Saron Tekie

Philosophy II Honors
Period 4
*Pages 341 - 355
Kant

Immanuel Kant faced two challenges: the way he was to reconcile the claims of science to
certain and genuine knowledge of the world with the claim of philosophy that experience could never
give rise to such knowledge and the way he was to reconcile the claim of religion was morally free with
the claim of science that nature was entirely determined by necessary laws.

According to Kant, man not only knows the phenomenal but that any metaphysical conclusions
concerning the nature of the universe that went beyond his experience were unfounded. In Kant’s
Critique of Pure Reason, Kant tried to resolve the fundamental dichotomy between empiricism and
rationalism. Kant argues that the blank slate model of the mind is insufficient to explain the beliefs
about objects that we have; some components of our beliefs must be brought by the mind to
experience. Kant expresses deep dissatisfaction with the idealistic and seemingly skeptical results of the
empirical lines of inquiry. Kant agreed with Hume in that the certain laws of Euclidean geometry could
not have been derived from empirical observation. He believed that we must recognize that we cannot
know things as they are in themselves and that our knowledge is subject to the conditions of our
experience. In terms of human cognition, Kant theorized that the mind does not conform to things;
rather, things conform to the mind. He used the fact that all content could be derived from experience
was drawn from mathematical judgments, the ideas of space and time remained in order to reach this
conclusion. Space and time can’t be said to be a characteristic of the world itself because they are
contributed in the act of human observation. Kant argued that that old division between a priori truths
and a posteriori truths employed by both empiricism and rationalism was insufficient to describe the
sort of metaphysical claims that were under dispute. Priori knowledge is independent of experience
while posterior knowledge is dependent on experience/empirical evidence. An analysis of knowledge
also requires a distinction between synthetic and analytic truths. A synthetic a priori claim must be true
without appealing to experience, yet the predicate is not logically contained within the subject.
Synthetic priori claims, Kant argues, demand an entirely different kind of proof than those required for
analytic priori claims or synthetic 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.

A Copernican Revolution refers to a major shift in a view/belief. In Kant’s Copernican Revolution,

he argues a number of synthetic a priori claims are true because of the structure of the mind that knows
them. Kant thought that Berkeley and Hume identified at least part of the mind’s a priori contribution to
experience with the list of claims that they said were unsubstantiated on empirical grounds. Kant argues
that a philosophical investigation into the nature of the external world must be as much an inquiry into
the features and activity of the mind that knows it. On the Lockean view, mental content is given to the
mind by the objects in the world. Their properties migrate into the mind, revealing the true nature of
objects. Similarly, Copernicus recognized that the movement of the stars cannot be explained by making
them revolve around the observer; it is the observer that must be revolving. Kant argued that we must
reformulate the way we think about our relationship to objects. It is the mind itself which gives objects
at least some of their characteristics because they must conform to its structure and conceptual
capacities. Kant states that the appropriate starting place for any philosophical inquiry into knowledge is
with the mind that can have that knowledge.

The Decline of Metaphysics

Kant’s epochal distinctions impacted the coming of modern philosophy. Kant makes a critical
turn toward the mind of the knower. Kant has rejected the dogmatic metaphysics of the Rationalists
that promises supersensible knowledge. He argued that Empiricism faces serious limitations that
sensibility is the understanding’s means of accessing objects. His transcendental method will allow him
to analyze the metaphysical requirements of the empirical method without venturing into speculative
and ungrounded metaphysics.

Kant’s argument that the mind makes an a priori contribution to experiences is one of the
central focuses of metaphysics. Kant rejects the claim that there are complete propositions etched on
the fabric of the mind. He argues that the mind provides a formal structuring that allows for the
conjoining of concepts into judgments, but that structuring itself has no content. The mind is devoid of
content until interaction with the world actuates these formal constraints. The mind possesses a priori
templates for judgments, not a priori judgments.

He also states that the reason synthetic a priori judgments are possible in geometry is because
space is an a priori form of sensibility. Kant argues that we cannot experience objects without being able
to represent them spatially. It is impossible to grasp an object as an object unless we delineate the
region of space it occupies. Without a spatial representation, our sensations are undifferentiated and we
cannot ascribe properties to particular objects. Time, Kant argues, is also necessary as a form or
condition of our intuitions of objects. The idea of time itself cannot be gathered from experience
because the succession and simultaneity of objects would be impossible to represent if we did not
already possess the capacity to represent objects in time. There is no all –encompassing, transcendent
or intrinsic “deeper” order in the universe to which the human mind could legitimately lay claim.