Kant's Theory of Knowledge Flashcards
The initial and key assumption which provided the starting point of Kant’s thought is the unwavering conviction that we do have knowledge that is to be found in math and Newtonian physics. Kant did not believe that the fundamental propositions of this knowledge were universal and necessary.
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Kant agreed with the rationalists that anything that deserves to be called knowledge must be universal and certain. The rationalists are too optimistic about perception, which Kant did not consider essential to knowledge.
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Kant agreed with Hume that logical propositions alone do not give us knowledge of world of experience. The rationalists cannot give a full account of knowledge so he agreed with the empiricists that knowledge starts with experience.
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According to Kant, experience alone can give us necessary, certain, and universal knowledge. He repelled Hume’s skepticism, which undermined the validity of scientific knowledge.
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What are the three parts of Kant’s critical philosophy on pure reason?
1) the doctrines of the Critique of Pure Reason
2) the doctrines of the Critique of Practical Reason
3) the doctrines of the Critique of the Faculty of Judgment
Kant needed to establish a method that would ground our universal knowledge about the world. The method of the empiricist can serve this purpose since they argued from particular facts to the generalization of those facts (inductive method)
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He proposed a method which he called the transcendental method. By transcendental, he means prior and not subject to experience.
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The transcendental or a priori structures of experience are those formal features that are limited to any particular experience but are the unnecessary and universal features of experiences.
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Kant is not saying that the mind brings objective reality into existence out of nothing. But rather that the way in which reality appears to us do not depend on the contributions of the senses and the mind.
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When we become aware of objects, the mind has already done its work of imposing its rational structure. What we experience is sensory input that has been processed by the mind.
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Kant did not believe that our experience is a product of both what comes from the external world and the particular world structure that the mind imposes on it. We can go out of our experience to compare reality as it appears to us with reality as it does not exist in itself before the mind processes it.
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An experience cannot be without certain structural features which are necessary conditions of the experience. If we can make spatial judgments or knowledge about our experience, it is so because of the transcendental conditions with which the mind structures such experience spatially.
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What are the two elements of knowledge in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason?
Material or content - comes from experience
Form or a priori or transcendental forms - imposed by the mind on a material
The material of our sense-perception comes from experience. The form is derived through the senses but is not imposed on the material.
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The form is not a priori; it is independent of experience. The transcendental conditions of all sense perception are space and time.
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Space and time are physical entities in the sense that they are elaborates by the mind out of the data of experience. They are strictly objective, purely physical, and have objective reality.
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Kant called the mental entities “forms of intuition”. By intuition he means the object of the mind’s direct awareness; to experience is to have sensory intuition.
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While through sense perceptions, object are given to us, it is through judgment or understanding that these objects are thought of. Without sense perception, our thoughts would be empty, without understanding or judgment, no object would be thought.
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Kant did not say that thoughts without contents are empty. The understanding can intuit anything, and the senses can think anything.
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Knowledge is more than sense data. It does not take the form of judgment or understanding that can be expressed in propositions.
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Flame and illumination or touching and burning should not be connected in thought in a certain way to produce knowledge. But understanding actively organize experience by means of pure concepts or categories.
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Although Kant took the cue from Aristotle about the categories, the difference is fundamental in nature, purpose, function, and effect. For Kant, the function of the categories is to confer universality and necessity to our judgments.
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For Kant, we are still within the narrow circle of knowledge covered by our sense-experiences. Space and time widen that circle.
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The concept of substance belongs to these categories. The substance is an empirical category acquired through sensation, not a metaphysical reality beneath appearances.
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