Kant's Revolution: Defending Synthetic A Priori Judgments

1. Chapter 3: KnowledgeKant’s Revolution Introducing Philosophy, 10th edition Robert C. Solomon, Kathleen Higgins, and Clancy Martin

2. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) • German philosopher, probably the greatest philosopher since Plato and Aristotle • Lived his entire life in a small town in East Prussia (Konigsburg); professor at the university there for more than thirty years • Never married; neighbors said his habits were so regular they could set their watches by him (a later German poet said, “It is hard to write about Kant’s life, for he had no life”)

3. Yet, from a safe distance, Kant was one of the most persistent defenders of the French Revolution and, in philosophy, created no less a revolution himself • His philosophical system, embodied in three huge volumes called Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Critique of Practical Reason (1788), and Critique of Judgment (1790), changed the thinking of philosophers as much as the revolution changed France

4. His central thesis was the defense of what he called synthetic a priori judgments (and their moral and religious equivalents) by showing their necessity for all human experience • In this way, he escaped from Hume’s skepticism and avoided the dead-end intuitionism of his rational predecessors

5. Structure of Truth and the World • Kant rejects the distinction between language and the world and thus between us and Truth • He believes that our “ideas”—our concepts and language—“set up” the world • The possibility of experience and truth depends upon certain discoverable and definable mental structures

6. Constitution of Experience • We constitute our own experience in the sense that we provide the rules and structures according to which we experience objects as governed by the laws of nature and the relations of cause and effect • We cannot understand reality outside of the way that we constitute it through our basic concepts, which he calls categories: the basic rules of the human mind

7. Kant attempts to prove that these concepts are necessary and a priori • Truth is not a correspondence between ideas and reality but rather our own system of rules by which we constitute our reality

8. Four Key Ideas (A Truth “Policy”) • Those claims that are rules by which we must interpret our experiences are true—necessarily true • Those claims that contradict rules by which we must interpret our experience are false—necessarily false • Those that are not rules by which we must interpret our experience are either analytic, contingently true, or contingently false • Finally, those claims that cannot be decided by appeal to the rules of our experience and make no difference to our experience are to be rejected as possible topics of knowledge

9. Explaining the Rules • Knowledge is only knowledge of our experience, and we can be certain of the rules of our own experience • Reality is the world of experience as we constitute it through the concepts of our understanding; the world is real because we constitute it as the way that it is • Thus, a belief can be true, necessarily true, if it is one of those rules that we impose to constitute our experience

10. Problems: Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814) • German philosopher, student of Immanuel Kant, who turned Kant’s “transcendental” philosophy into a practically oriented and relativistic “ethical idealism” • He taught that “the kind of philosophy a man chooses depends upon the kind of man he is” • One of the first German nationalists

11. The evaluation of different realities depends on practical consequences. The Truth, because of Kant, seems to be destined to be replaced by many truths • Kant rejects this idea because he believes that there is only one possible set of rules and therefore only one way of constituting our experience

12. Kant calls this argument a transcendental deduction • The argument says that we can infer, from various statements that we believe, the basic rules of our experience • Example of a transcendental argument: “In order for x to obtain, we must presuppose y; x obtains; Therefore, y”