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Kant and the Epistemology of Metaphysics

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Kant and the Epistemology of Metaphysics Kant and the Epistemology of Metaphysics Eilert Sundt-Ohlsen Submitted for the Degree of PhD at King’s College London Abstract I argue in this thesis that the topic of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is an epistemology of metaphysics. This has important consequences for how the argumentative structure of the work should be understood. While the Critique constitutes an indispensable part of Kant’s philosophy in general and his ethics in particular, it is doubtful whether it is fully successful as it stands. In a footnote to his Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science Kant hints at an alternative argumentative strategy to establish the claims of the Critique, but he seems not to have developed this in the subsequent 2nd edition of the Critique. In this thesis I present a critical reconstruction of this alternative argumentative strategy applied to the central topics of the Transcendental Analytic. I claim that it is the aim of the Transcendental Analytic as a whole to provide a justification for the claim that pure concepts – Categories – are validly applied to objects of experience. Following Kant’s hint in the footnote to the Foundations, I argue that this can be established directly from an analysis of the forms of empirical judgements, and that claims about space and time as forms of intuition and considerations about the nature of human sensibility, are redundant. This reconstruction offers a profoundly Kantian, yet robustly realist way of resolving important philosophical problems. C o n t e n t s Chapter 1 – Introduction 7 1.1 The purpose of the Critique of Pure Reason 7 a) The role of the first Critique in Kant’s critical philosophy 8 b) The disenchantment with metaphysics 10 1.2 Reading the Critique of Pure Reason 12 1.3 The Epistemology of Metaphysics 13 1.4 The overall argumentative structure of the Critique 18 a) The form of empirical knowledge 19 b) “Making experience possible” – subjective and objective conditions 21 1.5 The aims of this thesis 23 Chapter 2 – Methodology 25 2.1 Conceptual analysis 25 2.2 Explication 31 2.3 Meaning and application criteria 32 Chapter 3 – Representations and objects 34 3.1 The ground of representance 34 a) Kant’s background assumptions 38 b) The variety of representations 38 3.2 Receptivity and sensation 39 a) Sensation and environment 39 b) Human sensibility and sensation 43 3.3 Concepts and spontaneity 45 a) The facts about concepts 46 b) The representance of concepts 50 c) Perception and particulars 62 d) Abstractionism and current debate 65 3.4 Pure representations 66 Chapter 4 – The formal analysis of empirical knowledge 70 4.1 Empirical knowledge consists of judgements 71 a) Judgements and intuition – the simple view 72 b) Problems with the simple view 74 c) A fuller view of judgements and intuition 79 d) Problems with the fuller view 86 e) Judgments, intuitions and sortals 87 f) Towards an analysis of judgement 91 4.2 Kant’s table of Judgements 91 – 3 – Contents Chapter 5 – The Key to Metaphysics 95 5.1 Kant’s table of categories 96 5.2 The Transcendental Deduction of the Categories 100 a) The function of the Transcendental Deduction 100 b) Synthesis and the “unities of self-consciousness” 106 c) The argumentative structure of the Transcendental Deduction 121 5.3 Intuitions and the mathematical categories (step II) 127 a) The objectivity of judgements – §19 129 b) Categorisation of Intuitions – §20 130 c) Quantity of intuitions 133 d) Quality of intuitions 134 e) The first turn of the Key to Metaphysics 136 f) The transition to dynamical categories 137 5.4 Complex judgements and the dynamical categories (step III) 141 b) The Arguments of Step III 144 c) Summary of the arguments of the Transcendental Deduction 150 Chapter 6 – Temporal relations and Experience 152 6.1 Time, Combination and Subsumption 152 a) “Transcendental time determinations” 154 b) Schemata and the mathematical Categories 156 c) The medium of synthetic judgements 157 d) Time – the container of empirical judgements 159 e) Particular and general time-relations 161 6.2 Objectivity and the object of Experience 162 a) Successions of experiences and the experience of succession 162 b) Rules of Apprehension 168 c) The faculty of rules 170 d) The criterion of objectivity 172 6.3 Dictating Laws to Nature 176 a) Categories and basic experience 176 b) Laws and Nature 177 c) How Laws prescribed by Reason make Nature Possible 180 6.4 Synthetic Principles of Pure Understanding 181 a) Analogies of Experience 182 Chapter 7 – The 1st Analogy – Persistence and Substance 187 7.1 The notion of substance 187 a) The unity of time and the unity of nature 187 7.2 Transformational judgements 190 7.3 The Form of Transformational Judgements 193 7.4 The Principle of Persistence 194 a) The ambiguity of ‘change’ 194 b) The claim and its proof 196 c) Transformational judgements and The Ultimate Subject 197 7.5 That concept which can be thought as subject only 199 – 4 – Contents a) Generality and specificity of concepts 202 b) Summary – conclusions from the analysis of transformational judgements 205 7.6 The regulativity of the Principle of Persistence 207 a) Constitutive and regulative principles 208 b) Implementation of the regulative principle 215 c) The need for the regulative principle 220 Chapter 8 – The 2nd Analogy – Succession and Causation 224 8.1 Hypothetical Judgements 224 8.2 The Causal Principle 225 8.3 Causal Laws 227 8.4 The test for Causality 229 a) The Practice of Experimentation 230 8.5 The Universality of the Causal Principle 234 a) The generality of events 234 8.6 The Utility of the Causal Principle 237 Chapter 9 – The 3rd Analogy – Simultaneity 241 9.1 The Principle of Simultaneity 241 9.2 Typical Simultaneity 244 9.3 The third Relational Judgement 246 a) The Community of Judgements 248 9.4 The Compositum Reale 249 9.5 Systematic Experience 250 Chapter 10 – Epilogue 251 Chapter 11 – Appendices 252 11.1 The revised tables 252 a) The Table Of Judgements 252 b) The Table Of Categories 253 11.2 Bibliography 254 a) Works by Kant 254 b) Other sources 254 11.3 Specimen judgements 257 11.4 Figures 257 11.5 Index 258 – 5 – For Anna-Sara Acknowledgements This thesis has been made possible in part by an award from the ORS Awards Scheme. Thanks are due to many individuals who have all contributed in various ways to making this a reality. – Jens Saugstad at the University of Oslo who first showed me that trying to understand Kant is not an open-and-shut case. – My teachers at Kings College London who have provided invaluable insight, support, encouragement and criticism: Jim Hopkins, Keith Hossack, Mark Sainsbury and Anthony Savile. – Fellow students and friends who have either read parts or all of the thesis in various stages or been subjected to this material in seminar groups and discussions: Juliana Cardinale, Frank Carson, Tom Crowther, Pierre Cruse, Aleksandra Derra-Wlochowicz, Michael Gabbay, David Levy, Tom Neylan, Silvio Pinto, Elisabeth Schellekens, Paul Sheehy, David Spurrett, and of course Anna-Sara Malmgren. – 6 – C h a p t e r 1 – I n t r o d u c t i o n This thesis is concerned with Immanuel Kant’s philosophy as expressed in his Critique of Pure Reason.1 I am sympathetic to the broad lines of Kant’s arguments, and the kinds of aims and motivations that seem to have guided the writing of his “Critical” philosophy, though I have found myself in disagreement with a large number of the details of his arguments. I shall argue that Kant is correct in pointing out many epistemic phenomena that stand in need of an explanation, but that the actual explanations he offers are frequently mistaken. Even if Kant sometimes argues from false premises, his conclusions might nevertheless be true, and highly relevant to philosophical problems that are interesting not only in an historical sense. My aim in the present thesis is present a critical reconstruction of a central line of argument in the Critique. The view that I shall be presenting is not one that is completely and explicitly stated by Kant. Nevertheless – although I am in no position to prove this – I believe that it is a view that must at least occasionally have been present in Kant’s mind; this is a line of thought that he must have been on to even if he never stated it completely. Further, I believe that this view allows the Critique to fulfil its intended role in Kant’s overall philosophy. I shall try to show how this view can be gleaned from Kant’s text in a number of important passages, and that it affords a way to resolve a number of problems. 1.1 The purpose of the Critique of Pure Reason There seems to be to two clear strands to Kant’s motivation for writing the Critique. One is the work’s place in Kant’s philosophy at large, which he clearly regarded as an integrated whole; the other is Kant’s more specific disenchantment with the state of the then current metaphysics. 1 Hereafter referred to as ‘the Critique’ – 7 – Kant and the Epistemology of Metaphysics Eilert Sundt-Ohlsen a) The role of the first Critique in Kant’s critical philosophy From the outset, Kant saw the first Critique of Pure Reason, and the subsequent Critique of Practical Reason on morals and moral reasoning as parts of an integrated whole. This is evident in a letter to his pupil, Marcus Herz, of 1772.
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