Week 12 Lecture 1 -IMMANUEL KANT – THE SYNTHETIC A-PRIORI PDF

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IMMANUEL KANT, AWOKEN FROM DOGMATIC SLUMBERS, THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON, ANALYTIC VS. SYNTHETIC - REVISITED AND JUDGEMENT, THE SYNTHETIC A-PRIORI....

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WEEK 12 LECTURE 1: IMMANUEL KANT – THE SYNTHETIC A-PRIORI IMMANUEL KANT

Born in Prussian Germany to a humble and severely Christian family – showed a great aptitude

(1724-1804 CE)

for study, he enrolled at the University of Köni gsberg at the age of 16, where he spent the entirety of his career Kant focused at first on astronomical investigations (in which he had some notable successes), having been impressed by the new science and such figures as Isaac Newton Increasingly though, Kant turned to philosophical investigations, seeking ways to solve the various problems of Western philosophy he had inherited from the traditions of rationalism, idealism, and empiricism His works on metaphysics and epistemology, as well as moral philosophy, remain some of the most influential works ever published in the Western philosophical tradition Kant’s health was poor for much of his life, and the philosopher passed away in his home town of Königsberg, uttering the final words “Es ist gut (It is good)”

AWOKEN FROM

Kant was a rationalist until he read the works of David Hume, who Kant said ‘woke him from his

DOGMATIC

dogmatic slumbers’

SLUMBERS

Hume’s work convinced Kant that all knowledge of the world must indeed be based on experience Kant thus rejects the possibility of the mind being able to know the world completely independently of experience (‘pure reason’) However, Kant did not accept empiricism either, and many of his ideas were reactions to those of Hume – in fact, Hume’s skeptical conclusions had precipitated a philosophical crisis in the Western tradition which Immanuel Kant sought to solve

THE CRITIQUE OF

Kant accepted we can have knowledge of the world, and some of it with certainty (such as

PURE REASON

Newton’s laws of motion) – moreover, Kant agreed with Hume that all knowledge begins with experience, but not that all knowledge is limited to experience So how is knowledge possible? What constitutes our mode of knowledge formation?

ANALYTIC (A PRIORI)

A priori knowledge, which arises from the operations of the mind and is independent of sense

VS SYNTHETIC (A

experience

POSTERIORI)

Necessity and strict universality (no possibility of an exception)

REVISITED

A priori judgments are necessarily and universally true A posteriori knowledge, which arises from and depends on sense experience Contingency and particularity (always the possibility of exceptions) A posteriori judgments are never necessarily or universally true

ANALYTIC (A PRIORI)

In an analytic

VS SYNTHETIC (A

judgment the predicate makes explicit meanings that are already implicit in the subject - tautological

POSTERIORI)

E.g. “A triangle is three-sided"

JUDGEMENT

In a synthetic judgment the predicate adds to our knowledge of the subject in a way that logical analysis, by itself, cannot – new knowledge E.g. “Some houses are red"

THOUGHT EXERCISE If you can answer the questions below, all with the same answer, and work out how you did it, you will understand Kant’s solution to Hume’s scepticism... What is the shortest distance between Johannesburg and Pretoria? What is the shortest distance between your house and my house? What is the shortest distance between the Humanities Building and the Student Centre? What is the shortest distance between Earth and Mars?

The shortest distance between any two points is... a straight line Kant’s realization was that this kind of knowledge fell into a category that could not be described fully by the traditional analytic/synthetic distinction – Kant called this kind of knowledge the ‘synthetic a-priori’ THE SYNTHETIC APRIORI

Synthetic a-priori judgements are synthetic since they give use new knowledge, knowledge that could not be known by simple logical analysis of the subject – that is, non-tautological, nonanalytic knowledge However, they are also a-priori since they are necessarily and universally true, and give us knowledge beyond sense experience – that is, non-empirical, non-a-posteriori knowledge It is a fine distinction that none of Kant’s predecessors were able to make

Examples of synthetic a-priori judgments (according to Kant): 7+5 = 12 Everything exists in space and time Everything that happens has a cause In all changes of the material world, the quantity of matter remains unchanged In all communication of motion, action and reaction must always be equal (Newtonian physics) The world must have a beginning There exist immutable moral laws...