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KANT
The Three Critiques
Andrew Ward
polity
Copyright © Andrew Ward 2006
The right of Andrew Ward to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2006 by Polity Press
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ISBN-13: 978-15095-5112-5
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Preface
Over the last fifty years, there has been a widespread tendency among English-speaking philosophers to downplay Kant’s idealism. This seems to me to have been a mistake – so far, at least, as gaining an understanding of Kant’s own ideas is concerned. In this study, I offer an interpretation of the main themes in his three Critiques which places his mature thought squarely within the tradition of idealism: a tradition which includes the theories of Bishop Berkeley and of David Hume (however much Kant himself might have been surprised to learn that Hume falls into this tradition, and however much he would have disliked being compared with Berkeley).
Going along with the emphasis on idealism, I attempt to explain a number of Kant’s central views – those concerning our knowledge of objects in space and time, the ground of our moral obligations and our judgments of beauty – as, in part, reactions to the scepticism and empiricism of Hume. The latter’s views and, more to the point, the arguments that he provides for them are generally both clear and invigorating. While Kant’s views are nearly always invigorating, his reasons for holding them are seldom clear, at least when considered out of context. By placing some of his key philosophical ideas alongside those of Hume, the aim is to elucidate Kant’s arguments and, thereby, to offer an assessment of his conclusions.
A. W.
London, January 2006
Abbreviations and Conventions
CJCritique of Judgment (1790)CPractRCritique of Practical Reason (1788)CPRCritique of Pure Reason (1st edition 1781, 2nd edition 1787)ProlProlegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (1783)
Quotations from Kant’s works are referred to by volume and page number in the German Akademie edition, Kants gesammelte Schriften, ed. Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1900– ), with the exception of quotations from the Critique of Pure Reason, which are referred to by the pagination from the 1st edition of 1781 (cited as A) and/or the 2nd edition of 1787 (cited as B).
Acknowledgments
I should like to express my thanks to Palgrave Macmillan for permission to quote from Critique of Pure Reason by Kant/Kemp-Smith (second edition) and to Cambridge University Press for permission to quote from Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason edited by Mary J. Gregor and with an introduction by Andrews Reath, 1997.
1 A General Introduction to Kant’s Copernican Revolution in Philosophy, and its Relation to Scientific Knowledge and Transcendent Metaphysics
I want to introduce Kant’s philosophical approach in the Critique of Pure Reason – also known as the First Critique – by looking at what he took to be Hume’s sceptical stance on causation, and how, in general terms, he sought to overcome it. When Kant himself set out the main threads of his argument in his own introductory essay on the First Critique, unappealingly entitled Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics that will be able to Present itself as a Science, it was his reaction to Hume’s scepticism about causation that he particularly singled out. He did so not only because Hume’s scepticism awoke him from his dogmatic slumbers, but, more crucially, because it gave him the hint of the correct approach to philosophical problems:
Since Locke’s and Leibniz’s Essays, or rather since the beginning of Metaphysics as far as the history of it reaches, no event has occurred which could have been more decisive in respect of the fate of this science than the attack that David Hume made on it. He brought no light into this kind of knowledge, but he struck a spark at which a light could well have been kindled, if it had found a receptive tinder and if the glow had been carefully kept up and increased. (Prol, Preface; 4:257).
Hume’s attack on causation was aimed at the principle that every event, or change of state, in nature must have a cause. He did not deny that we believed the principle to be true. What he denied was that we were justified in our belief. For the principle claims necessity as well as universality: it states that every event in nature must have a cause. How, asks Hume, could such a connection, a universal and necessary connection, possibly
