Philosophy

Philosophy Study Guide

is merely one dimension of an intricately and elaborated constructed philosophy that integrates both epistemology and metaphysics in a seamless integration. Kant was known for his works, Critique of Pure Reas and Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics . It is in Kant’s Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, that he admits that it was Hume’s devastating attack on the principle of cause-and-effect, which is the bedrock of the principle of science that gave Kant’s investigation in the field of speculative philosophy a new direction. Kant was convinced that to erect a legitimate framework for knowledge, he must first begin by addressing Hume’s attack on reason as well as making sure this epistemological framework also incorporates other a priori (independent of experience) knowledge. Kant considers such knowledge to be metaphysical in the sense that its ultimate justification and truth are based on reason, independent of sense experience and it includes areas of experience, such as mathematics, knowledge of the self, the possibility of free will, moral principles, and the existence of God. It is through Kant’s theory of transcendental idealism (an epistemology that describes truths about the world that are both necessary and universal) that he addressed Hume’s fork in the road philosophy. Kant grounds his theory firmly in the world of lived experiences and initiates his inquiry with the challenge that science already has discovered knowledge that is necessary, universal, and certain. Kant reversed the traditional approach of epistemology. Rather than speculate on how the human mind can somehow connect to or match up with an ultimately unknowable external world, he decided to investigate how the human mind constructs a knowable world. Kant views the mind as an active agent in constructing the world and or knowledge about it and believing that objects must conform to our knowledge. Empiricism as expressed in the view of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume had viewed the mind as a passive agent or blank slate on which is recorded the sounds, images, and other sensations of experience. From Kant’s perspective, this is where the empiricists commit their fatal flaw. A careful examination of how the mind operates makes clear that as thinking beings, we do not simply receive and record impressions; instead, we actively select, organize, order, structure, and interpret these sensations, shaping them into an intelligible world about which we develop insight and knowledge. This is clear when we observe how science operates. Scientists do not simply record the data of experience; they actively pose questions, develop hypotheses, construct and implement experimental test, create theories, invent concepts to explain phenomena, and continually revise their understanding in the light of new information. It is through the active use of the human mind in interaction with the data of experience that science discovers ad constructs knowledge of the world. The cognitive process of perceiving, developing beliefs, and constructing knowledge involve both the data of sense experience and what Kant terms the faculties of the mind. It is through the active interaction of these two elements that we are able to constitute an orderly and intelligible world. It is through the active synthesis of our “self” that this world becomes “my world”, which was described in Kant’s work Critique of Pure Reason . Constituting our world and constructing genuine knowledge involves the ongoing interaction of our thinking activities with sense experience. Kant stated, “Thoughts (concepts) without content (sense data) are empty; intuitions (of sensations) without conceptions, blind.” This meant that a pure rationalist approach to knowledge was doomed because it failed to appreciate the need for sense experience to provide content for its thinking process; the empiricist approach was doomed because it failed to understand the need for structure, order, and interpretation provided by rational categories of the mind. The reason empiricists were unable to see the contributions of the human mind to constructing knowledge and why the rationalists were unable to fully credit the contributions of sensory experience was that the world

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