumed that
objects are simply there, completely
independent of our apprehension of them.
To know them our beliefs
must be brought to correspond to
these independently existing things.
Kant’s Copernican revolution does for the mind what
Copernicus did for the sense of vision.
“Instead of asking how our
knowledge can conform to its objects, we must start from the supposition that
objects must conform to our knowledge.” (276)
AGAIN: Instead of the mind
conforming to objects outside the mind, Kant said that objects conform to the
mind.
This
means that there is a priori
knowledge.
There is knowledge prior to sense experience. This means metaphysics is possible.
E.g., cause and effect.
“All our knowledge begins with experience, but
Kant insists that it does not follow that all of it arises from experience.”
(276)
There is knowledge that we
have independently of experience. This is a
priori knowledge.
“The marks of a
priori knowledge are necessity and universality.” (276)
Unlike Hume, Kant maintains
that the statement ‘every change has a cause’ expresses a judgment which is
strictly necessary and strictly universal.
1. It’s
necessary – we necessarily view experience in terms of cause and effect.
2. It’s
universal – cause and effect applies to everything, and not just certain individual
sense impressions.
Therefore causality does not
arise from experience.
Kant’s
Distinction Between Matter and Form
Kant “makes a distinction between the matter and the form
of our experience:
The matter
is what derives directly from sensation.
The form given by our
understanding is what permits the chaos of appearance to take on order.” (Kenny,
279)
Kant is only interested in
the “form.”
The “form” is there prior to or before sense experience.
Summary:
“Human knowledge arises from the combined operation of the senses and the
understanding. Through the senses, objects are given to us; through
understanding, they are made thinkable. The structure of our senses determines the content of our experience; the
constitution of our understanding determines its structure. The philosopher has
to study both sense and understanding. Kant calls the former study ‘the
transcendental aesthetic’ and the latter ‘the transcendental logic’.” (278)
Space
and Time
Kant says: “In the course of this investigation it will
be found that there are two pure forms of sensory awareness, serving as
principles of a priori knowledge,
namely, space and time.” (278)
Space and time are not
derived from empirical experience, but are transcendental (lying at the base of
experience).
Therefore space and time are
a priori.
In other words, Kant asserts
that space (and time) are not objective, self-subsisting realities, but
subjective requirements of our human sensory-cognitive faculties to which all things must conform.
Space and time serve as
indispensable tools that arrange and systemize the images of the objects
imported by our sensory organs. The raw data supplied by our eyes and ears
would be useless if our minds didn't have space and time to make sense of it
all.
