Parsons replies to me

KP: I am a tad busy right now, so I don't think I will have time for a long point/counterpoint. However, I would like to point out that the argument you are attributing to me is not the one I was trying to make. I am not questioning the legitimacy of all a priori reasoning. I was pointing out that philosophers have often made armchair pronouncements about what must or must not be, which scientists have blithely disregarded and proceeded to do what philosophers said could not be done. Leibniz, for instance, claimed to disprove the possibility of physical atoms. Scientists went right ahead with atomic theory--and a good thing too. Kant held that three dimensional space was an a priori intuition. Physicists have found it useful to disregard that "intuition." Spinoza "proved" that all that is must be. Quantum physics does not give a fig for such determinism. Auguste Comte said that the constitution of the stars would never be known. A year or two later the spectrograph was invented. Kant held that asserting either that the universe had a beginning or did not leads to insoluble intellectual antinomies. Big Bang theorists never cared. Descartes "proved" that the mind must be incorporeal res cogitans. Neuroscience piles success on top of success assuming that we think with our brains.

VR: But of course, the argument here isn't just an armchair speculation, it is a principed argument. In these cases, it has to be clarified that the scientific theory and the philosophical argument really contradicted one another. I know in the case of Kant, it is an open question as to whether the claims are really in conflict. This is the discussion of it in the Stanford Encyclopedia. 
It doesn't seem to me that Kant's position, just described, conflicts with scientific theory. 

On Kant's Moral Argument

A redated post.

Kant doesn't say that in order to be moral, you have to be religious. He is someone who thinks that other sorts of rational arguments about God don't decide the question either way (first cause arguments, arguments from evil, etc.) So, on his view, we are left with a choice of believing the world to contain a God, of believing in free will or not , and in believing that humans survive death.
On earth as we know it, virtue and happiness are not proportional. Virtuous people are sometimes miserable, nasty people are sometimes happy. (Think of all the murder cases which are never solved.)
Religious world-views presume the existence of a universe in which there is a future life in which happiness is apportioned according to virtue. Whether it is through a last judgment, or through a law of karma that puts you back on this earth either in good shape or in bad shape depending on your deeds, good prevails and evil fails, eventually.
Or you can accept a naturalistic world-view in which there is no mechanism for balancing the cosmic scales of justice. If wrong triumphs in the course of a lifetime, which is certainly seems to, then the story ends, people die, and feed the worms with no recompense for injustice. Hitler and Mother Teresa are in the same condition. They are dead.
The Kantian argument here strikes me as a distant cousin to Pascal's Wager. In Pascal's wager, you are looking at your own prospects, and "betting" on the world-view that pays off better. (Pascal, like Kant, was addressing the undecided. If your belief system is like that of Richard Dawkins, making yourself believe for either Pascalian or Kantian reasons is not an issue). The difference between the Kantian wager and the Pascalian is that you are "betting" on the world-view that will give you the most moral encouragement. You are not just betting on your own self-interest,, as you are in Pascal's Wager. Kant doesn't assume that you can't be moral without God. Pure practical reason tells you what is right and wrong, according to Kant. However, Kant maintains that you since can't settle the question of God any other way, you ought to choose based on the moral encouragement provided by each world-view.

Sometimes being moral is hard. In fact, all actions with moral worth are, according to Kant, done from duty as opposed to being done in accordance with duty, which means that when you do those actions, your inclinations or emotions are pulling you the other way. In other words, perfoming actions of moral worth, like breaking up, is hard to do. Is it more conducive to making the hard moral decisions we have to make to believe that there is no cosmic justice, or to believe that there is cosmic justice. Kant thinks the choice is a no-brainer, practical reason enjoins us to view the world as cosmically just, and therefore to accept the doctrines of God, freedom, and immortality.

Kant's moral argument for God

Here is Kant's version of the moral argument.

Explaining Hume's Fork

Hume is a classic, consistent, empiricist. He thinks that all ideas come from experience, because they all come from what he calls impressions. Now these impressions are experiences, however, some of them come from within ourselves as opposed to the five exterior senses. Second, he thinks that all justified beliefs are justified through experience, except for what he called relations of ideas. What relations of ideas were were simply how our ideas are related to one another. So, for example, you could know that all bachelors are unmarried without interviewing any bachelors to find out their marital status, because that is a matter of how we define the word "bachelor." He also asserts that all mathematical knowledge is just the knowledge of definitions. But we can't know anything about, say, whether something exists or not based on how we define the word. So attempts like the ontological argument to show that God must exist because of the way we define "God," are bound to fall flat. On the other hand, any knowledge that might lead us to conclude anything about what is real outside of our own minds, according to Hume, has got to come from experience.




Rationalists think that we can have knowledge of the world outside of our minds through reason, independently of experience. Kant, for example, thought that we could deduce our moral duties through rational reflection and use of the Categorical Imperative. Hume, on the other hand, thought morals derived from feelings.



Hume calls what we can know apart from experience relations of ideas, and what we need experience for matters of fact. This is called, in philosophy, Hume's Fork.

What do we do with philosophers from the past who say really insane things? Some problems with Kant

Or so it seems to people in the 21st Century. I don't think that great thinkers are supposed to avoid intellectual errors. Or rather, it is compatible with greatness to get at last some things horribly wrong.

Of course, the Kantian position that most people roll their eyes on is his views on lying, particularly in his response to Benjamin Constant. There you get a sense that, yes, he's got that wrong, but there is something to be gained by coming to terms with him neverthteless.

HT: Ed Babinski.

Keith Ward on the Impact of Kant

Kant, rational ethics, and arguing with a jerk

Kant's Categorical Imperative states: Act as if the maxim of your action were to become through your will a be general natural law. This according to Kant, is a rational ethical truth.

If you were arguing with a thorougly selfish person, could you show him or her that it was somehow irrational to cheat on other people while hoping that others will not cheat on you.


Q: What if everybody did?

A: I'm not everybody! I'm me, and I'm looking out for #1.

You might call such a person a jerk, but could you call him or her irrational?

I did something on this a few months back, to which I link.

Kant's moral argument for God

Suppose you can't decide whether or not God exists. (Kant thinks he has arguments that show that, looking at the world around us, you can't tell one way or the other whether or not there is a God). You therefore have to choose either a theistic world-view in which it is thought that there is a God, there is free will, and there is an everlasting life, or a world in which there is no God, no free will, and when we die we feed the worms. You then ask "Which world-view will best undergird my moral life, the theistic world-view or the atheist world-view?" And Kant concludes that the only rational choice for someone seeking to be moral is to select the theistic world-view.

More discussion with Manata on Calvinism

Hi Victor,
As I can’t get into an extended back-n-forth at the current time, I’ll offer a final response to this current issue. Before I begin, let me state that my liberal comment was meant more to portray the point that you don’t post blog entries indicting the “morally repugnant” nature of some liberal issues when juxtaposed against Kantian maxims. I understand your position on abortion and euthanasia and didn’t mean to imply that you were lock-step liberal on those matters. However, I do wonder why you don’t come out with a post entitled “Euthanists and Immanuel Kant,” concluding that euthanists need to say, “So much the worse for Kant.” That you don’t do this, and even seem to afford their arguments respect, always making sure their place is set at the table of rational discourse, strikes me as wondering if you really believe this Kantian argument you’re offering.

I don't think I would want to deprive Calvinism of a place at the table of rational discourse.


I take your current argument to be that Calvinism is morally repugnant according to your pre-argumentative moral intuitions. To flesh out what is pre-argumentative, you appeal to Kant’s Humanity Principle, HP. That is, "Treat humanity in yourself and in others as an end, but never as a means." You then claim that the Calvinist idea where God “guarantees a final outcome of [the reprobates] existence” is a violation of this principle because this makes these humans’ purpose to be “either for the glory of God or the edification of the blessed.” And so you say, “It is for that reason that I see reprobates as a mere means in the Calvinistic scheme.” That Calvinism violates Kant’s HP maxim, and so helps in substantiating your pre-argumentative intuitions, is because this violation shows that a “large chunk of moral thought common to various ethical traditions has to be set aside for the Calvinistic God.” Implicit here is that a “large chunk” of moral thought holds to the HP.

I take it that I have stated your argument correctly.

So here’s some problems I see for you. First, I disagree with your understanding of Kant. I do not see how the HP is doing the work you want it to here. As virtually all ethicists have pointed out, Kant’s position here is helpless to help us apply it to any concrete cases. You claimed that it was only helpless in “borderline” cases. However, as I read them, this is not what the ethicists tell us. This is not what the two ethicists I quoted, Timmons and Griffin, tell us. But agreement with my claim seems far and wide.

For example, Pojman points out that “Even if we should respect [other rational beings] and treat them as ends, this does not tell us very much.” I certainly doubt it tells a divine being what to do when looking over a mass of sinful humanity all deserving of punishment! Pojman says that at best it tells us not to treat others cruelly; and that without a good reason (Pojman, Ethics, 147)!

On the Calvinistic view, God is in a position such that he can bring it about that no one needs to be reprobated. God can do that by decreeing that they not sin or by decreeing that they receive redemption.

Wood claims that what constitutes respect for other persons always involves a need to combine that principle with contentious claims. He thinks that no criterion for deciding when someone is being treated as a mere means that comes out of HP (Wood, Kant, 150-155). Kant scholar Richard Dean admits that “it is far from clear what precisely the humanity formulation demands” (Dean, Humanity, 4).
When you rather confidently claim that, “the instantiation of a reprobate world seems to be a clear case of using the reprobates as a means to an end,” this strikes me as not just a free lunch you want, but also a lifetime supply of Big Mac burgers! Even setting aside worries about whether treating someone as a mere means is immoral, of if God has indeed treated the reprobate as *mere* means, the problem you have is that you apparently see farther than all of those who specialize not only in ethical theory in general, but Kant in particular.
Second, speaking of Kant experts, we have some general ideas of what it means to “treat humanity as a mere means and not an end.” For example, Kosrsgaard takes Kant’s treatment of the lying promisor, i.e., “you treat someone as a mere means whenever you treat him in a way to which he could not possibly consent (G 430)” as a hermeneutical light to shine on one of the most obscure ethical claims. Others claim, in similar fashion, and based off the role rationality plays in all of this for Kant, that if we have treated some agent, S, in a certain respect R, then we have made S a mere means *iff* S would not have agreed with R *given S was fully rational*. Rachels makes a similar argument (Rachels, Elements, 132). All that is required not to treat a person as an ends is “to respect their rationality.” Obviously none of this poses a problem for the Calvinist in that we claim no forcing is going on, and we would claim that if any agent were fully rational they would agree with all of God’s decisions. Indeed, in none of Kant’s specific examples, which many claim are unclear (Dean, Humanity, 4), is there something analogous to reprobation.

I didn't really intend for my claim to rest on the fine points of Kantian ethical theory. The Second Formulation has an intuitive appeal, why? The idea of someone being simply exploited is obnoxious to us.

I thought I provided a common-sense account of what it is for someone to be treated as a mere means. If another person's interests are completely set aside so that one's own goals can be accomplished, this is using a person as a mere means. Slavery and seduction would be paradigm cases of using persons as a means. Here interests need not be given any especially hedonistic definition. I take it that Calvinists agree that the interests of a created person are served when that person can "glorify God and enjoy him forever." Whether using violence to their will or not, the Calvinistic God guarantees that reprobates act in such a way that they spoil their chance at permanent happiness, and exist in irretrievable misery. No interest of these persons is taken seriously, these are all completely frustrated in the interests of fulfilling God's purpose either for himself (glory) or for the blessed (object lessons showing them he graciousness of their salvation). In ordinary contexts this would be a paradigmatic case of exploitation.

I think Kant would say that if a reprobate person were to see the true nature of his actions, he would not do them. He can only act in a reprobate way by being irrational. The fact that God can, without violence to their will, bring it about that people act irrationally and undermine their own best interests does not mean that they are not being exploited, any more than someone who plays on the irrational greed of someone in order to bilk them out of their money is exploiting them, even though they are not committing violence to their will.

But matters don’t get any easier. Next up is the notion of ‘humanity’. You seem to read this phrase as “actual persons.” However Kant scholar Richard Dean claims that figuring this out is even harder than the above questions posed, as it is “deceptively obscure” (Dean, Humanity, 4). In fact, and contrary to you Dr. Reppert, Dean claims that viewing ‘humanity’ as a “general noun to identify all members of the human species” is “not what Kant means by humanity,” according to “contemporary commentators” (Dean, Humanity, 5). Dean claims that ‘humanity’ is a property “in” a person, and that not all humans have this. In fact, some, like Singer, would argue that some animals and no human infants have this property! So to not treat cows as mere means I had better take back those free Big Macs you asked for above! And, if this were not enough, Dean points out that there is even disagreement on what this property is supposed to be. Not all agree it is the rational nature (Dean, Humanity, 5). Indeed, on Korsgaard, Wood, and Hill’s analysis infants do not come into the picture too! Dean has to admit that “there is no perfectly consistent and univocal sense that attaches to Kant's uses of the word ‘humanity’” (Dean, Humanity, 65).

Is it right to sacrifice the interests of a rational creature for the accomplishment of one's own goals? Is it right to raise rational creatures as food? For the purpose of doing slave labor? If we could create conscious androids with the kind of rich inner life as we have, would we be justified in treating them the worst plantation owners treated Negro slaves? After all we created them, so we can use the "potter argument" from Romans 9 to justify doing whatever the hell we want with them?

At this point things look dreary for your argument.

Only if you think the argument depends upon the fine points of Kantian theory.

Third, more problems can be seen, however, in that Kant’s argument *depends on* the idea that ‘humanity’ (whatever that is) is of the *highest* worth. But if the glory of God, or the benefit of the elect, are of higher worth, than the argument falls flat. And certainly, this is quite possible; indeed, most Christians admit it as pertains to God. But we don’t even need to go there at this point.

Well, here is where the real conflict lies. Does God's glory justify all of this, or the benefit of the blessed. My first question has to be "What glory does God get, and what benefit to the blessed get?" I don't see any. But if you can accept a "divine glory" theory of the good, and then be persuaded that reprobation maximizes that good, then you can get around my argument.

I am in agreement with philosophers Rhoda, Hasker, Swinburne, Widerker, Fischer, and Helm, to name but a few, in denying that omniscience is compatible with knowledge of the future indeterministically free actions of human agents. I am in agreement with other libertarians, like Hunt and Zagzebski, that foreknowledge renders all your actions settled, accidentally necessary. I have not seen a “way out” for those who are compatibilists about libertarian freedom and God’s exhaustive, meticulous foreknowledge of all things. Your claim that God “guarantees” certain outcomes is one that is had on more systems than just Calvinism. So you must find them morally repugnant too (unless you want to shore up the language used, but even so, I still would see no “way out” for Classical theisms). But an argument from a Christian that consigns all of historic, classical Christianity to the flames of the “morally repugnant,” is an argument that just tossed all its persuasive value into the same fire. All classical models have the fate of sinners “guaranteed.”

It is one thing to make the case that a position is itself morally repugnant. It is another thing to hold that a position has logical entailments not recognized by adherents of the position lead to morally repugnant conclusions. You have suspected that I have open theist leanings, and I do. Bill Hasker is both one of the founding fathers of the AFR, and the chief philosophical defender of open theism. I think Bill's arguments (and those of others on this score) may well be right. However, C. S. Lewis, for example, thought he could escape the implications of exhaustive foreknowledge by appealing to God's transcendence of time. Bill Craig thinks middle knowledge is the way out. They don't think they have to justify unconditional reprobation. They are certainly not philosophically omniscient, and they are not embracing reprobation in the way that a Calvinist does. The fact that many people, even conservative Christians, are willing to take the step of going to open theism instead of to Calvinism when they become persuaded that reconciliations of foreknowledge and freedom don't work is ample evidence that there is something repugnant, at least to them, about Calvinism.

Fourth, I still cannot figure out what your objection to God’s punishing criminals who deserve punishment is? Your claim is that he could have saved them all. But considered as sinners qua guilty criminals, he did not have to save even one. I once asked you if God was morally obligated to save anyone. You said “No.” This takes the teeth out of your argument. If you asked why he passed over Sam and not Jim, I cannot tell you, that belongs to the hidden things. If you asked why he made a world determined to fall over a world where no one ever fell, I respond by claiming that a redeemed world is better than an unredeemed world.

There is nothing in the character of sinners that merits salvation for them. However, the character of God is such that He will save anyone who can possibly be saved. And is a redeemed world better than an unfallen world? Do you have a model of each in a petri dish so we can compare? In C. S. Lewis's Perelandra the Un-man uses the Fortunate Fall argument to try to seduce the Green Lady of Venus to fall. I don't see why failure to fall should have cost the world the incarnation of the Second Person of the Trinity.

Fifth, I still did not see an *argument* for how these people were treated as *mere* means. I’m not even sure I understand the relevant difference between treating one as a means and one as a mere means. According to many popular understandings of Kant, Calvinism is not treating them as mere means.

The total frustration of all their interests for the sake of the ends of others strikes me as treating them as mere means.

Sixth, you claim that Calvinism is at odds with a major chunk of moral thought. Above I showed this to be false. What I will demonstrate here is that if you accept classical theism then you hold a view that is at odds with a chunk of moral thought. Take this moral claim:

[MC] If someone, S, knows the proposition {S* will kill and rape S** at t unless I, S, intervene, and I, S, have the power to intervene} then if S failed to stop S* from killing and raping S** at t, S would be immoral.

It's easy to see that if people are given a free will, God cannot be systematically insulating the world from its effects without in effect taking that free will away. If a billy-club turns into nerf every time I try to hit someone over the head, or if I start to throw up every time I lust, I am effectively unfree. Welcome to the world of Clockwork Orange.

I take it that almost all people would agree with [MC]. Now, one might *add* to [MC], say, claim that S had a *good reason* for allowing S* to kill and rape S**. But when you make *that move* I simply say, “Welcome to my parlor, said the spider to the fly.” If you claim I must know the reason, I deny this premise, appeal to skeptical theist arguments, and show that I am still untouched. BTW, this answer wouldn’t work on many interpretations of Kant!

Lastly, by way of closing I would like to say that I argued that your *Kantian* argument goes nowhere. I argued that you would have to condemn all of classical Christianity. I argued that you have yet to spell out what the problem with Calvinism WRT God passing over some sinners who deserve hell while saving some others is, exactly. I have argued that you hold a premise that conflicts with a major chunk or moral thought, and to the extent that you make it palpable, you also free Calvinism from your clutches. Furthermore, to the extent you can appeal to some kind of greater good, you still would have to say, “So much the worse for Kant;” or, perhaps, “So much the worse for traditional conceptions of omniscience.” So I hope this brief response shows why the Calvinist does not find your argument cogent (i.e., persuasive in the right kind of way). But perhaps the most damaging things I have done is shown that what you initially took to be an *explanation* of your intuition posits *more* things to explain! There is more now to explain at the level of the explanans than the explanandum.

Please take note of my analysis of exploitation above. No doubt Calvinists will say that this "exploitation" must be justified since, based on Scripture, this is just what God has done, and who are we to answer back. I am not here claiming that these considerations trump all other theological considerations. But I hope I have come a tad closer to giving you a sense of what makes Calvinism seem morally outrageous to many people, including Christians.

Calvinism and Immanuel Kant

Kant's second formulation of the Categorical Imperative says "Treat humanity in yourself and in others as an end, but never as a means." Does it bother Calvinists at all that reprobates are, according to their theology, a mere means and not an end in themselves? Thus, heaven is not a kingdom of ends, there are people who interests are completely sacrificed to the interests of others?

I raised this issue parenthetically in one of my posts last year, and I was reading over a response by Paul Manata where he answers it, and I link to that answer here.

ii) Kant justified punishment by the categorical imperative by arguing that if someone S, say, killed someone, then S is acting as if this were a universal law, and thereby agrees with his punishment; agrees it is just. So, if S sinned against God, and knew this deserved death (cf. Romans 1), whence ariseth the Kantian problem?

The question here, though, is why such a sinner exists, and it is the second formulation of the Imperative, not the first, that we are concerned with. The only way this could work would be if you said that it served the true ends of the sinner to bring it about both that he sins and is punished. And I think what you have to say is that the sinner's interests are sacrificed completely for the glory of God.

The Calvinist response, I supposed, has to be "So much the worse for Kant." Which is surely a possible answer. However, I am attempting to cash out the intuitions that underlie the negative reaction that many of us have with respect to Calvinism. Is it mere emotion or sentimentality? Or is it something else? If the Second Formulation of the Categorical Imperative is a rational moral principle, then isn't there a rational difficulty with Calvinism?

The Westminister Shorter Catechism was, I take it, not written by an Arminian, and it says the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever. I don't think reprobates glorify God (this is different from claiming that God is glorified in their reprobation, which Calvinists do claim) and they surely don't enjoy him forever. So apparently, if Calvinism is true, God creates creatures with a true end which they do not achieve, in spite of being in complete control of them.

Is it really against reason?

Is it really against reason to say, "I will do what is good for me, and what happens other people does not matter. Kant thinks I have to be willing to universalize my principles. Why? I'm not other people. Of course, let other fools be ethical. I will do what I have to do for me.

Kant's moral argument for God

A redated post. The link it to a philosophy of religion information site.

Suppose you have been trying to decide whether to believe in God or not and you can't figure it out. The philosopher Immanuel Kant thought that we are all in that situation. Kant argued that we must then choose the beliefs that will best facilitate our efforts to be moral persons, and he argued that a world-view with an infinite future ahead of us, a world-view where our choices are really up to us, and a world-view that sees the world governed by a moral God is preferable from that standpoint that a world-view where we die and rot, where the scales of justice are not balanced in the end. So if our goal is to be moral, then given a choice, we should believe in God.

Is Kant right about this?

Kant, Reason, and Morality

If Kant is right, it is illogical to be immoral. But suppose you are very good at benefitting yourselves in ways that are immoral. You are a high-up in a crime family, for example, enjoying a life of luxury financed by murder, drugs and prostitution. If you started being moral, you would have to confess your crimes and spend the rest of your life in prison, maybe even face execution, since you have ordered numerous hits on your enemies. According to Kant, the rational thing to do is the right thing to do, which is to go straight and face the law. But, many of us would think that it is an illogical thing to do.

Is Kant right that it is irrational to be unethical?

Kant on arguments from God

I. Kant on the Ontological Argument
Kant begins with the ontological argument. This argument was originally developed by St. Anselm, rejected by St. Thomas Aquinas, but adapted by Descartes.
He maintains that while the idea of God contains the idea of a necessary being, this idea does not tell me whether or not God exists. If a know that a triangle has three angles, I still don’t know whether there are any triangles.
Existence is not a property. If I think of a white cat sitting on my desk, and I think of an existing white cat sitting on my desk, I am thinking of the same thing.
Existence is not a predicate
Existence is not a predicate, that is, a property. (Obviously in grammar, the word “exists” is the predicate of the sentence “God exists,” but this is not what Kant has in mind.) If I think of a white cat sitting on my desk, and I think of an existing white cat sitting on my desk, I am thinking of the same thing.

II. The Cosmological Argument
As Kant understands the cosmological argument, it rests on the premise ‘Every event has a cause.” But this applies only to the world of experience as it appears to us, and can’t be applied to something we can’t experience.
Further it rests on the idea of a necessary being, and therefore only works if the ontological argument works, which it doesn’t.
This is a bit puzzling
Kant’s second response to the cosmological argument strikes me as a bit puzzling. If we can’t prove the existence of a necessary being by the ontological argument, does it follow that we can’t prove it some other way? If Kant had criticized the ontological argument in a way that showed that the idea of a necessary being made no sense (that would be Hume’s critique) then the statement would make sense.
What I think he is getting at is that even if you show that a necessary being exists, that being needn’t be the traditional God unless the ontological argument works. Though Aquinas’ fourth way is somewhat different from the OA, but it would reach the same conclusion if it were to be accepted.

III. Kant on the design argument
Considers it “the oldest and clearest and most accordant with the common reason of mankind of all the arguments for God.”
But it would only prove an architect of the world, not a necessary being or a perfect being. You need the ontological and cosmological arguments for that.
So the arguments for God fail
But so do the arguments against the existence of God. Theoretical reason just doesn’t work in this area. That’s not the fault of God, it’s a question of using the wrong tool.
Kant said he needed to deny knowledge to make room for faith. However, we need to take a close look at what philosophers (or theologians for that matter) mean when they use the word faith.

So do we commit metaphysics to the Humean flames?
No. We are burdened by questions that we as reasoners can’t ignore, but which we don’t know how to answer either.
The ideas help us regulate our thought. It is useful to act as if we knew there was a God, a self, and a cosmos.
Does he mean that these ideas are useful fictions, or does he mean that they are ideas we must presuppose as rational beings? Kant scholars are divided on this.

Kant's three metaphysical concepts

I. Three metaphysical concepts
Self
The Cosmos
God
We can’t really discover these by pure reason, because pure reason operates within experience. He calls these transcendental illusions, but it doesn’t follow from that that they don’t exist. They’re just not objects of theoretical knowledge.

II. The Self
Kant thought that every thought or judgment is preceded by the “I think.”
However, the self is not known as a substance. The self we discover in experience is the empirical self, the self as it appears to us. Psychologists can study this self.
The self as it is in itself is called the “transcendental ego” or “transcendental unity of apperception.” This is not known through experience, either introspective or through scientific investigation.

III. The World as a Totality
We can add up all the finite experiences of the world and call it a cosmos.
However, when we attempt to theorize about this as if it were reality as it is in itself, we end up with contradictions. Did the world have a beginning in time? Is it spatially limited? Can it be divided into basic elements? Are some events free and undetermined? Is there a necessary being?
If we think we know the world as it is in itself, we can reason ourselves to opposite answers on this, and these Kant calls antinomies.

IV. Kant’s sympathy for metaphysics
Kant thought that if there is no God and no free will, moral ideas lose all their validity.
However, that doesn’t mean that we can reason from the world to these ideas. This would be to use concepts designed to put experience together and extend them beyond the world of experience.
However, these ideas could be the product of “intellectual presuppositions and faith.”

Kant's transcendental method

I. Kant’s Transcendental Method
From experience to the conditions of its possibility
II. Hume in reverse
Hume goes from experience to what we can know about the world, and gets skeptical results.
Kant goes from knowledge of the world to how we could possibly have that knowledge.
III. Space and time
Most of us are inclined to suppose that space and time are just “out there.” Kant’s claim is that space and time are the “forms of intuition” generated by the mind.
For example, we can imagine a space with no objects, but not objects with no space. Space is one of the mind’s forms of arranging sensations.
Traditionally, God is thought of as being outside of space and time. So, Kant reasoned, space and time are the ways we put the world together, not a feature of reality as it is in itself.
IV. Geometry and Arithmetic
Geometry is the study of space and its relations.
Arithmetic is the science of temporality.
By saying that space and time are mind-dependent, Kant explains the possibility of our having synthetic a priori knowledge of these. Nevertheless it does give us knowledge of the world that science studies.

V. Categories of the Understanding
What concepts do we need to make experiential judgments? Kant thinks there are twelve.

Quantitative categories

Unity
Plurality
Totality

Qualitative Categories
Reality
Negation
Limitation
Relational Categories
Substance
Causality
Community or reciprocity

Modality
Possibility-impossibility
Existence-nonexistence
Necessity-contingency

VI. The Category of Substance
Agrees with Hume: substance isn’t given in experience.
It’s not some metaphysical reality beneath appearance.
But it’s the way our mind puts the flow of experience together.
VII. Causality
Agrees with Hume that it’s not given in experience.
Not just a subjective custom or habit by which we put events together.
But rather the way our mind must put the world together in order to experience it.
VIII. The Kantian view of experience
If we attend to experience to see what is given in experience, we find that it is a jumble of loose and separate entities.
But we view that experience as organized.
Therefore our minds work like “glasses” to organize experience so that we can know it.
IX. Phenomena and Noumena
However, the world as experienced is the world as it appears to us, as our minds must put it together.
However, that doesn’t tell us how the world is in itself, but rather how the world as it appears to us must be.
Kant says that reality as it is in itself causes the world to appear to us in certain ways. This has been criticized because his notion of causation is supposed to relate events within experience.

Notes on Kant

Immanuel Kant
The Powers and Limits of the Mind
I. Kant’s significance
Philosophy is divided between pre-Kantian and post-Kantian periods.
He began as a rationalist, influenced by Christian Wolff, who wrote a book entitled Reasonable Thoughts on God, the World, the Soul of Man, and All Things in General.” This kind of reminds me of Douglas Adams’ book “The World, the Universe and Everything,” except Wolff was serious! Wolff was a follower of G. W. Leibniz, the third of the Continental Rationalists.
Was “awakened from his dogmatic slumbers” by the skeptical writings of David Hume. His plan was to combine the rational confidence of the rationalists with the insights of the empiricists without falling into either dogmatism or skepticism.

II. Kant’s key assumption
Kant’s key assumption is that we do have knowledge, found in math and in science.
Kant agreed with the rationalists that genuine knowledge must be universal, necessary and certain, but he knew that perception was essential to the operation of science.
He agreed with the empiricists that all knowledge begins with experience.
III. Difficulties with empiricism
Hume had pointed out that experience alone cannot give us universal, necessary and certain knowledge.
Connections between items of experience, for Hume, is a matter of psychological habit.
Thus Hume could find no grounds for believing that our minds conform to an objective, external world.

IV. Kant’s goals
To put science on a secure foundations and steer between rationalism and empiricism.
To reconcile mechanistic science on the one hand with religion, morality and human freedom.
To address the crisis of metaphysics. Rationalist metaphysics and theology had said we could know various realities that transcended experience, but they all disagreed with one another. Descartes was a dualist, Spinoza was a pantheist, and Leibniz was an idealist. But the solution is not to commit all books on metaphysics to the flames, indeed we can no more stop doing metaphysics than we can stop breathing. So getting metaphysics off the ground by, paradoxically, setting limits for it is another of Kant’s three goals.
V. Critical Philosophy
As opposed to dogmatic philosophy, Kant called his own philosophy critical philosophy.
His most important work is called the Critique of Pure Reason. He determined to find out what pure reason is capable of, and what it is not capable of. The pure reason he is talking about is theoretical reason rather than practical reason.
VI. Kant’s Copernican Revolution
Kant agrees with the empiricists that all knowledge begins with experience.
But it doesn’t all arise out of experience.
Copernicus’ revolution with respect to our understanding of the solar system was achieved by changing the center of focus.
The empiricists thought the mind was passive in confronting the world. On this picture, knowledge conforms to its objects. Kant turned this around and said that objects conform to knowledge. For sense data to be experienced as objects by us, our mind must impose a certain structure on them.
VII. Appearance and Reality
Kant makes a distinction between the way reality appears to us and the way it is in itself. The way it appears to us (the only reality we can know) depends on both the sense and the intellect, or mind. What we see is not what is there in itself, but what appears to us when we put our glasses on.
When we become aware of objects, the mind has already done its work.
VIII. Varieties of judgments
Analytic judgments are based on the principle of contradiction: All bachelors are unmarried.
Synthetic judgments give us new information about the world.
A priori knowledge is knowledge that can be obtained independently of experience.
A posteriori knowledge is knowledge obtained from experience
IX. Four combinations
Analytic a priori judgments, or Humean relations of ideas.
Analytic a posteriori judgments. No such thing. If it’s analytic we don’t learn it by experience. Hence a research study on the marital status of bachelors would be a waste of money indeed.
Synthetic a posteriori judgments. Humean matters of fact. Known through experience.
Synthetic a priori judgments. For Hume these do not exist, but this left big holes in Hume’s theory of knowledge which he had to fill with sentiment, custom, and habit. Kant, however, claims that there are indeed such judgments. For example, for Kant “All events have a cause” is synthetic a priori, as is (contrary to Hume), the truths of mathematics.

Kant on the cosmological argument

What sense does anyone make of Kant's claim that the cosmological argument rests on the ontological argument. The OA attempts to prove the existence of a necessarily existing God by definition, the CA by causal inference. The only thing I can think of is that the CA doesn't get you a perfect being necessarily, just a necessarily existing first cause, and you need another argument to establish God's perfection after that. Only, Aquinas' fourth way is a different way to establish God's perfection, which is different from the ontological argument. So I'm still confused.

Looking for a challenging read?

Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (Kemp Smith translation) is online.