Kant’s answer to the question: how is metaphysics as a science possible?2 What is the difference between analytic and synthetic judgements? Give examples.
3 ‘The pure conceptions of the understanding have no meaning whatever, when they quit the objects of experience and refer to things in themselves’ (noumena) (Kant). Explain and critically discuss.
Suggestions for Further Reading (Including Internet Resources)
1 I. Kant, Prolegomena [1783], ed. G. Zöller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); contains an introduction and analysis of the arguments, as also does the edition of G. Hatfield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
2 For other texts and commentaries on Kant, see readings at the end of Part I, section 8.
3 See also H. E. Allinson, Kant’s Transcendental Idealism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983) and P. Guyer (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), esp. introduction and ch. 4.
4 For online resources, see those at the end of Part I, section 8. See also Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-transcendental-idealism/ (by R. Stang), and the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy at https://www.iep.utm.edu/kantmeta/, sections 1–7 (by M. McCormick).
5 Good podcast lectures include D. Robinson https://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/series/kants-critique-pure-reason, lectures 2–4 (Oxford University, 2011); A. F. Holmes lecture 52 (Kant’s epistemology) from his History of Philosophy series https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7n9Vs6m-fA; and S. Stuart’s lecture series on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason at https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/kants-epistemology/id544311813. See also R. P. Wolf’s video lecture series on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (McMaster University 2016), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d__In2PQS60
6 For many other materials on Kant, see KantPapers.org: http://kantpapers.org/articles.php.
Notes
* Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena [1783], excerpts from §§ 1, 5, 11, 12, 18, 29, 30, 32, 33 and ‘Solution of the General Problem of the Prolegomena’. English version trans. E. Belfort, in Kant’s Prolegomena (London: Bell, 1891), pp. 12–15, 22–3, 30–1, 44, 59–60, 60–1, 62–3, 115–16; with minor modifications.
1 1 Critique of Pure Reason, A5; B8.
2 2 ‘Coal burns’, or ‘bread nourishes’, are synthetic propositions, since their truth cannot be established merely by analysing the meaning of the subject terms (‘coal’, ‘bread’). Contrast this with ultimately uninformative tautological or analytic propositions, such as ‘bachelors are unmarried’, where the predicate (unmarried) is contained within the subject (contained within the concept of bachelorhood). Kant’s position should be compared with that of Hume, who argues that no genuinely informative propositions can be known a priori (see introduction to extract 7, above).
3 3 His argument here seems questionable, since the relevant proposition is clearly analytic if we define ‘analytic’ (as Kant himself sometimes does) as that which cannot be denied without contradiction.
4 4 This argument is developed in the Critique of Pure Reason; see below, Part VII, extract 7.
5 5 ‘Aesthetic’ (from the Greek word for sensory awareness) is the term used by Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason to refer to the temporal and spatial intuitions in terms of which we experience the world.
9 Reality as Flux: Alfred Whitehead, Process and Reality, and Science and the Modern World*
Our next extract is from the work of the English philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, who co-authored with Bertrand Russell a famous text on the foundations of mathematics, Principia Mathematica (published 1910–13), but who went on in the 1920s (when he was in his sixties) to develop a comprehensive theory of metaphysics that was very much his own. Many previous approaches, going back to Aristotle (see extract 2, above), had classified reality in terms of substances – individual enduring subjects defined in terms of their essential attributes. Whitehead came to think that this ontology of substances gave far too fixed a picture of the ultimate nature of reality. In our opening extract, from his Process and Reality (based on his Gifford Lectures given in at the University of Edinburgh in 1927–28), Whitehead gives a very different account of reality as fundamentally involving flow or ‘fluency’ – a metaphysics of ‘flux’, as he calls it – in contrast to the traditional metaphysics of substance.
In the second extract, from his Science and the Modern World (1925), Whitehead takes as his particular target Descartes’s notion of substance (see extract 3 above), which he criticizes as leading to a split between on the one hand a materialistic and mechanical conception of nature, and on the other a separate private realm of ‘cogitating minds’ (compare Part IV, extract 3). In place of this, Whitehead proposes an organic conception of reality as a unified unfolding process, where our mental perceptions of the world around us are simply one aspect of the overall reality adjusting itself to another: as Whitehead puts it, one aspect ‘prehends’ (grasps, gathers in or incorporates) another aspect of reality into itself. The overall framework is thus a holistic or organic one, and ‘the organic starting point is from the analysis of process as the realisation of events disposed in an interlocked community’. So in place of individual objects, Whitehead considers the primary unit to be the event: ‘the event is the unit of things real’. In the penultimate paragraph of our abstract Whitehead suggests that his conception of reality is supported by modern science, where the old picture of individual substances and their essential properties has given way to much more fluid notions, such as that of an ‘electromagnetic field of activity pervading space and time’. In the last paragraph Whiteheads adds the interesting point that the language of modern science is nevertheless very abstract: the reports of the observer are taken account of, but the observer’s actual experience (e.g. of the colour red) is left out. Whitehead’s approach aims to resolve this duality into an organic whole made up of interlocking aspects of a single event.
Whitehead’s style is not always easy to follow, and his mode of philosophizing can seem speculative and schematic to those accustomed to the more tightly focused arguments of contemporary analytic philosophy. But his philosophy can nevertheless be located along an enduring strand of philosophical thought that goes back to Heraclitus (as Whitehead himself notes below), and has something in common with Leibniz’s ‘organic’ conception of activity as being fundamental to reality (see extract 5, above), as well as being reminiscent in part of the Hegelian idea of the world as a dynamic process unfolding over time (see Part I, extract 9). In addition, his thought has some affinities with the views of the pragmatists (see Part I, extract 10), which influenced him following his move to America in 1924. Whitehead’s ideas also illustrate a tendency that has continued to exert a strong influence on subsequent metaphysics, the wish to make our overall conception of reality more responsive to the most recent discoveries of science. Finally, the framework developed by Whitehead has been influential in leading to a distinctive brand
