My Final Essay on Kant’s Critique
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These two formulations of a causal necessity in observation of alterations in nature and a slight difference which some claim they represent will not be the subject of my attention here. I will rather focus on the proof and how it shows the necessity and the nature of Kants causality opposed to Humes concept of merely arbitrary one.
First Kant reminds that “All change (succession) of appearances is only alteration; for the arising or perishing of substance are not alterations of it, since the concept of alteration presupposes one and the same subject as existing with two opposed determinations, and thus as persisting” (B233).
Then, like Hume, he describes the observation of the process of alteration and grants: ”I am … only conscious that my imagination places one state before and the other after, not that one state precedes the other in the object; or, in other words, through the mere perception the objective relation of the appearances that are succeeding one another remains undetermined”.
Then he attempts to show what it means to be determined the actual determination of this cognition:
“Now in order for this to be cognized as determined, the relation between the two states must be thought in such a way that it is thereby necessarily determined which of them must be placed before and which after rather than vice versa. The concept, however, which caries a necessity of synthetic unity with it can only be a pure concept of understanding, which does not lie in the perception, and that is here the concept of the relation of cause and effect, the former of which determines the latter in time, as its consequence, and not as something that could merely precede in the imagination (or not even be perceived at all)”. (Remember, Hume said about two billiard balls, “I dont perceive the cause betwixt them”?) Therefore it is only because we subject the sequence of the appearances and thus all alterations to the law of causality that experience itself… is possible; consequently they themselves, as objects of experience, are possible only in accordance with this law”(B234).
Further Kant expands on the subject and gives two contrasting examples of perception with and without causal determination. His perception of the ships position downstream invariably follows the perception of its position upstream, and it is impossible that in apprehension of this appearance for the ship to be perceived otherwise. The necessity is present in this case of causal apperception. In the case of observing the house he is not obliged to observe parts of it in a certain predetermined order, because there is no causality involved here. Could Humes theory account for such a difference?
I believe that Kant succeeded in his criticism of Humes theory, which was also successfully criticized by Thomas Reid in his Common Sense philosophy.
10. Explain Kant's "Copernican Revolution" in Metaphysics. Make clear what the problems were that led Kant to think such a "revolution" was required, and how Kant's new "transcendental" metaphysics was supposed to solve those problems.
There were two major problems in metaphysics for Kant: the possibility of knowledge (synthetic and a priori) that transcends the bounds of experience and the problem of antinomies. Kant deals with both problems by reversing the usual way of viewing cognition and instead of thinking of our knowledge as conforming to a realm of objects, we think of objects as conforming to our way of knowing. Kant thinks that our knowledge is limited to phenomena, while noumena are thinkable but not actually knowable. The possibility of synthetic a priori knowledge of objects is explicable, because such objects must necessarily conform to the conditions under which they can become objects for us. The contradiction of antinomies arises from considering the spatio-temporal world as it were as it were the world of things-in-themselves. On Kants account, when we reject that consideration, it can be seen that the phenomenal world is neither finite nor infinite and causal determinism (in nature) is reconcilable with the freedom needed for morality (we considered as noumena).
11. Kant asserts that "concepts without intuitions are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind." [A51=B75] What does he mean by this? Give some examples of "empty" concepts and how they have been illegitimately employed by other philosophers. Are there possible legitimate uses for any empty concepts?
Our cognition for Kant arises from two fundamental sources in the mind, the reception of representations (the receptivity of impressions) and the faculty for cognizing the object by means of these representations (spontaneity of concepts): through the former the object is given to us, through the latter it is thought in relation of that representation (receptivity-sensibility and spontaneity-of- cognition-understanding). Intuition is the way by which we are affected by objects. Understanding is the faculty for thinking of objects. Without sensibility we have no object, and without understanding none is thought. That is why thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind. The understanding is not capable of intuiting anything and the senses are not capable of thinking anything.
The concept of a walking fish is empty (unless we actually see something like this), like a concept of an angel (if we did not see him/her ourselves or dismiss the testimonies of others, who would be witnesses). The concept of God, even manifested in human forms of alternative forms described in thousands of books of many nations (if not all of them) is an empty concept, because Kant did not see those manifestations himself, and all miraculous reports are labeled as simpleminded peoples delusions, or those of perpetrators, and cannot be considered as sensible. The possibility of totality representing itself in a limited form to conform with the limitations of human understanding is not considered by Kant as a philosophical issue. The regular empirical criterion is too strong. Humes future can easily be under no obligation to mimic the past, but God should be definitely under obligation to manifest Himself to everybody and anytime, to have the right even to be considered as also an empirical reality. The soul too is not the object of intuition if it is considered only as transcendentally thinkable. The pure intuition of self without sense perception of any kind as well as thinking of any kind cannot be legitimate, because Kant does not experience anything of the kind and neither his colleagues do. I think that creates a problem (of illusory and legitimate concepts) which has to be dealt with in future. May be the concepts Kant considered as paralogisms are not really that. May be human intuition can reach farther than Kant expected. May be the Greek word empireia (observation) can be legitimately used not just in the realm of physical senses. But the detailed discussion on that is not the subject of this paper and should be treated separately, in a book with a name like Transcending the Ordinary Limitations of Observable ( including the possibility and logic of pure intuition of truth).
12. "The rainbow in a sunny shower may be called a mere appearance..." (A45=B63,). Explain very carefully what Kant is saying here, and what he means by "mere appearance". Does Kant think that "Roses are red, violets are blue" is false?
To answer this question we have to consider a preceding (B62), because in (A45/B63) Kant attempts to illustrate his objection to the Leibnizian-Wolfian philosophy concerning the nature and origin of our cognitions. He thinks that the distinction between sensibility and the intellect is not merely logical, but transcendental, does not concern merely the form of distinctness or indistinctness, but the origin and content. Through sensibility we do not cognize things in themselves merely indistinctly, but rather not at all. Without our subjective constitution, the represented object can not be encountered, for it is just this subjective constitution that determines its form as appearance.
In the beginning of A45 Kant describes the origin of the illusion occurring when we try to apply our ordinary distinction between sense in general and contingent appearances of this sense to the essentially transcendent sphere of noumena and to the immanent phenomena. That is how our transcendental distinction gets “lost, and we believe ourselves to cognize things in themselves, though we have nothing to do with anything except appearances (in the world of sense), even in the deepest research into its objects”. So it is by mistake “we would certainly call a rainbow a mere appearance in a sun-shower, but would call this rain the thing in itself”. It would be correct only if we understood “the latter concept in a merely physical sense”.
About roses and violets and their colors the judgment is not false as long as we understand that all we actually know of those belong to the sphere of phenomena and not noumena, but if we think of them as noumena, it is false to claim that we know anything more about them that they exist somehow affecting our sensibility, which we construe as flowers and their colors.
14. Explain what Kant's Transcendental Deduction of the Categories tries to prove, and, at least roughly, how the argument goes. Make clear, in passing, what Kant means by"deduction", "synthesis", and by "transcendental unity of appercep