Seminar Meeting Synthesized with my Notes on Kants PROLEGOMENA

The Translators Preface Kant first began his inaugural dissertation with the main point being that there are a priori forms of cognition, not simply a posteriori. The next step that needs to be taken is in critical philosophy, as Kant calls it. This type of philosophical investigation revolves around whether or not these a priori thoughts have a real relation to objects. (That philosophy lecture I attended at Franciscan awhile back and had nary a clue can finally be understood!) With a posteriori thoughts there is not really a problem because we can clearly see that we have thoughts produced by action of external objects on the awareness. But with a priori, we run into a PROBLEM, that is: How is my intellect supposed to constitute a priori concepts with which things must necessarily agree. Put another way, how is the mind to lay out principles regarding things such that our experience must truly agree with these principles even though these principles are independent of immediate and particular sensations. Its kind of like how can the chicken come before the egg? The SOLUTION? Kant wrote the Critique of Pure Reason for exactly this reason, to find the solution to the problem of real relations between sensible objects and a priori cognitions. A Priori = pure forms of thought that synthesize valid experience by combining sense data into a real whole. For example, let us take a categorical judgment, as in All bodies are divisible. Purely formal logic makes no distinction between what is to be subject and what is to be predicated, as in Something divisible is a body. But, when body is brought under the pure concept of substance a determination is made. Namely, that sense data of body in real experience must always be regarded as subject. So, we come to the CONCLUSION that the pure concept of substance determines how parts, i.e. bodies and divisible, are to be combined into a whole of cognition. So, a priori forms of thought make objective experience. Sense data alone without these forms do NOT provide us with objective experience. Introduction and General Exposition The Prolegomena is similar to Humes ECH in that they are both smaller versions of larger works, but Kant didnt really popularize his stuff with the smaller version in the same way that Hume did. Kant indeed wrote this to be popular, even though he stated otherwise. This book is actually a great deal more difficult to read than the CPR because it is so incredibly dense, short and unbelievably complicated (no wonder it was taking me a half hour a page to read!) Kant wrote this based on an analytical method which proceeds regressively from condition to condition. Kant begins with the a priori, with uncontested pure knowledge, like 2+2=4, and then inquires NOT whether this is possible, but HOW it is possible. Kant and Descartes Mediate and Immediate Experience Kant felt that consciousness is the very beginning of all speculative philosophy, very much like Descartes cogito. But, the two differ because Kant felt that we do not

know our noumenal selves by any act of rational intuition. The self becomes aware of oneself when it brings to self-consciousness, through the previously described transcendental act, intuitions provided by sensibility. We are informed, as it were, about ourselves when we have a posteriori cognitions that are organized, synthesized and given meaning through pure concepts. Inner experience is not possible unless we have immediate consciousness of external things. This is directly in conflict with Descartes who would hold that the existence of material objects is dependent on an inference from immediate inner experience. Kant basically says that external experience is immediate and inner experience is mediate through experience Time and Space Kant Bridging the Gap Now we move on to Time and Space. First, Leibniz, who postulated monads, each with some degree of consciousness. Space for him was a set of relations of monads, an order of coexistent things. Time for him consists of the relations of the successive states of consciousness of a single monad. Space and time dont exist without monads. Newton, however, had a divergent view from this. He held that space and time were things that would exist, even if there were no bodies. Empty space and empty time are indeed possible. Kant then comes in and is able to reconcile the two. Time and space provide us with a context in which we exist. But, it only tells us about counting; it does not tell us about uncountables or number. Put another way, space and time are based epistemologically on the nature of the mind rather than ontologically on the nature of things. Here is where Kant reconciles the two. Space and time are absolute wholes in which objects are located, insofar as they are forms of sensible intuition lying ready in the mind rather than being independently existing containers for objects. Or, as Crowe out it, information of a higher order is metaphysical and time/space instantiations start us on our journey. For example, the number three has an objective correlative, -2 does not. -2 exists, just not in time and space. In mathematics, this imaginary number is said to exist formally. So, knowing this about time and space, allows us to talk about it meaningfully. Transcendental Idealism, Copernican Revolution, Noumena, There are other concepts in between that I shall treat more fully later, namely the subtle distinctions between a priori and a posteriori. Here I would like to elucidate a bit about Kants Transcendental Idealism. Realism = if a body dies, so does the incorporeal, the thing-in-itself. Kant espouses a brand of realism here that is actually very close to that of Lockes. Kant thinks that it is a problematic concept to speak of the thingin-itself lying at the heart of objects just as Locke thought it was genuinely problematic epistemologically to have knowledge of the real essence of substances. Here we have the problem of universals, of incorporeals, of things-in-themselves, of noumena all over again. Berkeley (and Hume) felt as though physical objects are nothing but a cluster of qualities in the mind. We must needs remember here about his idea that perception is direct. This immaterialism b.s. doesnt concern Kant. For Kant, there is indeed a reality behind the sense data given to us by an object. Then we get Hume, whose Empiricism is basically talking about mental processes describing themselves. Again, Hume cannot be refuted on his own grounds, so what do we do? Enlarge the context of the discussion. Kant wants to know what these mental processes tell us about the world, and even further

down the road what they tell us about God and the soul. Universals exists, but we cannot know them with absolute surety. Universals cannot be apprehended with sure knowledge like that of 2+2=4. But nonetheless there is Validity in the Transcendent, which massively enlarges the debate with Hume, and truly makes him the first PostEnlightenment thinker. This is the heart of the Copernican Revolution, of redefining philosophy in metaphysical terms. Metaphysics is thus the way of taking epistemology away from being an end in itself to a means to an end. The transcendent is worth coming to a conclusion about, so culture and society can carry on, because of the idea that it is the active mind that is coming to a conclusion. The problem of connecting my idea to voracity (actuality) has been sufficiently demonstrated so its the thinking that matters. Metaphysical propositions cannot be established reasonably. The mind cannot empirically establish the synthetic a priori (to be discussed forthwith). But, the possibility of knowledge involves the participation of the active mind (remember: a posteriori informed by a priori, which makes objective experience). We need to be involved personally in interactions with objective reality. This really represents a shift away from reason and more towards faith (the German Lutheranism can plainly be seen in Kant). We can pray to God without really knowing who/what God is. Knowledge as reciprocation A helpful illustration here is Kierkegaards image and story of the knight who loves a girl who is manifestly unobtainable and whom he has never talked to (Or similarly, as we learned today, Petrarch and his Laura) This is where we can see knowledge as reciprocation. I have my knowledge of the situation, of the girl and what she is like. But the situation is too subtle and complicated to know whether this knowledge is true (i.e. corresponds to reality, or as we saw with Anselm, that my affirmative percept of this girl is validated in its correspondence to realityremember correspondence is not truth, it is simply a condition for it) Yet the knight learns more and more about the girl every time he meets her, sees her or watches her interact with materiality. So, I have a less tenuous understanding of things here, but I still cannot know whether my new knowledge is true. Then I am reinformed again, and the reciprocal process begins anew. The problem I have here with Kant is that this should be good enough, or so Kant says. Lets investigate. Going back to the thing-in-itself for a bitThere are actually different schools of thought/interpretations of Kant here, but Dr. Crowe and most serious scholars hold the two aspect view. We are in the same world as the thing-in-itself. The thing-in-itself and my idea of the thing-in-itself are of reciprocity. Noumena are utterly unknowable, but that does preclude us from trying, as it were, to know the unknowable. Its almost as if Kant is saying that it is the process of obtaining knowledge that is more important than whether that knowledge actually corresponds to pure truth. (I think St. Thomas Aquinas just turned over in his grave.) Wittgenstein inherits Kant here a bit, when he says Judgments are informed by ideas, but not conformed by them. But, this is not a oneway street, as Plato would have it. Our knowledge of reality is the context in which our reality has meaning. Like the knight and the girl illustration, what the knight currently knows about the situation forms the context in which his reality has meaning. This meaning is neither true nor false, since its not completely true as its correspondence

is not there, but its not false because its HIS meaning. He obtains new meaning as the thing-in-itself (the concept of this girl as she truly is) lends itself more fully to him in terms of his knowledge or understanding. In this way, the fact of reciprocation is constant, even though the terms of reciprocation are changing. Knowledge is motion rather than a status. Knowledge is a two way relationship, between the thing-in-itself and my conception of the thing-in-itself. Nature and God Nature = an existence of real objects as they are ordered according to universal laws. These general, universal laws are a priori, like the principle of non-contradiction. The particular laws, like botanical, chemical, etc are a posteriori. This apriority of universal laws places him squarely in the tradition of the continental rationalists like Leibniz and Descartes, and in fundamental opposition to the British empiricists. As regards God, one can say this in Kants framework: We can know what we know about God. But again, the entire aforementioned problem with knowing noumena rears its head. We cannot truly know whether our knowledge of God, conforms or corresponds to the true reality that is Being, Absolute Perfection, Perfect Love. So this is where I depart from Kant, beginning with the end of the last section. I think hes fundamentally right and his effort to counteract Hume is incredible (still to come). The world needed a thinker like Kant. But, I have trouble with his subjectivist principles, with his Copernican revolution. I see him leading to todays dictatorship of relativism. I agree that noumena, most especially God, cannot be known with pure reason. Reason, to borrow a phrase from Mounier, is ultimately impotent. So, what is the key here? The revelation of Jesus Christ and Faith in His message. We cannot figure out the essence of things, incorporeal universals, by reason alone. It is faith seeking understanding that is key. We have Truths of God and the nature of things by revelation, from which we can use as the starting point for our rational investigations. But, here I must mention that it seems to me that these subjectivist principles lead to one rationalizing that anything is correct, or allowable morally. This is where I would assume that the categorical imperative and Kantian ethics comes into play, to allow Kant to establish an objective basis for morals on which he subjective search for truth in things-in-themselves rest. Kant and Hume Treating Cause and Effect Kant says that the subjective connection of cognitions is distinguished from the objective connection to them. And it is here that he gives his locus classicus of efficient causation. His explication begins by means of an example. One walks into a room and sees a glowing stove. As far as the subjective order of cognitions is concerned a person 1.) feels warm 2.) spots the stove glowing. But, still even though this is the order is which these two events are cognized, the person will still say that it is the stove which causes the room to be warm, NOT that the rooms warmth causes the glowing stove. So, to have knowledge through perception one must connect his sense data IN THEIR OBJECTIVE RELATIONS. Necessity doesnt exist in subjective ordering, but it does in the objective ordering of cognitions. By this, Kant means, A (glowing stove) precedes B (warm room) objectively. So one must think of A preceding B, or else be wrong. It truly makes no difference how one subjectively perceives these two events. Hume claimed that

there were three conditions which had to be fulfilled for one event to be considered the cause of another. They were: 1. Cause precedes effect in time 2. Cause and effect are contiguous in space 3. Cause and effect are constantly conjoined in experience There have been attacks leveled on the first two of these. An example against the first is the fact that water boils simultaneously at 100 degrees Celsius and so the cause, the temperature, does not precede the effect, the boiling water, in time. For the second, spatial contiguity, one needs only to look at the moons effect on the tide as an example. I personally think that spatial contiguity is relative (i.e. the moon is damn close to us compared to Alpha Centauri) and think that the second holds still. The first is pretty selfevident to me too, but number three makes number one not stand. All one needs is one case to invalidate a universally affirmative predication. Kant leveled his objections at Hume by concentrating on the third condition above. In Humes view, evidenced by the third condition, there is no way to distinguish between the subjective order of cognitions and the objective order. It was precisely this point that awoke Kant from his dogmatic slumber. Hume stated that the necessary connection from Cause and Effect arises from habit of association from a repeated number of perceptions. Kant said that the objective reordering of the subjective succession of cognitions (as we saw with the fire above) is actually a synthetic reorganization (move from premises to conclusion) of the a posteriori order of perception. The causal ordering of cognitions is an act of the intellect BROUGHT to experience. Or as was stated back in the beginning, experience is made by the a priori embedded in our minds about the objective ordering of things we experience subjectively. This a priori does NOT come from experience, as Hume claimed. Sense data is NOT the end all and be all. Basically, Hume is saying that I experience A before B time after time, so my saying A causes B is a function of habit that comes from repeated experience. Kant disagrees, telling us that the objective reordering of subjective experience is a priori. So, this synthetic reorganization is brought to experience. It is innate. It is a function that the intellect has prior to any experience. Summation of Experience = Experience is the result of the synthetic activity (putting multiple a priori concepts together) of the intellect by means of such pure concepts organizing empirically given sense data arranged in time and space. ***NOTE: It must be mentioned here that Duns Scotus (the only philosopher I have ever encountered who is more difficult that Kant, and by a long shot too) does a brilliant job in his piece Against Henry and the Skeptics explaining how the intellect goes about apprehending a priori truth. He actually explains the mechanisms by which we see the truth of a mathematical statement, like a=a. It is precisely in the relation between the terms that makes out intellect see the whole statement as self-evident. Just brilliant. Really.***

Hume and Kants Commonality in Super Sensible Objects and the Ontological Argument

Both men agreed that using a priori concepts to determine something about super sensible object grossly oversteps the bounds of experience and produces illusion. There are a priori forms of thought, BUT they are only meaningful when they are applied to sense impressions to organize these sense impressions into objective experience. For example, Kant looks at the substance concept being applied to the soul to infer its immortality. Essentially, this concept is being transcendentally. So, the results do not equate to objective reality, they equate to what Kant calls a dialectical illusion. Kant and Hume indeed have much in common here in their criticism of attempts of reason to transcend all possible experience. Hume says that any matter of fact cannot be proved by any a priori arguments. That is to say, synthetic truth cannot be proved by deductive proofs, or again, that cause cannot be proven to precede effect. I remember here that for Hume, God was a construct, a simple (well, rather complex actually, in terms of details and externalities, but simple is for the general concept here) summation of a bunch of ideas that become belief by virtue of habit. Again, for Hume, the imagination = idea+idea. So, I can imagine the existent summer sky or the nonexistent golden mountain. This leads us into the fact that there is NO being whose nonexistence implies a contradiction. (i.e. there is no necessarily existing Absolute Being). This is the opposite of exactly what the ontological argument was concluding. In the same way, Kant attacks this ontological argument as well. He says that there are three possible proofs for Gods existence, 1.) physico-theological 2.) cosmological 3.) ontological. He states that the first two depend on the third, so if the third fails then the others do to. He also says that all existential propositions are synthetic and so we cannot say that the predicate of existence cannot be rejected without contradiction. Or, another way:
Since the criterion of the possibility of synthetic knowledge is never to be looked for, save for in experience, to which the object of an idea (i.e. God) cannot belong, the connection of all real properties in a thing is a synthesis, the possibility of which we are unable to determine a priori [but can only determine a posteriori].

Ok, so maybe the ontological argument is not bulletproof. But, I still like it nonetheless.

Kants Own work/words

Whether such a thing as Metaphysics be at all possible? KANT
Human reason so delights in constructions that is has several times built up a tower and then razed it to examine the nature of the foundation.

HUME that if the thing be posited, something else must also be necessarily posited; for this is
the meaning of the concept of cause.

Kant considers the a priori to be one of reasons children, which is obviously erroneous for Hume. We saw that Hume could not get out of his head, could not get out of that tight little box beginning with sense data continuing with the mental processes of resemblance, contiguity and association and ending in ideas. Mental processes describe mental

processes. Kant frames Humes rejection of the a priori, and thus of any possibility of metaphysics, like this:
The question waswhether the concept [of cause] could be thought by reason a priori It was a question concerning the origin of the concept, NOT concerning its indispensability in use.

Basically what Kant is saying is that the attack of Hume should come from pure thought NOT by an appeal to common sense (as was common of attacks of Hume and Berkeley, pretty darn weak at that too) because common sense only should judge what applies immediately to experience. Speculative judgment is for metaphysics. Hume indeed jump-started Kant, and awoke him from a lifelong dogmatic slumber, as he called it. Kant says,
If we start from a well founded, but undeveloped, thought which another has bequeathed to us, we may well hope by continued reflection to advance further than the acute man to whom we owe the first spark of light.

So, we start from a single principle and deduce from this a priori concepts which arose from pure understanding, NOT experience. Kant had a great deal of work to do here, because he felt that his innovations here were what made metaphysics possible. He says,
And the worst was that metaphysics, such as it then existed, could not assist me in the least because this deduction alone can render metaphysics possible.

In my estimation here, I see that Kant saw how Humes pure reason destroyed all metaphysical possibility of thought (entirely impossible for reason to think a priori) and that he demonstrated this irrefutably. So Kant had to enlarge the debate. I said earlier that he did so by demonstrating the validity of the transcendental, even if we could not apprehend this perfectly. This transcendental deduction, that which makes it all possible, metaphysics that is, is the principle that all metaphysics consists altogether of a priori concepts. Kant then proceeded to demonstrate what those concepts were. And this deduction is what makes metaphysics possible. This is why Kant calls this a new science. So, the CPR is about the working out of Humes problem, determining the whole sphere of pure reason, in its limits and in its contents. But, its misunderstood and so he writes the Prolegomena. NEW SCIENCE It is a perfectly new science, of which no one has ever thought, the very idea of which
was unknown, and for which nothing hitherto accomplished can be of the smallest use, except it be the suggestion of Humes doubts.

WOW QUOTE
Making plans is often the occupation of an opulent and boastful mind, which thus obtains the reputation of a creative genius by demanding what it cannot itself supply, by censuring what it cannot improve and by proposing what is knows not where to find.

The Prolegomena is written in an analytic style, where we start with a certainty and then deduce the rest. The CPR is written in a synthetical style, where the method is to work everything out, in order to arrive at that one certainty. The latter is looking at the trees and the former is concerned with a depiction of the whole forest. To end the preface, Kant pokes fun at people who pretend to be learned in the area of metaphysics, saying, This much abused obscurity has its uses, since all who in other sciences observe a
judicious silence speak authoritatively in metaphysics and make bold decisions, because their ignorance here is not contrasted with the knowledge of others.

I have found passages like this littered all over the Prolegomena, and it makes Kant seem a bit boastful

Of the Sources of Metaphysics and Concerning the kind of cognition which can be considered Metaphysical We begin here with a discussion of metaphysical cognition. It cannot be empirical and it cannot be derived from experience. This is a priori cognition, an understanding of pure truth and pure reason. We seek here to make the distinction about judgments in terms of their content. There are two kinds, analytic and synthetic. The picture below summates the kinds of judgments and their subtle distinctions.

Now, lets delineate with clarity and further exposition what this picture means. An analytic judgment adds nothing to the content of cognition, whereas synthetic judgments increase cognition. The former can be liked to Wittgensteins first proposition in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus when he says that The world is everything that is the

case. The latter is kind of like an unpacking of all that is the case. Analytic judgments express nothing in the predicate in the predicate but what has already been thought in the subject. This is a self-evident truth, as when we say All bodies are extended. Synthetic judgments amplify my knowledge by adding something to the concept, as when we say, All bodies have weight. To arrive at this synthetic statement we must take our concept of body and amplify, or describe more fully, our knowledge of it by adding to it by means of intuition to create a new synthetic proposition, namely, that bodies have weight. Kant says:
So it is manifest that the predicate belongs to this concept necessarily indeed, yet not directly [as in analytic statements] but indirectly by means of a necessarily present intuition.

Another way he states this:

The essential and distinguishing feature of synthetic a priori from all other a priori is that it cannot proceed from concepts, but only form the construction of concepts.

So, analytic judgments are dissections of the concept and synthetic judgments proceed beyond concepts by means of intuition. This is where Hume comes in Hume cast his doubt on all a priori judgments and felt that pure mathematics was an analytic judgment. Metaphysics would be classed for him as synthetic a priori judgments. For Kant, they are both synthetic a priori. Kant says that this mistake had a decidedly injurious effect upon his whole conception. Metaphysical Judgments Kant says:
We must distinguish judgments belonging to metaphysics from metaphysical judgments properly so-called. Many of the former are analytic, but they only afford the means to metaphysical judgments, which are the whole aim of the science and which are always synthetic.

There is extreme subtlety here. Let us take an example of a judgment belonging to metaphysics, that substance is that which exists as a subject. This is an analytic a priori cognition. We arrive at the definition of the concept of substance by way of several such analytic judgments. So the concept of substance is a metaphysical judgment, which is synthetic, because we are arrive at the pure concept by way of putting together several analytic a priori cognitions The analysis of a pure concept such as this is not different from any other concepts, like empirical ones, which do not belong to metaphysics. But Kant says,
The science has something special and peculiar to itself in the production of its a priori cognitions, which must therefore be distinguished from the features it has in common with other rational knowledge. Thus the judgment that all the substance in things is permanent is a synthetic and properly metaphysical judgment.

So, we conclude that the synthetic a priori judgments alone constitute the end of metaphysics, but, they require dissection of various propositions/concepts which are analytical. Kant then goes on to say that he found a hint of what he is getting at here in Locke, followed by his tooting his own horn a bit, Men who never think independently have nevertheless the acuteness to discover everything, after is has been once shown them, in what was said long since, though no one could ever see it there before.

Is Metaphysics at all Possible? A great quote:

There is no single book to which you can point, as you do to Euclid, and say: this is metaphysics; here you may find the noblest aim of this science, namely, the knowledge of a highest being and a future existence, proved from principles of pure reason.

To answer this question, whether metaphysics is possible, we need a conception of metaphysics, which before Kant (i.e. in Hume) was problematic. We have our answer in the fact that we can say with confidence that there are indeed certain a priori cognitions which are actual and given. Here Kant points to pure mathematics and pure physics. So, the question becomes not whether metaphysics is possible, but how it is possible, so that we can deduce from the existence of actual a priori cognitions the possibility of all the rest knowledge. The General Problem: How is Cognition from Pure Reason Possible? Here is where what is known as the transcendental problem is put forth. That is, how are synthetic a priori propositions possible? Analytical judgments are easily seen to exist, as they are derived directly from the principle of non contradiction. Metaphysics stands or falls with the solution to this problem. So, Kants transcendental philosophy is nothing but the complete solution to the problem here propounded. He proceeds to the solution by way of the analytical method, whereby we assume that cognitions exist, and then appeals to pure mathematics and pure natural science for they alone can exhibit to us objects in intuition and consequently can show the truth or conformity of the cognition to the object in concreto. This transcendental problem is divided into four questions. 1. How is pure mathematics possible? 2. How is pure natural science possible? 3. How is metaphysics in general possible? 4. How is metaphysics as a science possible? He is searching for the sources in reason itself, so that reasons faculty of knowing something a priori might by its own deeds be investigated and measured. ***AsideGotta love this guy tooting his own horn. Observe:
Should my reader complain of the difficulty and the trouble which I occasion him in the solution of this problem, he is at liberty to solve it himself in an easier way. Perhaps he will then feel under obligation to the person who has undertaken for him a labor of so profound research and will be rather surprised at the facility with which, considering the nature of the subject, the solution has been attained.