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Sign in to use this feature. About us. Editorial team. This article has no associated abstract. Kant Metaphysics Greatness. Find it on Amazon. Applied ethics. History of Western Philosophy. Normative ethics.
Philosophy of biology. Philosophy of language. Philosophy of mind. Philosophy of religion. For example, Kant saw an amphibolous use of the concepts of comparison of identity and difference, which he argued allowed Leibniz to falsely extend beyond its legitimate scope the principle of the identity of indiscernibles if two things are qualitatively identical, that is, indiscernible, then they are numerically identical.
The issues at the center of the debate between Leibniz and Kant are still with us—though they sometimes manifest themselves in different ways. Hence, something from nothing. Writing recently in the New York Times , the philosopher David Albert raises some pointed questions for Krauss: Where do the quantum fields come from? Why are the laws of nature what they are?
And, still, why is there a world of quantum fields at all? None of these questions are answered by Krauss, and without answers to these questions it would seem philosophically presumptuous to claim to have answered the fundamental question of metaphysics.
For his part, however, Kant had argued that the principle of sufficient reason is valid only in the realm of experience and that it does not even have meaning when applied to things outside the world of sense and prior to the origin of the world. In other words, the proper metaphysical view is that natural science, conceived as an inductive and deductive enterprise based on sense experience, can never give us an answer to the question why is there something rather nothing?
But neither can rationalist metaphysics. The arguments, in other words, involve fallacies that vitiate their conclusions. More specifically, the demand for the unconditioned, and the idea of the soul to which it gives rise, may be construed regulatively as devices for guiding inquiries, but never constitutively — never, that is, as yielding grounds for any a priori synthetic knowledge of a metaphysical self given immediately to pure reason.
There are also excellent discussions to be found in Allison , , Bennett , Buroker , Guyer , Wuerth , Bird , Ameriks , Melnick , Dyck , Proops The second discipline of rationalist metaphysics rejected by Kant is Rational Cosmology. Not only does Kant address himself to the task of discounting the metaphysical arguments in cosmology, but the resolution to some of these conflicts provides, he claims, an indirect argument for his own transcendental idealism.
Thus, the case here differs from the paralogisms and, as we shall see, from the Ideal. The reason for this difference resides in the nature of the idea of reason in question. Unlike the soul and God, which are clearly supposed to be non-sensible metaphysical entities, the sum total of all appearances refers specifically to spatio-temporal objects or events. For with respect to each problem addressed the finitude vs. More specifically, one can either think the unconditioned as an intelligible ground of appearances, or as the total even if infinite set of all appearances.
Unfortunately, each of these conceptual strategies is unsatisfying. Worse, the antithesis arguments, in refusing to go beyond the spatio-temporal realm, end up being just as dogmatic as their opposites, for the assumption is that whatever holds within space and time also holds generally.
To assume this is to take what are for Kant merely subjective features of our intuition forms of sensibility, space and time to be universal ontological conditions holding of everything whatsoever. If the conditioned is given, then the whole series of conditions, a series which is therefore itself absolutely unconditioned, is also given. Consequently, the entire series of all conditions of objects of the senses is already given.
There are a number of problems with this argument, according to Kant. The rational assumption that the total series of all conditions is already given would hold only for things in themselves. In the realm of appearances, the totality is never given to us, as finite discursive knowers. As finite sensible cognizers, however, we shall never achieve an absolute completion of knowledge. To assume that we can do so is to adopt the theocentric model of knowledge characteristic of the dreaded transcendental realist.
This hypostatization of the idea of the world, the fact that it is taken to be a mind-independent object, acts as the underlying assumption motivating both parties to the two mathematical antinomies. The first antinomy concerns the finitude or infinitude of the spatio-temporal world. The thesis argument seeks to show that the world in space and time is finite, i. The antithesis counters that it is infinite with regard to both space and time.
The second antinomy concerns the ultimate constitution of objects in the world, with the thesis arguing for ultimately simple substances, while the antithesis argues that objects are infinitely divisible. The alleged proponent of the antithesis arguments, on the other hand, refuses any conclusion that goes beyond the sensible conditions of space and time.
According to the antithesis arguments, the world is infinite in both space and time these being infinite as well , and bodies are in accordance with the infinite divisibility of space also infinitely divisible. In each of these antinomial conflicts, reason finds itself at an impasse. Satisfying the demands placed by our rational capacity to think beyond experience, the thesis arguments offer what appears to be a satisfying resting-place for explanation.
How does Kant demonstrate this? Both the thesis and antithesis arguments are apagogic, i. An indirect proof establishes its conclusion by showing the impossibility of its opposite. Thus, for example, we may want to know, as in the first antinomy, whether the world is finite or infinite. We can seek to show that it is finite by demonstrating the impossibility of its infinitude.
Alternatively, we may demonstrate the infinitude of the world by showing that it is impossible that it is finite.
This is exactly what the thesis and antithesis arguments purport to do, respectively. The same strategy is deployed in the second antinomy, where the proponent of the thesis position argues for the necessity of some ultimately simple substance by showing the impossibility of infinite divisibility of substance, etc. Obviously, the success of the proofs depends on the legitimacy of the exclusive disjunction agreed to by both parties.
The world is, for Kant, neither finite nor infinite. The opposition between these two alternatives is merely dialectical. In the cosmological debates, each party to the dispute falls prey to the ambiguity in the idea of the world. Kant thus structures his analysis of the mathematical antinomies by appealing to the general dialectical syllogism presented at the end of section 4. Problems stem from the application of the principle expressed in the first premise to the objects of the senses appearances.
Here again, Kant diagnoses the error or fallacy contained in this syllogism as that of ambiguous middle. The minor premise, however, which specifically refers to objects in space and time appearances , is committed to an empirical use of the term. Indeed, such an empirical use would have to be deployed, if the conclusion is to be reached.
The conclusion is that the entire series of all conditions of appearances is actually given. In the dynamical antinomies, Kant changes his strategy somewhat. Rather than arguing as in the mathematical antinomies that both conclusions are false , Kant suggests that both sides to the dispute might turn out to be correct.
This option is available here, and not in the two mathematical antinomies, because the proponents of the thesis arguments are not committing themselves solely to claims about spatio-temporal objects. In the third antinomy, the thesis contends that in addition to mechanistic causality, we must posit some first uncaused causal power Transcendental Freedom , while the antithesis denies anything but mechanistic causality.
Here, then, the debate is the standard though in this case, the specifically cosmological dispute between freedom and determinism. Finally, in the fourth antinomy, the requirement for a necessary being is pitted against its opposite.
The thesis position argues for a necessary being, whereas the antithesis denies that there is any such being. In both cases the thesis opts for a position that is abstracted from the spatio-temporal framework, and thus adopts the broadly Platonic view. The rational necessity of postulating such a necessary being or a causality of freedom satisfies the rational demand for intelligible explanation.
Insofar as the antithesis denies the justification for doing this, of course, it is said to adopt a broadly Epicurean standpoint. If space and time were things in themselves, then of course the application of the demand for this unconditioned would be warranted.
The resolution to these antinomies here consists in giving each side its due, but simultaneously limiting the domain over which the claims hold. Similarly, the antithesis conclusions can stand, but only in relation to objects in nature, considered as appearances. Here, the conflict seems irresolvable only on the assumption that appearances are things in themselves. If appearances were things in themselves, for example, then it would certainly seem true that either they are one and all subject to mechanistic causality, or not.
In such a case, it makes sense both to argue for a non-temporal beginning and to deny such a beginning. Left unresolved, then, this antinomy leaves us wit the following dilemma: on the assumption of transcendental realism, both nature and freedom seem to be undermined.
To avoid this, Kant appeals to transcendental idealism, which is supposed to rescue reason from the conflict. These works helped to secure Kant a broader reputation in Germany, but for the most part they were not strikingly original. While some of his early works tend to emphasize rationalist ideas, others have a more empiricist emphasis. During this time Kant was striving to work out an independent position, but before the s his views remained fluid. In Kant published his first work concerned with the possibility of metaphysics, which later became a central topic of his mature philosophy.
In , at the age of forty-six, Kant was appointed to the chair in logic and metaphysics at the Albertina, after teaching for fifteen years as an unsalaried lecturer and working since as a sublibrarian to supplement his income. Kant was turned down for the same position in In order to inaugurate his new position, Kant also wrote one more Latin dissertation: Concerning the Form and Principles of the Sensible and Intelligible World , which is known as the Inaugural Dissertation.
Inspired by Crusius and the Swiss natural philosopher Johann Heinrich Lambert — , Kant distinguishes between two fundamental powers of cognition, sensibility and understanding intelligence , where the Leibniz-Wolffians regarded understanding intellect as the only fundamental power. Moreover, as the title of the Inaugural Dissertation indicates, Kant argues that sensibility and understanding are directed at two different worlds: sensibility gives us access to the sensible world, while understanding enables us to grasp a distinct intelligible world.
The Inaugural Dissertation thus develops a form of Platonism; and it rejects the view of British sentimentalists that moral judgments are based on feelings of pleasure or pain, since Kant now holds that moral judgments are based on pure understanding alone.
After Kant never surrendered the views that sensibility and understanding are distinct powers of cognition, that space and time are subjective forms of human sensibility, and that moral judgments are based on pure understanding or reason alone.
But his embrace of Platonism in the Inaugural Dissertation was short-lived. He soon denied that our understanding is capable of insight into an intelligible world, which cleared the path toward his mature position in the Critique of Pure Reason , according to which the understanding like sensibility supplies forms that structure our experience of the sensible world, to which human knowledge is limited, while the intelligible or noumenal world is strictly unknowable to us.
Kant spent a decade working on the Critique of Pure Reason and published nothing else of significance between and Kant also published a number of important essays in this period, including Idea for a Universal History With a Cosmopolitan Aim and Conjectural Beginning of Human History , his main contributions to the philosophy of history; An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?
Jacobi — accused the recently deceased G. Lessing — of Spinozism. With these works Kant secured international fame and came to dominate German philosophy in the late s. But in he announced that the Critique of the Power of Judgment brought his critical enterprise to an end By then K. In his chair at Jena passed to J. Kant retired from teaching in For nearly two decades he had lived a highly disciplined life focused primarily on completing his philosophical system, which began to take definite shape in his mind only in middle age.
After retiring he came to believe that there was a gap in this system separating the metaphysical foundations of natural science from physics itself, and he set out to close this gap in a series of notes that postulate the existence of an ether or caloric matter. Kant died February 12, , just short of his eightieth birthday. The main topic of the Critique of Pure Reason is the possibility of metaphysics, understood in a specific way.
See also Bxiv; and — Thus metaphysics for Kant concerns a priori knowledge, or knowledge whose justification does not depend on experience; and he associates a priori knowledge with reason. The project of the Critique is to examine whether, how, and to what extent human reason is capable of a priori knowledge.
To understand the project of the Critique better, let us consider the historical and intellectual context in which it was written. The Enlightenment was a reaction to the rise and successes of modern science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The spectacular achievements of Newton in particular engendered widespread confidence and optimism about the power of human reason to control nature and to improve human life.
One effect of this new confidence in reason was that traditional authorities were increasingly questioned. Why should we need political or religious authorities to tell us how to live or what to believe, if each of us has the capacity to figure these things out for ourselves?
Kant expresses this Enlightenment commitment to the sovereignty of reason in the Critique :. Enlightenment is about thinking for oneself rather than letting others think for you, according to What is Enlightenment?
In this essay, Kant also expresses the Enlightenment faith in the inevitability of progress. A few independent thinkers will gradually inspire a broader cultural movement, which ultimately will lead to greater freedom of action and governmental reform.
The problem is that to some it seemed unclear whether progress would in fact ensue if reason enjoyed full sovereignty over traditional authorities; or whether unaided reasoning would instead lead straight to materialism, fatalism, atheism, skepticism Bxxxiv , or even libertinism and authoritarianism The Enlightenment commitment to the sovereignty of reason was tied to the expectation that it would not lead to any of these consequences but instead would support certain key beliefs that tradition had always sanctioned.
Crucially, these included belief in God, the soul, freedom, and the compatibility of science with morality and religion. Although a few intellectuals rejected some or all of these beliefs, the general spirit of the Enlightenment was not so radical.
The Enlightenment was about replacing traditional authorities with the authority of individual human reason, but it was not about overturning traditional moral and religious beliefs. Yet the original inspiration for the Enlightenment was the new physics, which was mechanistic. If nature is entirely governed by mechanistic, causal laws, then it may seem that there is no room for freedom, a soul, or anything but matter in motion.
This threatened the traditional view that morality requires freedom. We must be free in order to choose what is right over what is wrong, because otherwise we cannot be held responsible. It also threatened the traditional religious belief in a soul that can survive death or be resurrected in an afterlife. So modern science, the pride of the Enlightenment, the source of its optimism about the powers of human reason, threatened to undermine traditional moral and religious beliefs that free rational thought was expected to support.
This was the main intellectual crisis of the Enlightenment. In other words, free rational inquiry adequately supports all of these essential human interests and shows them to be mutually consistent. So reason deserves the sovereignty attributed to it by the Enlightenment.
To see how Kant attempts to achieve this goal in the Critique , it helps to reflect on his grounds for rejecting the Platonism of the Inaugural Dissertation. The Inaugural Dissertation also tries to reconcile Newtonian science with traditional morality and religion in a way, but its strategy is different from that of the Critique. According to the Inaugural Dissertation , Newtonian science is true of the sensible world, to which sensibility gives us access; and the understanding grasps principles of divine and moral perfection in a distinct intelligible world, which are paradigms for measuring everything in the sensible world.
So on this view our knowledge of the intelligible world is a priori because it does not depend on sensibility, and this a priori knowledge furnishes principles for judging the sensible world because in some way the sensible world itself conforms to or imitates the intelligible world. Soon after writing the Inaugural Dissertation , however, Kant expressed doubts about this view. As he explained in a February 21, letter to his friend and former student, Marcus Herz:. Here Kant entertains doubts about how a priori knowledge of an intelligible world would be possible.
The position of the Inaugural Dissertation is that the intelligible world is independent of the human understanding and of the sensible world, both of which in different ways conform to the intelligible world. But, leaving aside questions about what it means for the sensible world to conform to an intelligible world, how is it possible for the human understanding to conform to or grasp an intelligible world?
If the intelligible world is independent of our understanding, then it seems that we could grasp it only if we are passively affected by it in some way. So the only way we could grasp an intelligible world that is independent of us is through sensibility, which means that our knowledge of it could not be a priori.
The pure understanding alone could at best enable us to form representations of an intelligible world. Such a priori intellectual representations could well be figments of the brain that do not correspond to anything independent of the human mind. In any case, it is completely mysterious how there might come to be a correspondence between purely intellectual representations and an independent intelligible world.
But the Critique gives a far more modest and yet revolutionary account of a priori knowledge. This turned out to be a dead end, and Kant never again maintained that we can have a priori knowledge about an intelligible world precisely because such a world would be entirely independent of us.
The sensible world, or the world of appearances, is constructed by the human mind from a combination of sensory matter that we receive passively and a priori forms that are supplied by our cognitive faculties. We can have a priori knowledge only about aspects of the sensible world that reflect the a priori forms supplied by our cognitive faculties. So according to the Critique , a priori knowledge is possible only if and to the extent that the sensible world itself depends on the way the human mind structures its experience.
Kant characterizes this new constructivist view of experience in the Critique through an analogy with the revolution wrought by Copernicus in astronomy:. As this passage suggests, what Kant has changed in the Critique is primarily his view about the role and powers of the understanding, since he already held in the Inaugural Dissertation that sensibility contributes the forms of space and time — which he calls pure or a priori intuitions — to our cognition of the sensible world.
But the Critique claims that pure understanding too, rather than giving us insight into an intelligible world, is limited to providing forms — which he calls pure or a priori concepts — that structure our cognition of the sensible world. So now both sensibility and understanding work together to construct cognition of the sensible world, which therefore conforms to the a priori forms that are supplied by our cognitive faculties: the a priori intuitions of sensibility and the a priori concepts of the understanding.
This account is analogous to the heliocentric revolution of Copernicus in astronomy because both require contributions from the observer to be factored into explanations of phenomena, although neither reduces phenomena to the contributions of observers alone. For Kant, analogously, the phenomena of human experience depend on both the sensory data that we receive passively through sensibility and the way our mind actively processes this data according to its own a priori rules.
These rules supply the general framework in which the sensible world and all the objects or phenomena in it appear to us. So the sensible world and its phenomena are not entirely independent of the human mind, which contributes its basic structure. First, it gives Kant a new and ingenious way of placing modern science on an a priori foundation. In other words, the sensible world necessarily conforms to certain fundamental laws — such as that every event has a cause — because the human mind constructs it according to those laws.
Moreover, we can identify those laws by reflecting on the conditions of possible experience, which reveals that it would be impossible for us to experience a world in which, for example, any given event fails to have a cause.
From this Kant concludes that metaphysics is indeed possible in the sense that we can have a priori knowledge that the entire sensible world — not just our actual experience, but any possible human experience — necessarily conforms to certain laws.
Kant calls this immanent metaphysics or the metaphysics of experience, because it deals with the essential principles that are immanent to human experience. In the Critique Kant thus rejects the insight into an intelligible world that he defended in the Inaugural Dissertation , and he now claims that rejecting knowledge about things in themselves is necessary for reconciling science with traditional morality and religion.
This is because he claims that belief in God, freedom, and immortality have a strictly moral basis, and yet adopting these beliefs on moral grounds would be unjustified if we could know that they were false.
Restricting knowledge to appearances and relegating God and the soul to an unknowable realm of things in themselves guarantees that it is impossible to disprove claims about God and the freedom or immortality of the soul, which moral arguments may therefore justify us in believing. Moreover, the determinism of modern science no longer threatens the freedom required by traditional morality, because science and therefore determinism apply only to appearances, and there is room for freedom in the realm of things in themselves, where the self or soul is located.
We cannot know theoretically that we are free, because we cannot know anything about things in themselves. In this way, Kant replaces transcendent metaphysics with a new practical science that he calls the metaphysics of morals.
Perhaps the central and most controversial thesis of the Critique of Pure Reason is that human beings experience only appearances, not things in themselves; and that space and time are only subjective forms of human intuition that would not subsist in themselves if one were to abstract from all subjective conditions of human intuition.
Kant calls this thesis transcendental idealism. Kant introduces transcendental idealism in the part of the Critique called the Transcendental Aesthetic, and scholars generally agree that for Kant transcendental idealism encompasses at least the following claims:.
Two general types of interpretation have been especially influential, however. This section provides an overview of these two interpretations, although it should be emphasized that much important scholarship on transcendental idealism does not fall neatly into either of these two camps. It has been a live interpretive option since then and remains so today, although it no longer enjoys the dominance that it once did.
According to the two-objects interpretation, transcendental idealism is essentially a metaphysical thesis that distinguishes between two classes of objects: appearances and things in themselves.
Another name for this view is the two-worlds interpretation, since it can also be expressed by saying that transcendental idealism essentially distinguishes between a world of appearances and another world of things in themselves.
Things in themselves, on this interpretation, are absolutely real in the sense that they would exist and have whatever properties they have even if no human beings were around to perceive them. Appearances, on the other hand, are not absolutely real in that sense, because their existence and properties depend on human perceivers. Moreover, whenever appearances do exist, in some sense they exist in the mind of human perceivers.
So appearances are mental entities or mental representations. This, coupled with the claim that we experience only appearances, makes transcendental idealism a form of phenomenalism on this interpretation, because it reduces the objects of experience to mental representations. All of our experiences — all of our perceptions of objects and events in space, even those objects and events themselves, and all non-spatial but still temporal thoughts and feelings — fall into the class of appearances that exist in the mind of human perceivers.
These appearances cut us off entirely from the reality of things in themselves, which are non-spatial and non-temporal. In principle we cannot know how things in themselves affect our senses, because our experience and knowledge is limited to the world of appearances constructed by and in the mind.
Things in themselves are therefore a sort of theoretical posit, whose existence and role are required by the theory but are not directly verifiable. The main problems with the two-objects interpretation are philosophical. Most readers of Kant who have interpreted his transcendental idealism in this way have been — often very — critical of it, for reasons such as the following:.
First, at best Kant is walking a fine line in claiming on the one hand that we can have no knowledge about things in themselves, but on the other hand that we know that things in themselves exist, that they affect our senses, and that they are non-spatial and non-temporal.
At worst his theory depends on contradictory claims about what we can and cannot know about things in themselves. Some versions of this objection proceed from premises that Kant rejects. But Kant denies that appearances are unreal: they are just as real as things in themselves but are in a different metaphysical class. But just as Kant denies that things in themselves are the only or privileged reality, he also denies that correspondence with things in themselves is the only kind of truth.
Empirical judgments are true just in case they correspond with their empirical objects in accordance with the a priori principles that structure all possible human experience. But the fact that Kant can appeal in this way to an objective criterion of empirical truth that is internal to our experience has not been enough to convince some critics that Kant is innocent of an unacceptable form of skepticism, mainly because of his insistence on our irreparable ignorance about things in themselves.
The role of things in themselves, on the two-object interpretation, is to affect our senses and thereby to provide the sensory data from which our cognitive faculties construct appearances within the framework of our a priori intuitions of space and time and a priori concepts such as causality.
But if there is no space, time, change, or causation in the realm of things in themselves, then how can things in themselves affect us? Transcendental affection seems to involve a causal relation between things in themselves and our sensibility.
If this is simply the way we unavoidably think about transcendental affection, because we can give positive content to this thought only by employing the concept of a cause, while it is nevertheless strictly false that things in themselves affect us causally, then it seems not only that we are ignorant of how things in themselves really affect us.
It seems, rather, to be incoherent that things in themselves could affect us at all if they are not in space or time. On this view, transcendental idealism does not distinguish between two classes of objects but rather between two different aspects of one and the same class of objects. That is, appearances are aspects of the same objects that also exist in themselves. So, on this reading, appearances are not mental representations, and transcendental idealism is not a form of phenomenalism.
There are at least two main versions of the two-aspects theory. One version treats transcendental idealism as a metaphysical theory according to which objects have two aspects in the sense that they have two sets of properties: one set of relational properties that appear to us and are spatial and temporal, and another set of intrinsic properties that do not appear to us and are not spatial or temporal Langton This property-dualist interpretation faces epistemological objections similar to those faced by the two-objects interpretation, because we are in no better position to acquire knowledge about properties that do not appear to us than we are to acquire knowledge about objects that do not appear to us.
Moreover, this interpretation also seems to imply that things in themselves are spatial and temporal, since appearances have spatial and temporal properties, and on this view appearances are the same objects as things in themselves. But Kant explicitly denies that space and time are properties of things in themselves. A second version of the two-aspects theory departs more radically from the traditional two-objects interpretation by denying that transcendental idealism is at bottom a metaphysical theory.
Instead, it interprets transcendental idealism as a fundamentally epistemological theory that distinguishes between two standpoints on the objects of experience: the human standpoint, from which objects are viewed relative to epistemic conditions that are peculiar to human cognitive faculties namely, the a priori forms of our sensible intuition ; and the standpoint of an intuitive intellect, from which the same objects could be known in themselves and independently of any epistemic conditions Allison Human beings cannot really take up the latter standpoint but can form only an empty concept of things as they exist in themselves by abstracting from all the content of our experience and leaving only the purely formal thought of an object in general.
So transcendental idealism, on this interpretation, is essentially the thesis that we are limited to the human standpoint, and the concept of a thing in itself plays the role of enabling us to chart the boundaries of the human standpoint by stepping beyond them in abstract but empty thought.
One criticism of this epistemological version of the two-aspects theory is that it avoids the objections to other interpretations by attributing to Kant a more limited project than the text of the Critique warrants. There are passages that support this reading.
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