“The problem of how a judgment can be synthetic and a priori, then, presents itself to Kant as the problem of how two concepts, neither of which includes the other, can be connected in a way which does not rest upon past experience and is not vulnerable to future experience.”
Page 23 of ‘Kant’s Analytic‘ by Jonathan Bennett
The Prospect has a good article here on Parmenides (no longer free). Stanford’s page here.
“By these arguments, Parmenides arrives at his picture of the world as a single, undifferentiated, unchanging unity. Needless to say, scholars have disagreed over exactly what he meant. They have questioned whether he meant that the universe was one thing, or only that it was undifferentiated.”
Here is a quote from this abstract:
“According to Hume, the idea of a persisting, self-identical object, distinct from our impressions of it, and the idea of a duration of time, the mere passage of time without change, are mutually supporting “fictions”. Each rests upon a “mistake”, the commingling of “qualities of the imagination” or “impressions of reflection” with “external” impressions (perceptions), and, strictly speaking, we are conceptually and epistemically entitled to neither.“
and also:
“Unlike Hume, however, he (Kant) undertakes to establish the legitimacy or objective validity of the schematized category of substance and, correspondingly, of the representation of time as a formal unity with duration as one of its modes.“
Photo found here.
The Prospect has a good article here on Parmenides (no longer free). Stanford’s page here.
“By these arguments, Parmenides arrives at his picture of the world as a single, undifferentiated, unchanging unity. Needless to say, scholars have disagreed over exactly what he meant. They have questioned whether he meant that the universe was one thing, or only that it was undifferentiated.”
Here is a quote from this abstract:
“According to Hume, the idea of a persisting, self-identical object, distinct from our impressions of it, and the idea of a duration of time, the mere passage of time without change, are mutually supporting “fictions”. Each rests upon a “mistake”, the commingling of “qualities of the imagination” or “impressions of reflection” with “external” impressions (perceptions), and, strictly speaking, we are conceptually and epistemically entitled to neither.“
and also:
“Unlike Hume, however, he (Kant) undertakes to establish the legitimacy or objective validity of the schematized category of substance and, correspondingly, of the representation of time as a formal unity with duration as one of its modes.“
Photo found here.
Full post here. (link may not last)
Perhaps Hawking is guilty of a little hubris in weighing in with such certitude on the God question?
Here’s a quote of his Hawking’s posted previously:
“His [Kant’s}argument for the thesis was that if the universe did not have a beginning, there would be an infinite period of time before any event, which he considered absurd. The argument for the antithesis was that if the universe had a beginning, there would be an infinite period of time before it, so why should the universe begin at any one particular time? In fact, his cases for both the thesis and the antithesis are really the same argument. They are both based on his unspoken assumption that time continues back forever, whether or not the universe had existed forever.”
-Stephen Hawking-A Brief History of Time
Not so much that time continues back forever, but that it’s impossible to conceive of a point outside of time. Kant wished to argue that both time and space are not necessarily inherent characteristics of the universe (or any object at all…especially those objects with which we have no direct experience, like a black hole, though according to Kant we can have knowledge of objects) but rather time and space are part of our onboard apparatus, and preconditions for us have intelligible experience in the first place (unlike as is assumed in calculus, for example). He constructed a vast metaphysics to make his point in the hopes of putting metaphysics on the same ground as the sciences (the Enlightenment was going strong around him, and he latched onto Newton’s laws especially). It’s questionable as to whether or not he succeeded, but fascinating to think about nonetheless.
Also On This Site: Roger Scruton In The American Spectator Via A & L Daily: Farewell To Judgment…From YouTube: Roger Scruton On Religious Freedom, Islam & Atheism…
Via The University Of British Colombia: Kant-Summary Of Essential Points…From Bryan Magee’s Talking Philosophy On Youtube: Geoffrey Warnock On Kant…Sunday Quotation: From Jonathan Bennett On Kant
Via Wikipedia-Quine’s position denying the analytic/synthetic distinction is summarized as follows:
It is obvious that truth in general depends on both language and extralinguistic fact. … Thus one is tempted to suppose in general that the truth of a statement is somehow analyzable into a linguistic component and a factual component. Given this supposition, it next seems reasonable that in some statements the factual component should be null; and these are the analytic statements. But, for all its a priori reasonableness, a boundary between analytic and synthetic statements simply has not been drawn. That there is such a distinction to be drawn at all is an unempirical dogma of empiricists, a metaphysical article of faith.[13]
— Willard v. O. Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”, p. 64
As a pretty strong materialist, Quine rejects a priori synthetic statements as necessary, as well as mind/body duality problems, regarding the ‘why?’ questions as fundamentally unanswerable. At least such questions are not for philosophy to posit nor answer, anyways.
There simply doesn’t exist a category of knowledge we humans possess that doesn’t have its origins in our experience.
For Quine, it seems, philosophy is more abstract and general than the sciences (asking questions about questions, clarifying), but it it can’t hope, as Kant hoped, to be placed onto the same ground as the sciences.
Yet, as a Youtube commenter points out: Aren’t there still abstract entities beyond our material existences on Quine’s view (not souls, not God, not ideal forms), but rather just numbers and number sets naturally existing, and perhaps waiting to be discovered?
A link posing a re-purposed Quinian idealism:
ABSTRACT. Quine’s web of belief is influenced by, and encompasses, the entire scope of reality. It is established with a minimalist vocabulary, and is an efficient and integral vehicle toward his metaphysical [a]nd unambiguous ontological commitment, which leads to a somewhat bleak but rigorous membership in the world. Physical objects exhaust the domain of substance, and man becomes a mere four dimensional physical object. All states of mind are psychologized, or reduced to their impact on behaviour. Effectively, idealist criticisms have not simply been taken note of, but idealism has been hijacked, and the result is a new kind of empiricism and an original view of the world.
Thanks, reader: ‘Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the pessimistic philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer. Guests include A.C. Grayling, Béatrice Han-Pile and Chris Janaway.’
It’s all pretty much will, but how he arrives at such a metaphysics gets some treatment.
As posted:
‘The separation between so-called duties of law and duties of virtue, more correctly between justice and philanthropy, which was effected by Kant in so forced and unnatural a manner, results here entirely of itself and thereby testifies to the correctness of the principle. It is the natural, unmistakable, and sharp boundary between the negative and positive, between doing no injury and helping.’
Schopenhauer, Arthur. On The Basis Of Morality.
“The problem of how a judgment can be synthetic and a priori, then, presents itself to Kant as the problem of how two concepts, neither of which includes the other, can be connected in a way which does not rest upon past experience and is not vulnerable to future experience.”
Page 23 of ‘Kant’s Analytic‘ by Jonathan Bennett
For a friend:
“The problem of how a judgment can be synthetic and a priori, then, presents itself to Kant as the problem of how two concepts, neither of which includes the other, can be connected in a way which does not rest upon past experience and is not vulnerable to future experience.”
Page 23 of ‘Kant’s Analytic‘ by Jonathan Bennett.
On Locke at the Stanford Encyclopedia Of Philosophy:
‘Some philosophers before Locke had suggested that it would be good to find the limits of the Understanding, but what Locke does is to carry out this project in detail. In the four books of the Essay Locke considers the sources and nature of human knowledge. Book I argues that we have no innate knowledge. (In this he resembles Berkeley and Hume, and differs from Descartes and Leibniz.) So, at birth, the human mind is a sort of blank slate on which experience writes.’
On Charles Sanders Peirce. Full entry here:
The previous point must be tempered with the fact that Peirce increasingly became a philosopher with broad and deep sympathies for both transcendental idealism and absolute idealism. His Kantian affinities are simpler and easier to understand than his Hegelian leanings. Having rejected a great deal in Kant, Peirce nevertheless shared with Charles Renouvier the view that Kant’s (quasi-)concept of the Ding an sich can play no role whatsoever in philosophy or in science other than the role that Kant ultimately assigned to it, viz. the role of a Grenzbegriff: a boundary-concept, or, perhaps a bit more accurately, a limiting concept. A supposed “reality” that is “outside” of every logical possibility of empirical or logical interaction with “it” can play no direct role in the sciences. Science can deal only with phenomena, that is to say, only with what can “appear” somehow in experience. All scientific concepts must somehow be traceable back to phenomenological roots. Thus, even when Peirce calls himself a “realist” or is called by others a “realist,” it must be kept in mind that Peirce was always a realist of the Kantian “empirical” sort and not a Kantian “transcendental realist.” His realism is similar to what Hilary Putnam has called “internal realism.” (As was said, Peirce was also a realist in quite another sense of he word: he was a realist or an anti-nominalist in the medieval sense.)
The previous point must be tempered with the fact that Peirce increasingly became a philosopher with broad and deep sympathies for both transcendental idealism and absolute idealism. His Kantian affinities are simpler and easier to understand than his Hegelian leanings. Having rejected a great deal in Kant, Peirce nevertheless shared with Charles Renouvier the view that Kant’s (quasi-)concept of the Ding an sich can play no role whatsoever in philosophy or in science other than the role that Kant ultimately assigned to it, viz. the role of a Grenzbegriff: a boundary-concept, or, perhaps a bit more accurately, a limiting concept. A supposed “reality” that is “outside” of every logical possibility of empirical or logical interaction with “it” can play no direct role in the sciences. Science can deal only with phenomena, that is to say, only with what can “appear” somehow in experience. All scientific concepts must somehow be traceable back to phenomenological roots. Thus, even when Peirce calls himself a “realist” or is called by others a “realist,” it must be kept in mind that Peirce was always a realist of the Kantian “empirical” sort and not a Kantian “transcendental realist.” His realism is similar to what Hilary Putnam has called “internal realism.” (As was said, Peirce was also a realist in quite another sense of he word: he was a realist or an anti-nominalist in the medieval sense.)
Related On This Site: Via The University Of British Colombia: Kant-Summary Of Essential Points…From Bryan Magee’s Talking Philosophy On Youtube: Geoffrey Warnock On Kant…Sunday Quotation: From Jonathan Bennett On Kant…Via YouTube: “Cosmic Journeys-Is The Universe Infinite?”
Hilary Putnam On The Philosophy Of Science: Bryan Magee’s Talking Philosophy On YouTube
Towards the end of the video, it’s suggested that the physical sciences have now separated themselves from the binds of metaphysics (or as I presume, the binds of certain kinds of metaphysics: Aristotelian, in the case of Galileo and cosmology in the 16th century and onwards).
We have perhaps returned to open questions of infinity as posed by the pre-Socratics, and freed such high-end mathematical thinking from many a metaphysician, or natural philosopher, or theologian; thus establishing natural science as a confluence and continuance of Enlightenment development. Onward we go. Of course this view, while possibly accurate, relies on its own assumptions.
As sent in by a reader: Kelly Ross makes the Kantian metaphysical argument here:
“Kant does not think we can know, or even imagine, the universe as either finite or infinite, in space or in time, because space and time are only forms of perception and cannot be imagined or visualized as absolute wholes. The universe, as the place of things in themselves, is not in space or in time and so is neither finite nor infinite in space or in time. Thus there cannot be an a priori, rational or metaphysical, cosmology.”
And while this may have freed Kant from the metaphysical disputes of his day, especially both Rationalist and Empiricist as he synthesized both, what do the current thinkers about such matters stand to gain by being tied into Kantian metaphysics (his Copernican revolution)?
Addition: As I’ve discussed with many people, I don’t have a specific answer as of now. Kant was deeply tied in to Newton’s laws, and stayed abreast of the developments of his day (Any metaphysician of similar weight would probably have to deal with Einstein, QED etc) . He wanted to put metaphysics on the same footing as the sciences, and it’s doubtful he succeeded. The rest of us are picking through what he did achieve, which has been highly influential.
Related On This Site: Via The University Of British Colombia: Kant-Summary Of Essential Points…From Bryan Magee’s Talking Philosophy On Youtube: Geoffrey Warnock On Kant…Sunday Quotation: From Jonathan Bennett On Kant…Roger Scruton At The WSJ: ‘Memo To Hawking: There’s Still Room For God’
I’ve found this to be useful teaching material.
“The problem of how a judgment can be synthetic and a priori, then, presents itself to Kant as the problem of how two concepts, neither of which includes the other, can be connected in a way which does not rest upon past experience and is not vulnerable to future experience.”
Page 23 of ‘Kant’s Analytic‘ by Jonathan Bennett
I was asked if it would be foolish to demand of Einstein that his laws conformed directly to his experience, or to claim that his thought experiments had their roots in our theory of direct experience of objects? Or why even try to place him within the towering metaphysics of someone like Kant?
Why not just let a 20 year old student of mathematical physics rigorously learn the equations necessary to allow him a useful arrival at pondering a great problem, and to maybe crunch the numbers at CERN and work through a functioning theory, rather than routing him through either Hume, Kant, or any other profound philosophers of the natural world?
I’m not sure I know.
Here’ a question I can better answer with some quotes from James Van Cleve’s book Problems From Kant Pg 31. What led him out on his limb of synthetic a priori reasoning, and does it hold if you follow it?:
——
First a reconstruction of Hume’s argument, and how it may have looked to Kant:
1. If a proposition is a priori, its denial implies a contradiction.
2. If a proposition implies a contradiction, it is inconceivable.
3. The denial of the causal maxim is conceivable.
4. Therefore, the denial of the causal maxim does not imply a contradiction (from 2 and 3).
5. Therefore, the causal maxim is not a priori (from 1 and 4).
We may add to this that the causal maxim is not knowable empirically, either. As a universal proposition (every event has a cause), it outruns what experience could ever establish…
…So, if Hume is right, the causal maxim is not knowable at all–a result that Kant thought would be disastrous for science and knowledge. Such is the problem Hume posed for Kant…
…In Kantian terminology, the short way to say that the denial of a proposition p implies a contradiction is ‘p is analytic’. From Kant’s point of view, therefore, the argument amounts to this: the causal maxim is not a priori because it is not analytic (step 4), and only the analytic is a priori (step 1). A similar argument, Kant perceived, would show that not even mathematics is a priori-an assertion from which Hume’s “good sense would have saved him” (B20). This is why the category of synthetic a priori judgments was so important for Kant: if they are possible, the Humean argument above can be evaded.
Related On This Site: From Bloggingheads: Adam Frank And Eliezer Yudkowsky Discuss The Epistemology Of Science
Hilary Putnam On The Philosophy Of Science: Bryan Magee’s Talking Philosophy On YouTube
“It is a common empiricist assumption that I can know my experience simply by observing it. But this is not so. I do not observe my experience, but only its object. Any knowledge of experience must therefore involve knowledge of its object. But I can have knowledge of the object only if I can identify it as continous. Nothing can have temporal continuity without also having the capacity to exist when unobserved. Its existence is therefore independent of my perception.”
-Roger Scruton here.
This is part of a brief summary of Kant’s transcendental deduction, of which Scruton later says:
“It is fair to say that the transcendental deduction has never been considered to provide a satisfactory argument (boldface mine). In all its versions it involves a transition from the unity of consciousness to the identity of the subject through time. Hume pointed out that the slide from unity to identity is involved in all our claims to objective knowledge; he also thought that it could never be justified. Kant did not find the terms with which to answer Hume.”
Also On This Site: A Few Responses To Kant’s Transcendental Idealism…Link To An Ayn Rand Paper: The Objectivist Attack On Kant…A Few Thoughts On Isaiah Berlin’s “Two Concepts Of Liberty”
There is a world out there, and your senses do give you an impression of it which yields genuine knowledge of empirical objects, according to Kant, but what empiricists fail to take into account is the apparatus that we depend upon to make sense of that world:
“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: “Every event must have a cause,” “There are mind-independent objects that persist over time,” and “Identical subjects persist over time.” The empiricist project must be incomplete since these claims are necessarily presupposed in our judgments, a point Berkeley and Hume failed to see. So, 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”
As mentioned, The American thinker W.V.O Quine has a dispute with the way in which Kant arrives at his answer to that problem.
From a paper by Arthur Sullivan here:
“There do not exist two distinct types of reality in the world which require two distinct modes of expression. This leads Quine to conclude that the analytic-synthetic distinction is a purely logical convention that is ontologically unnecessary and empirically superfluous. In this respect, Quine agrees with the radical empiricism of Mill, with its claim that there is no a priori knowledge. The fact that something is the case, or even the fact that something seems to be necessarily the case, does not imply the reality of a priori truths. Quine goes so far a to refer to the notion of a priori knowledge as a “metaphysical article of faith.”
Of course, so also did Schopenhauer have a problem with Kant (wikipedia summary here).
This quote was found here:
“Empirical concepts are ultimately based on empirical perceptions. Kant, however, tried to claim that, analogously, pure concepts (Categories) also have a basis. This pure basis is supposed to be a kind of pure perception, which he called a schema. But such an empiricist analogy contradicts his previous rationalist assertion that pure concepts (Categories) simply exist in the human mind without having been derived from perceptions. Therefore they are not based on pure, schematic perceptions.”
Just some thoughts on a Sunday, as it was requested by a friend. If you can refer me to a more comprehensive critique, I’d appreciate it.
Did Kant really address why his own metaphysical system is necessary as charting a course for possible human knowledge? Warnock states that Kant thought:
“All we can establish foundations for is the notion of possible experience and what can be an object of possible experience…”
In other words, physics can tell you all kinds of things about energy, but it can’t tell you what energy is. And this is the best of our knowledge (which philosophers like Kant try to explain). Kant’s metaphysics (and religion too) can’t even do that, and are doomed to failure.
In a way, metaphysics may be just where Aristotle left it, or where someone like Roger Penrose leaves it (after a lifetime of applying deep mathematical thinking to physical theory in his work on black holes): An exercise in trying to develop firm footing for our knowledge after the fact…trying to provide some context for our knowledge and not being able to do so…yet…
Addition: Of course, this doesn’t nullify the depth of Kant’s contributions, nor the depth of his moral theory. It just may not make it a moral law in the same sense as Newton’s laws (deeper laws have already come along) . I dug up one side of this exchange from the Bloggingheads Sentimental Mood Jesse Prinz Edition. So just because Kant didn’t perhaps validate his project as he’d have hoped, it doesn’t follow that you need to embrace some moral relativism as does Prinz:
—————-
1. If there are facts of a certain sort (chemical, biological, psychological, moral, whatever) which may be true true, even though everyone thinks they are false, then facts of this sort (chemical, biological, etc.) must never change.
The trouble is that you yourself don’t actually believe this principle. For example, geographical facts are clearly objectively true — even if everyone believes in El Dorado, El Dorado doesn’t exist; and even if no one believed in Everest, Everest still would exist. But it’s obvious that it doesn’t follow that geographical facts don’t change over time. Mountains and polar ice caps and rivers come and go. Geographical facts change all the time — it’s just that our beliefs don’t change them.
Perhaps your point is, not that the geographical facts don’t change, but rather that the geological laws don’t change. But at a certain level even this isn’t true: Plate Tectonics fits the earth over most of its history, but it doesn’t exactly fit the earth when it was molten or when it eventually cools down completely in the distant future. It doesn’t fit the moon or Jupiter. Perhaps at a high level of abstraction, we can imagine a final theory of planetary geography that fits ALL types of planets anywhere in the universe. Perhaps these very abstract laws don’t themselves vary (once there are any planets to talk about).
But if you make the moral law sufficiently abstract, it can be as unvarying as any laws of universal planetology. Utilitarianism is the theory that there is a rather abstract law of morality, which, though it does not vary, accounts for why seemingly quite different things can be right or wrong in different circumstances (e.g., why leaving your elderly to die may have been OK for the Eskimos in conditions of scarcity while it would be very wrong for us).