Abstract
This paper focuses extensively on Kant’s critical epistemology as postulated in his Critique of Pure Reason. It grapples with the problem of identifying and harmonizing these borderlines of empirical and rational knowledge with that of metaphysical knowledge. Kant argues that the mind is so structured and empowered that it imposes interpretative categories on our experience so that we do not simply experience the world, as the empiricists claim, but interpret it through the categorizing mechanism of the mind. In ruling out indifference to metaphysical questions, Kant posits that if metaphysics is not science, yet still as natural disposition, human reason is driven on ‘by an inward need’ and not by mere ‘idle desire’ to ask metaphysical questions. Furthermore, Kant posits that what makes skepticism about metaphysics unsustainable is that metaphysics cannot be discarded in isolation from cognition in general. Kant, therefore, is of the view that the very same principles of reasoning as are employed in empirical judgments about physical objects are also used in a purified form, in metaphysical judgments about God, the soul and other non-empirical entities. However, the paper criticizes Kant for being too anxious to prove the subjectivity of space, as an escape route from materialism. Kant was quite averse to the argument that if space is objective and universal, God must exist in space, and hence, be spacial and material in nature. Thus, Kant might have been satisfied with the critical idealism which holds that all reality is known to us as our sensations and ideas.
Highlights
A number of antecedent factors helped shape Kant’s critical philosophy
Kant posits that what makes skepticism about metaphysics unsustainable is that metaphysics cannot be discarded in isolation from cognition in general
Kant is of the view that the very same principles of reasoning as are employed in empirical judgments about physical objects are used in a purified form, in metaphysical judgments about God, the soul and other non-empirical entities
Summary
A number of antecedent factors helped shape Kant’s critical philosophy. His philosophical development was characterized by constant and unforeseeable vacillation. Kant posited that if synthetic a priori judgments could be justified in mathematics and geometry, the same could be applicable to metaphysics He demonstrated that metaphysical judgments cannot be rejected for Hume’s reason – on the grounds that they do not derive from either logic or experience. In the Analytic, he argued against the empiricist, conception of experience in support of the rationalist’s claim that pure reason is necessary for knowledge, in the dialectic, Kant opposed the rationalist conception of the scope of reason, in support of the empiricists’ position that objects must be experienced in order to be known. Given that the “I think” is a non-empirical representation, rational psychology amounts to an attempt to answer the question, ‘what is the constitution of a thing which thinks, on an a priori basis Kant divides it into four claims and corresponding (dialectical) inferences, which he calls paralogisms (Gardner 1999:225). The thesis is that the world has a beginning in time and a limit in space, and the antithesis that the world has no beginning in time and is unlimited in space
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