My Final Essay on Kant’s Critique

                                    (By Alexander Koudlai)

1) What is meant by Kant’s “Copernican Revolution”?  

While the natural philosophers used to think of space, time, and objects of perception as of reality existing “out there”, Kant claims that those exist but in us. Space and time are forms of pure intuition, and objects are mere appearances (phenomena) of transcendental things (noumena). So Kant made human psyche the center of phenomenal world, when the a priori categories were the rules for all empirical knowledge, pre-determined by those categories and pure (not empirical)  intuitions of space and time.

2) What is the “Transcendental Aesthetic”” about?

     In B36 Kant gives his own definition of the term:

I call a science of all principles of a priori sensibility the transcendental aesthetic. There must therefore be such a science, which constitutes the first part of the transcendental doctrine of elements, in contrast to that which contains the principles of pure thinking and is named transcendental logic.

Transcendental Aesthetic is that part of Kant’s transcendental Philosophy, which deals with an explanation “how are synthetic a priori propositions possible? – namely pure a priori intuitions, space and time, in which, if we want to go beyond the given concept in a priori judgment, we encounter that which is to be discovered a priori and synthetically connected with it, not in the concept but in the intuition that corresponds to it; but on this ground such a judgment never extends beyond the objects of the senses and can hold only for objects of possible experience”(B73).

3. Explain what Kant means by (l) intuition, pure intuition, empirical intuition; (2) concept, pure concept, empirical concept; (3) transcendent; (4) transcendental; (5) a dogmatic procedure of reason; (6) critical.
 

     (1) “ In whatever way and through whatever means a cognition may relate to objects, that through which it relates immediately to them, and at which all thought as a means is directed as an end, is intuition”. (A19/B33)

The intuition is pure if it is not grounded in experience, but exists a priori. Kant claims that there are only two pure intuitions of space and time. Those are necessary preconditions for all kinds of experience. They are general ways of experiencing all kinds of sensual objects. There are also particular intuitions. “That intuition which is related to the object through sensation is called empirical” (A20).

     (2)Objects are given through intuitions but “thought through understanding, and from it arise concepts” (A19/B33). This is about empirical concepts. But there are also pure concepts of understanding, the categories, the a priori forms for all kinds of possible empirical knowledge without which we could not have any understanding of nature at all.

     (3) transcendent and (4)transcendental

Look first at A296/B352-3, for the meaning of "transcendent" and how it's different from "transcendental". Transcendent principles, or a transcendent employment of principles, go beyond possible experience. Look at A309, A326-327. B427,B448, B487.

      In the Transcendental Logic Kant speaks of transcendent principles of pure understanding as those which “would fly beyond the boundaries of immanent” ones which belong to possible experience. Kant’s concern is about “illusions” of dialectic (“a logic of illusion” A293/B249) He tries to clarify the principles of thinking and to establish the boundaries of different kinds of those.

     In A296 he writes: “We call the principles whose application stays wholly and completely within the limits of possible experience immanent, but those that would fly beyond these boundaries transcendent principles (“that actually incite us to tear down all those boundary posts and to lay claim to a wholly new territory, that recognizes no demarcations anywhere). But by the latter I do not understand the transcendental use or misuse of categories, which is a mere mistake of the faculty of judgment, when it is not properly checked by criticism, and thus does not attend enough to the boundaries of the territory in which alone the pure understanding is allowed  its play”.

So, if I understand it correctly, Kant says that there is a possibility of a transcendental use-misuse of immanent as well as transcendent principles . He wants us to be careful (critical) in our thinking.

     (5) a dogmatic procedure of reason is transcendental thinking of transcendent or immanent without proper verification: that which may create an illusion of knowledge, based on a misuse of abstract logic in the sphere of possible experience, and categories in the sphere of pure ideas. Sophistry without a content.

     (6) critical thinking or dialectical rigorous investigation is opposed to mere sophistry and can be compared to the skeptical method in A424. “This method of watching or even occasioning a contest between assertions, not in order to decide it to the advantage of one party or the other, but to investigate whether the object of the dispute is not perhaps a mere mirage… It is entirely different from skepticism, a principle of artful and scientific ignorance…”

 4. Kant sometimes formulated the central problem of the first Critique this way:  “How are synthetic a priori judgments possible?”
Explain what he means by this question.  Give examples of the kinds of judgments Kant thinks in need of defense?  Explain why he thinks that these examples are neither (i) a posteriori (empirical), nor (ii) analytic. ............