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|Historical Context=Born in 18th century Europe, Kant was thrown into a time where the emergence of Newtonian science sparked a social and cultural revolution – The Enlightenment. With his revolutionary discoveries, Newton inspired the society to challenge the norm of Roman Catholicism and evoked an intellectual epiphany where people began to attempt explaining nature without consulting religion.[[CiteRef::Bristow (2011)]] As a result, two epistemological schools of thought surfaced: classical rationalism and classical empiricism. The dispute between these two views dominated the 17th century, where rationalists such as René Descartes (1596-1650) and Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716) and empiricists such as John Locke (1632-1704) and David Hume (1711-1776) were in a stalemate with regards to the epistemological nature of the world.[[CiteRef::Samet (2008)]] Rationalism, or apriorism, is the view that it is possible to attain knowledge independent of experience, i.e. there exists “a priori” innate knowledge that we know as part of our rational nature or through our intuition.[[CiteRef::Markie (2015)]] It holds that through the attainment of synthetic a priori knowledge outside of our sensory experience, we can deduce further theories from those axioms that will allow us to make sense of the world – that is, we are able to rationalise nature without necessarily consulting our senses. Two of its most well known proponents, Gottfried Leibniz and René Descartes, both believed that since: a) senses were unable to provide us with the ‘truth’ due to an irreconcilable level of uncertainty with our perceptions, and b) the world is intelligible and understandable, innate universal knowledge must exist (Samet, 2008), Indeed, retrospectively we now know their respective a priori axioms were unsound, but their theories nonetheless provided more insight on the epistemological issues that both empiricism and itself shared, which will soon be explained. Empiricism, on the other hand, holds the opposite view that only our senses provide us with an accurate description of the world, and only through sensory experiences are we able to capture the objective world that we live in, make sense of each individual observation and of the world through inductive logic (Samet, 2008). Empiricists such as Locke believed that empiricism is superior to rationalism for two distinct reasons. Firstly, Locke argued that classical rationalists often retreated to non-factual (i.e. non-empirical) claims for support: namely intuition and ‘innate’ knowledge. Secondly, empiricist arguments were preferred for their simplicity. However, despite this divide, empiricism and rationalism both suffered from the same 2 criticisms that are proposed by skeptics such as David Hume (1711-1776) and Pyrrho (360-270BC) who brought up the problems of induction and sensations respectively.
A brief summary of these problems, which is needed as Kant offers an ingenious solution to the criticisms that both the empiricists and rationalists faced, is as follows. The ‘Problem of Sensations’ stems from Pyrrho’s skepticism about the reliability of our senses and whether they are adequate in providing us with the “truth”, due to the possibility that reality is not what it seems. This is important because it implies that we cannot ever make claims of truth (or lie) about the world solely based on our observations,[[CiteRef::Annas and Barnes (Eds.) (1985)|p.11]] thus directly dismantling classical empiricism. Secondly, Hume’s ‘Problem of Induction’ stipulates that it is impossible to attain a rationally certain synthetic statement from a collection of individual observations through inductive logic, no matter how large the sample size.[[CiteRef::White (2015)|p.275]]. This is because one refuting instance is enough to dismantle the whole generalisation, and that a refuting instance is always possible with a synthetic statement. Together they imply that it is impossible to make objective statements of the world through empiricism. For example, empiricists have attempted to answer the problem of induction by appealing to past occurrences, but this simply results in a circular argument. Likewise, the rationalist axiomatic system was equally unable to provide an adequate solution to these problems. Leibniz attempted to formulate a principle that aims to show the necessity of the “uniformity of nature”. Named “The Principle of Sufficient Reason”, Leibniz states that it is irrational for something to happen – and conversely, for something not to happen – without reason and establishes this as an a priori axiom that any rationalisation of nature must be contingent upon.[[CiteRef::Belot (2001)|p.62]] However, Hume’s problem persists, as this axiom is still inevitably synthetic and simply cannot guarantee the certainty of inductively obtained conclusions.
|Major Contributions=Kant, in his first Critique, responds to both these problems, along with revitalising Leibniz’s Principle of Sufficient Reason (hereafter referred to as PSR) in light of its criticism. He aimed to reconcile rationalism with empiricism by devising a system that validated our sensations as means to rationalise nature, whilst also reformulating the PSR based on his ideas of intellect being the preconditions of our experience, resolving both the aforementioned problems. Kant develops the rationalist stance by asserting that there are fundamental synthetic a priori statements that are not only independent of experience, but actually precedes sensation as a precondition that sensory experience is contingent upon. He coined a few terms, as previously mentioned, that aided the articulation of his overall case.
To address Pyrrho’s problem of sensations, Kant developed the noumena/phenomena distinction, and asserted that our senses only explained the world of phenomena rather than make objective claims about the world of noumena. Thus, Pyrrho’s problem is irrelevant because Kant simply doesn’t assert that our empirical statements refer to the objective ‘truth’. This distinction divides the world of forms (the “intelligible world”) with the world of appearances (the “sensible world”).[[CiteRef::Kant (1781)]] The former, which he calls the noumena, is the objective reality: a reality representing objects “in themselves” behind our perceptions. To Kant, the world of noumena merely puts up a façade of appearances to the senses (p.356), and what we perceive collectively form the world of phenomena (p.177). Since our perceptions pertain only to our subjective world of phenomena, Pyrrho’s skepticism regarding the certainty of synthetic statements is avoided – or rather, simply tacitly accepted by Kant, as the Kantian system now simply states that all observational statements don’t make objective claims.
To tackle Hume’s problem of induction, Kant first asserted that there were synthetic a priori forms that preceded experience. Those are: space, time, conservation of substance, and causality. Kant believed he deduced those 4 forms based on 3 premises: Classical empiricism/rationalism does not guarantee absolute certainty, and absolute certainty does exist in the form of Newtonian physics. The former 2 are the forms of sensibility – the transcendental aesthetic,[[CiteRef::Guyer (1992)|p.13]] and they are a priori as their existences are independent of any properties, objects or subjective conditions.[[CiteRef::Kant (1781)|p.177]] Space is simply the collection of all external appearances; an intuition that rationalises our reception of the outer world. Time, on the other hand, is the formal a priori condition that governs all appearances by relating it to the agents “inner state” (p.180). The latter 2 are forms of pure reason – the transcendental dialectic.[[CiteRef::Guyer (1992)|p.15]] Wanting to confirm and extend the validity and success of Newtonian mechanics, Kant aimed to deduce the certainty of causality and conservation of substance by postulating that they must be preconditions of experience, and that the world must follow strict causality, or else the world wouldn’t be knowable.[[CiteRef::Friedman (1992)|p.180]] The “totality” of objects is the unity of the limitations the object has in reality, the causal relationships it participates in with other objects, and its necessary existence implied simply by the possibility of its existence.[[CiteRef::Kant (1781)|p.212]] All three aspects form the totality of an object, and collectively the totality of nature.[[CiteRef::Friedman (1992)|p.167]] With these concepts in mind, he developed what was essentially Leibniz’s PSR as the Principle of Universal Causation – which necessitates that the principle of universal causality be a priori. If it’s not a priori, our perceptions will be insignificant and baseless in an unorderly world, and it simply directly contradicts the contemporary successes with rationalising the world through mathematical and mechanistic laws, as well as the notion of totality within nature.
Furthermore, with these 4 a priori forms of experience Kant restored the belief that valid synthetic a priori statements may exist, after the setbacks of Descartes and Leibniz. None of these a priori forms are analytic intuitions, as they are not simply a clarification of definitions. Nor are these forms a posteriori, as they precondition experience. Kant provided an incredibly complex yet ingenious way of viewing reality, and his epistemological distinctions of statements as well as the metaphysical distinction of objective and subjective realities has influenced discussions up until the 20th century.