Rabbi Michael Kagan
Dept. of Philosophy
Le Moyne College
Syracuse, NY  13214-1399

The threat from skepticism is an old one,going back to the academic and Pyrronic skeptics by way of Descartes. (RecommendPopkin's Skepticism from Erasmus to Descartes [Spinoza].

Review Descartes' dream and evil demonarguments and his solution. Relate the history of the mind/body problemthrough Lockeian "something I know not what", Berekelian monism, and Humewho ended up with habits and ideas floating about. Whose Dialogues didin design, whose causal arguments turned science into a matter of habitformation.   Refer students to  [My1997 notes on Descartes].

Kant responds to these challenges by attemptingto answer 4 questions, the "philosophy of world citizens":

1) What can I know?--
2) What ought I do
3) What may I hope?
4) What is man?

I. Kant 's Life

Like Socrates, Kant was a philosopher whostrove to stay at home. (these Bio notes from Matson, pp. 399ff). Thoughoriginally interested in becoming a pastor, Kant gave up theology for naturalscience and philosophy. When 30 he published a General Natural Historyand Theory of the Heavens where he suggested that the sun and planetsoriginated as condensations of diffuse matter (the Nebular Hypothesis ahalf century before Laplace), supporting this conjecture with detailedmathematical reasoning." Kant managed on the popularity of his lectures(as Priovatdocent) after an earlier career of tutoring and billiards.

II. The Problem

The threat from skepticism is an old one,going back to the academic and Pyrronic skeptics by way of Descartes. (RecommendPopkin's Skepticism from Erasmus to Descartes [Spinoza].

Review Descartes' dream and evil demonarguments and his solution. RElate the history of the mind/body problemthrough Lockeian---1632-1704, Essay Concerning Human Understanding,1690--- "something I know not what", Berekelian monism---1685-1753, EssayTowards a New Theory of Vision (1709), PRinciples of Human Knowledge(1710), Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous (1713) and Hume---(1711-76),Treatise of Human Nature (1739+40), Inquiry Concerning HumanUnderstanding (1748), Inquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals(1752), Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1777 posthumously)who ended up with habits and ideas floating about. Whose Dialogues didin design, whose causal arguments turned science into a matter of habitformation {and undermined traditional rational religion's proofs basedon causation}.

KAnt responds to these challenges by attemptingto answer 4 questions, the "philosophy of world citizens":

1) What can I know?--2) What ought I do3) What may I hope?4) What is man?Notes from Wallace I. Matson's A History of Philosophy (New York, Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1968).[Kant's response to the challenges]

III. How is Pure mathematicsPossible?

The forms of sensibility (space and time)characterize all outer appearances. Space is infinite, our experience ofit not. Therefore space not= our experience of space. As Matson s it, "wesee the world through space-colored glasses." The synthetic a prioricharacter of time, the form of inner sense, is the source of math. Thiskind of argument from knowledge to the conditions of its possibility, is"transcendental," as is the knowledge gained of the conditions of suchexperience. Though Kant allows that we have knowledge that in this sensetranscends experience, that kind of knowledge is limited to the conditionsof experience.

IV. How Is Pure Science of NaturePossible?

Kant first distinguishes judgments of perceptionform judgments of experience--the former along the lines of it seems redto me the latter like the heat caused the milk to go bad so quickly.

Judgments of experience have recourse toenduring things, substances, which have real relations to other substances,i.e., causal. If cause really were just habit, then judgments of experiencewould not differ from judgments of perception, there would be no objectiveknowledge of the real world.

But they (judgments of perception and judgmentsof experience) are different matters, and there is real objective knowledgeabout the world. This happens since the mind not only contributes spaceand time, but also categories of, the pure concepts of the understandingof which there are 10 ((3) these synthetic a priori principles areuniversal judgments applied to the world of experience--phenomena in spaceand time--[SEE P. 50 FOR TABLE OF JUDGMENTS]
(a) e.g., hypothetical judgment (if-then)yields causality--judgements under the category of cause

Wallace Matson continues by complicatinghis space colored glasses analogy by thinking of "the mind as a camerawhich takes a picture of the world through a space-colored lense onto afilm that has to be developed by the use of substantial and causes andten other kinds Error! Reference source not found. of chemicals." Matsonthen provides the useful complication of pointing out that if the camerais the only source of knowledge and we know that the film is BLACK ANDWHITE, then we will know something about the products of such a cameraand information got through those photos. In this sense, then, "The understandingdoes not derive its laws (a priori) from, but prescribes them to,nature." This, is Kant's Copernican revolution in philosophy. Skepticismcan be avoided, Kant argues, since scepticism is based on the idea thatwe must somehow conform to the object known; "Kant claimed to have avoidedthese difficulties by making the object known conform to the knower." (Matson,p. 407)

V. The Illusions of Reason

1. The world had/had not a beginning. Bothfounder on applying time to the entire world and thing in itself, insteadof to possible experience. Both thesis and antithesis are false (each sideinvolves a false assumption like arguing about the baldness of the kingof America).

2. Kant similarly diagnoses arguments asto infinite/non-infinite spatial extensionality.

3. regarding freedom (our own self-causality)and determinism; Kant says "your both right". Determinism applies to appearances.The demands of morality require freedom of moral agents considered as thingsin themselves. ---Goto section on Kant's ethics---

{regarding self identity--succession ofperceptions not = perception of successions which we do have. A contextof perceptions--so far so good, but we do not thus get the simple substantialself. }
(Antinomies, in Critique of Pure ReasonB454, Norman Kent smith trans., 396).  Prolegomena, pp. 86ff-98),P. 92mid-95 top, end with freedom for transition to ethics)

VI. Kant's ethics

CI1: Act only according to the maxim whichyou can at the same time will that it should become a universal law." (Matson416 citing Foundations, p. 39).

CI2: Act so that you treat humanity, whetherin your person or in that of another, always as an end and never as a meansonly." (ibid., citing , Foundations., 147)

CI3: (autonomy and freedom and legislation):Act as if you were Legislator in the realm of ends."

Antinomy 4. God the necessary being cannotbe got from the ontological argument nor the derivatives cosmological,or design. However, we can get G back as a regulative ideal. A possibility.A postulate of practical reason. Some criticize Kant thinking he derivesmorality from G.; to me it looks the other way. [B856; Norman Kent smithtrans., 650, Critique of Pure Reason).