Took up the task of developing a systematic metaphysics At a time when the smart money was that it was a waste of time science had progressed to the point mathematics had progressed to the point where the world of thought the Enlightenment world knew what it was doing and the meta positions actually should just trouble themselves so the state of metaphysics was something of a wreckage and Many of the wiser heads thought that it could be safely regarded entirely And so I usually like to begin these lectures with constant systems that even as you set out to ignore metaphysics You're probably engaged in some form of metaphysical speculation yourself he says That the human mind will ever give up metaphysical research. There's as little to be expected as that We should prefer to give up breathing all together to avoid inhaling impure air there will therefore always be metaphysics in the world may everyone especially every man of reflection will have it and For want of a recognised standard will shape it for himself after his own pattern So you're going to do this whether you like it or not? And one of the objectives of the critique is to have us do it the right way the results issue very well No are mixed Not only mixed but many regard the project as a dead-letter Jonathan Bennett in the philosophical Review some years ago wrote this most of the critique of Pure Reason is prima facie dead Because prima facie are dependent on wholly indefensible theories So the commentators dominant problem is to display the light below the surface now I think that this autopsy report will surely premature because in the 40 years since since Bennett reached that conclusion Don't ask how many? hundreds and even thousands of dissertations journal articles books treatises Presentations from lecturers have been addressed to this alleged corpse It's a case of mistaken identity I should think I think the dead body but Bennett found was a body that he had misidentified But can't face this in his own time after the first edition which came out in 1781 it was obvious in no time that both friends and critics Systematically misunderstood what he was trying to convey Kant reacted to criticism with his characteristic Intemperate frustrated impatience he refers to quote incompetent judges who while they would have an old name for every Deviation from their perverse though common opinion and never judge of the spirit of philosophical nomenclature but cling to the letter only are ready to put their own conceits in the place of well defined notions and therefore deform and Distort them but his critics did have a leg to stand on and have you've been wading through the first critique You'll be sympathetic with the frustration of critics who are often not clear as to just what not Only what Kant means but what the purpose of the entire project is. What is the project of first critique? What's he trying to do? It's not enough rather airily to say put metaphysics on a scientific foundation Because we've yet to define metaphysics or come to some agreement as to what Kant would mean by scientific Let alone putting something on a foundation Sebastian Gardner says this This is all by way of encouraging you to approach the book with great optimism and cheerfulness Sebastian Gardner says Virtually every sentence of the critique presents difficulties Attempts have been made to provide commentaries comprehensively illuminating Comprehensively illuminating each individual section of the work and some of these run to several volumes Without getting near its end and then one commentator come Noting what it's like to read the critique of Pure Reason says it is quote but Disagreeable task because the work is dry Obscure opposed to all ordinary notions and long-winded as well. Who said that? Kant in the prologue domina, this is his this is his reflection on the critique of Pure Reason a Disagreeable task dry obscure opposed to all ordinary notions and long-winded as well So you should be very enthusiastic now about taking up the first critique based on these judgments Kant got to this During his pre critical years. He was a highly published scholar His interests were wide-ranging they included issues in law and in science and particularly astronomy he's He is a scholar of consequence and he would have been a notable scholar had he never taken up this project at all He gets to it through a rather winding path A lot of it is hit and miss you can tell from the correspondence He has with friends and admirers that he's heading toward the critique of Pure Reason, but he's not quite sure What the model should be? And the best way to get there, he's he's living in a divided world. He's living in a world of newton and leibniz a world of British empiricism focused on observation and measurement and a world of traditional Rationalist approaches to difficult problems where if you're the right person sitting in the right? armchair you should be able to deduce the facts of the world and Kant is trying to be at home and even reconcile those two worlds The first sign of of real progress comes ten years before the first edition of the first critique He's writing a letter to Markus Hertz form a student a doctor an interesting fellow in his own, right? Markus Hertz I think was the first Medical School faculty member to admit and teach Jewish students at oppression University and Hurts himself did a fair amount of writing and he was a very loyal faithful correspondent of Kant's Deeply interested in Kant as a person and in his work and can't can't was rather Self-disclosing in his letters to Hertz. He says two Hertz that he's well he's he's onto it now at 1771 he's working on something. He's tentatively titled on the limits of sensibility and reason so we can see that this is Forecasting what the nature work will be he describes himself in his approach to these subjects as suffering from a mania for Systematizing you may have noticed those clinical signs if you've been coming through the critique of juries a veritable mania for system If the thing were outlined to any more molecular level it would be a book of outlines Do you see and in the German? It's much more outlined He expresses an urgency in his Letters to Hertz he sees time running out. He's still not quite sure how to get to this Well, what is the question the question is how far our knowledge can reach the extent to which we can rely on our Senses and the extent to which we can rely on reason He recognizes that the ultimate arbiter in matters of this kind has always been human rationality But no one has taken the time test the measuring instrument That is if the gold standard for whether an argument succeeds or not his rationality itself One has to assess the instrument how good a thermometer is it? what does its nature bring to the table as it sets about to make judgments about its own productions and Count I think is quite Original in that regard. He understands that the senses and reason are both limited but limited how Now What was the project if someone were to ask you as one day you will be asked if you're doing philosophy here One of those easy Questions. What was Kant's project in the first critique? You have three hours What what will you say that the project is? Call Emmerich's who is a distinguished Kant scholar sees Contemporary Kant's collar ship as giving us three alternatives Emmerich's adds as a fourth First to develop a systematic metaphysics serving as a refutation of Skepticism so the grey eminence here of course is Hume who awakened kahn from his dogmatic slumbers and one certainly can read the first critique as a sustained defense of our epistemic resources against hume type Skepticism which is the most developed form of what might be called the empiricist path to skepticism Now what is it about empiricism, but that culminates in in skepticism in some form of skepticism on the traditional empiricist account We do not have direct access to the facts of the external world That is we do not experience Externality directly, but only media not immediately But mmediately because between us in the external world, are those what do you call them? oh, yes sense organs and So the question is how faithful e they report what is going on up there? Well to raise the question how faithful is the sensory? Report of the external world is to assume that you have some reliable Non-sensory way of answering that question. That's the box you can't get out of and so there is always this gap between reality as it might possibly be known by some non-human creature and reality as empirically Sampled by the senses whose limitations and distortions are very well known but not perfectly Classified or categorized or or measured so there is that problem you do the best you can How good are the senses? well We got to the moon and came back So they're obviously reporting something reasonably well But if you're serious about epistemology, then you have reservations about all knowledge grounded in sense experience So there's that problem Call it The luck problem or but call it whatever problem you like It's it's one of the consequences certainly of a radical empiricism and there are gambits that can be invoked - apart from continent one so you could adopt a form of realism a Thomas Reid type realism according to which the alleged gap is not a gap at all In fact, you see what is there? Your knowledge of the external world is Immediate not mediated and I shall have a few things to say about that Maybe today and truly in the course of these lectures Well, you might also say that the project of the first critique is to develop a metaphysical system that will provide the right kind of foundation for science and I lean in the direction of Kant attempting to develop an argument that will ground the objectivity of science but is to say Cunt is not trying to redeem the wisdom of the plain man He recognizes the errors that ordinary fought his prompt that would be prompt too But he also recognizes the profound success of the Newtonian project the 17th century project the age of Newton and Galileo and company and this surely can't be based on iffy and and and epistemically chance-y Hume type are The vulnerabilities So what metaphysical foundation at once? Respects the achievements of science and provides a grounding so that science itself understands the basis upon which its claims ultimately depend one might argue that that is the project of the first critique Emmerich's gives us a third option Which is the enduring problem because it the enduring problem of ontology Now what is ontology? Well you all know what ontology is your philosophy students Willard van orman quine says the nice thing about ontology is that it can be defined exhaustively by three monosyllabic english words What is there? Well, what is there now Locke surely one of the fathers of modern modern day British empiricism Was it pains to argue that the endless metaphysical disputes about the real essence of things? Were idle to begin with because we lack the capacity to know the real essence of anything All we have is what Locke referred to as the nominal essence of things. It's the way we In virtue of the way we perceive And-and-and-and cogitate. It's the way we come to label things people and carpets and mike bulbs and computers we give things names based on general characteristics, and it's largely the shared experiences of a community that settles on the meaning of a term as for the real essence of things That's beyond the reach beyond beyond the reach of our are very senses Now, how does Locke come to a conclusion like that? Well? He is an older friend of that very clever young fellow ah Isaac wants his name and according to Newton Ultimate reality is corpuscular that is to say the ultimate material basis of everything is beyond our visual capabilities So the real essence of the you know, this how Locke spins out the particular Theory of mind that he advances in an essay concerning the human understanding What are ideas ideas are something Fabricated out of elementary sensations. Well, how does that work? Well elementary sensations are very much like the corpuscular elements of Mind do you see? Now by a process of Association these elementary sensations are pulled together To form elementary ideas. And what is that process of Association? Like it's like gravitational forces that pull together corpuscles to form more complex bodies So Locke is already giving us something of a Newtonian theory of mind and on that account Of course, we can't know the real essence of thing No, no, even a bug can't know the real essence of things The real essence of things is something very small but that's not the level at which we Examine things we examine things at this level and at this level we give things names Based on what based on the use we make of them and the traffic that we have with them in actual life Well this then does create something of an ontological problem The problem is all right we've got these nominal essences these things we've given names to but what really is there and In case you are hearing something of a bat squeak of Kantian Lumina Sneaking in this point you're you're hearing Apted you're hearing aptly That there is an aspect of reality which is inferable, but not knowable and The county and Lumina are not entirely removed from the Lockean Real essences. Oh I can almost hear can't scour screaming and protest they usually take something for magic Now Call Emmerich's argues that Kant was aware of all three of these Issues, but he finally settled on a modest fourth option which Emmerich's refers to as the transcendental option that would unearth and delineate the conditions necessary for both the scientific and the manifest images of the world the transcendental option I will get to count and his Neologistic use of transcendental a little a little later Well Khan says This is a b10 When once reason has learned completely to understand its own power in respect of objects Which can be presented to it in experience It should easily be able to determine with completeness and certainty the extent and the limits of its attempted Employment beyond the bounds of experience once reason sees what it is doing with the input if I can use that Horrid language, it's because that thing was so difficult to turn off today. I'm going to start telling you about inputs. I'm sure I am Andy stop me before I sin again. Yes All right once once reason has a way of reckoning what it does with the contents of experience how it works on the contents of experience Half the muddle that's taken care of already and this is why we need a critique of critical assessment of How reason operates what its limits what its limits are Contraries is a very interesting question, which I think is probably the best way in to the first critique He raises a question in the prolegomena The question is How is nature possible? How is nature possible Think about this He defines nature as the existence of things so far as it is determined according to universal laws Now what is he getting at with this Look, here we sit. Well you sit I stand Here we stand and sit in a veritable hurricane of stimulation Showers of quanta Sounds which if you were very attentive you would begin to hear listen say Things you touch Surfaces that you think are hard though, they're not what they're hard, but they're not what you think You've got this tremendous of stimulation Disconnected How bad is it? Well the olfactory epithelium cells of the canine Will respond to the dissipation of one molecule of fatty acid. Do you see? This is why Argos detects Odysseus that the minute he gets within smelling range There's Odysseus pretending to be me And this Argos who spots him after all these years and dies, I mean the very Fact of Odysseus is survival shops himself So Argos picks up the smell Your dog will pick you up maybe 1/3 of a mile away without wind do you see? The best studies of energy at the threshold of human vision Indicate that if we can successfully get 2 or 3 quanta to a retinal cone It will excite a visual response You generally have to bang the cornea with about a hundred and fifty of them Because half of what arrives at the cornea is reflected back and then there's more reflection off the anterior surface of the lens, etc Etc. But if you even get a few to the retina You'll excited visual response Audition is sensitive at the level of Brownian motion If you haven't done any physics may I say to you that is a very low volume since most of you will blown out your Auditory mechanism with what you refer to as music You don't have to worry about hearing anything at the level of Brownian motion You'll be lucky if you hear a streetcar coming bearing down on you, but the auditory system Is it what you see the problem? Don't you? You've got all that going on and hitting a system That's responsive to just about everything how out of morass Do you get tables and chairs and people and symphonies and rules of law and trees and Agricultural principles and shipping vessels etc. How do you get the law governed world of science? given that that rash that epidemic of sensory experiences What makes that possible? And Kant is satisfied that empiricism doesn't even have a way of addressing the question let alone settling it The human being as a passive recipient To these tidal waves of stimulation would in the words of Sir Thomas Browne in relay, it's a wonderful passage and religio Medici were Thomas Brown refers to one as Staring about with a gross rusticity Well, we'd go through life staring about with a gross rusticity What was that oh god, what was that? What was that you think as opposed to? The lunar excursion model and coming back to earth Orbiting the moon Etc How is all that possible and Kant is going to argue that all that is possible because of what we bring to this otherwise tidal wave of Stimulations the order that we impose on it But the knowledge we have in fact is a reflection of the very rational and perceptual principles that operate as we confront the world now you say to yourself well for goodness sake what's new and that Here's what's new in that Anyone taking the that part of the empiricists story according to which our knowledge of the external world is never immediate but mediate Recognizes that we are imposing some kind of effect on whatever it is that gets to us. That's all Nimmo disconcert Bisson I dem bloomin em, no one ever steps into the same river twice Everything's in flux. Do you see? The trick that plant has to pull off is how to save in light of all that how to save what I prefer to think of as the scientific image from ranked subjectivity that's the burdensome part of the task to acknowledge what we are doing by way of constructing a lawful reality and at the same time Saving the resulting image from as I say rank subjectivity Now he wants to save philosophy from something else Next week I shall go into a little more detail on this a Number of scholars have wondered why can't is so harsh in The prolegomena in his treatment of the Scottish common sense school the school of read Oswald DT and others And I think Manfred Keene has has the right answer to that Kant is part of a war within German philosophy It has whiskers it was there before count was even a student And the war is between those who would make philosophy a systematic scientific in that sense of systematic subject and Those who would attempt to reconcile philosophy to the ordinary understandings of the ordinary person indeed reconcile philosophy to the claims of religion in such a way as to appeal to persons of ordinary person and judgment This gives rise really to two rather distinct schools of philosophy within the German intellectual world the true philosophy which is the academic philosophy that Kant will defend all of his life and the popular Philosophy, which is as the term suggests something much more accessible to ordinary sensibilities Can't I think pegged the Scottish common sense school as so close to the popular philosophy As to put some distance between it and himself. This is the only explanation for the rather trivializing reference to read us Walt and BT because there's much in count that is redolent of gradian common sense philosophy So a few words about Reid If Thomas Reid Were alive and thriving well, he wouldn't be thriving today Because he was 54 years old before his first book came out which means he would have been let go About 25 years before he had any occasion to write anything He wasn't a plotter he he was careful thoughtful Probably the scientifically most prepared mind of the period. He knew the math. He knew he he was an expert in geometry He was an expert in well, I could go on about about We've rediscovered Reid long forgotten. I think the first paper that I published on Reid was 1978 and Good scholars would look you in the eye and say Thomas who well, that's no longer the case Reid's inquiry into the human mind is a book you can take to the beach you will enjoy it. It's well-written its humorous and places weeds concern is that philosophical skepticism Will create a wreckage out of philosophy itself He's particularly concerned with the influence that Humes philosophy is likely to have Not because it's startles but because it makes virtually, no contact with the successful dimensions of life that is to say everything about which Hume raises a skeptical challenge is something that must be taken for granted in all of the ordinary affairs of life and We works Hume against himself in this regard of you Mridu human causality and in the treatise and mind you If humor wakened count it wasn't the treatise because although the treatise comes before the inquiry the treatise was not available to cut Can't read Humes inquiry but the treatise which I think is one of the reasons why He never got caught up in the personal identity issue Which is so fully explored in the treatise not so much at all really in the inquiry But what is what is Hugh arguing for regarding causality? Hume gives us the mission hood sir. Okay I see before me on a billiard table two balls one moves it hits the other the other moves quote I must own I said I cannot see some third term betwixt them Ball one moves it's ball two Ball two moves. What? Is it that Hume can't see between Those events. He can't see a cause He can't see a cause so where is causality causality isn't on the billiard table Causality is a habit of the mind Fabricated out of repeated experiences Thus whenever two events are constantly conjoined in experience It becomes habitual for us to assume that one Causally brings about the other and since this is an habitual feature of our own mental machinery Which after all could be other than what it is Hume reaches the rather startling conclusion quote that anything may be the cause of anything that Is you could reconstitute Sentient life in such a way that the causal connections would be understood in radically different ways This just happens to be the way we do it and then humor shows us that of course when he leaves the privacy of his study and Goes out into the light of day he thinks the way ordinary people think that this is a philosophical insight on his part Weed has a bit of fun with that He says so you see then mr. Humes philosophy Is very much like a hobby horse? which a man when he is ill can keep home with him and ride to his contentment, but Just in case he should bring it into the marketplace his friends would quickly impanel a jury and Confiscate his estates and have the solicitude never to leave him alone now What Reed wants to make clear is that there are certain first principles on which all thought depends These are principles of common sense He says which we are under an obligation to take for granted in all of the ordinary affairs of life quote Even the lowly caterpillar will crawl across a thousand leaves until it finds the one that's right for its diet It does not do this by way of metaphysical speculation In fact 99 times and a hundred the most decisive moves. We make the initiatives we take are nondeliberative You will not be deliberating the movements associated with riding a bike Getting a forkful of something into your mouth Picking up the phone these It's not just the picking up of the phone. It's Understanding that whatever laws were operating that gave the telephone weight Yesterday are still operating Do you see that the laws? Well, we didn't know about internal combustion engines But wait if you go out in the morning and the car doesn't start your first thought is not my goodness They've suspended the laws of the internal combustion No, your first assumption is there's something wrong with the car and that assumption It's not something that you sort of grudgingly reach on the basis of it It is a necessary part of functioning. You might see this as almost a kind of pre-darwinian in site Into what it is creatures of a given time and a given nature must take for granted To get across the street now what Reid wants to argue? Is that a philosophy that? Officially opposes this that holds up before a rational being the spectacle of its most basic conceptions being fatally Philosophically fought is a philosophy that's going to have a very very brief shelf life people will look at it and they'll smile at the cleverness of the person who Advanced it and then they will get on with the business of life but median principles of common-sense Have a kind of cousinship with some of the apparatus that you will see Kant developing under the pure categories of the understanding and under the core principles of Perception. So that's a rather long-winded way of saying that there are some Radian anticipations of Kant and then the question is Since Kant didn't read English. Did he read read and I do want to say but account by the way took some pride in the fact that his Ancestry was Scottish that the name Kant itself is a corruption of a Scottish name and we know how avidly he pursued the Productions of the Scottish school because these in redacted form were being it made available in German translations and very very quickly Scottish philosophical thought was not remote from the german-speaking world a Number of years many years ago. Oh my gosh one of my students was going to do a PhD in Berlin and as we always hope our students will say Professor is there anything I can do for you while I'm in Germany? You've done so much for me you say? Right that doubt I said which I rarely do yes See if you can find a German translation of reeds inquiry that might have been available before Kant wrote the first edition of the first critique and Damn it if there wasn't one It's the worst thing it was anonymously published Wisely by the translator. It's a horrible translation and and although the timing would have been All right. I had no reason to believe can't ever got hold of this common sense is rendered as the miner mentioned fish tongues, you know, like a common criminal and the bank may be completely pissed because he in castigating read Oswald and Biddy as if as if what they came up with would serve as a criticism of Humes sophisticated philosophy He says what does the Common Sense school do other than consult quote the wisdom of the herd? But you see the Common Sense school is not considered is not consulting the wisdom of the herd It's not what everyone stands up and applause it's not what everyone claims for himself It's what every one of us is under an obligation to take for granted You can't prove the law of contradiction for example because all proof Presupposes the validity of the law you get that, right? well, this is exactly what Reid is going to do with principles of common sense every mode of verification that you would seek to employ in an attempt to vindicate these principles Presupposes their validity and this gets very close to a Kantian Transcendental argument the necessary condition for something else to be the case There's one more feature of the critique that that that I want to bring to your attention Before going into the details of what he means by a transcendental argument contrary often takes recourse to legal metaphors He speaks of the fair-minded judge He speaks of the kind of evidence that would prevail upon the judgment of a good jury He wants his arguments to be understood not as arguments in formal logic But arguments in a transcendental logic by which he means an evidentiary form of argument Given the fact what get given this is the case. What are the necessary conditions? Absent, which this couldn't possibly be the case now we do know that Cantor early on I mentioned to you at the beginning of lecture that his interests reached law and Politics and so forth Kant was quite interested in in legal cases involving boundary disputes and At law these are often referred to but the papers that would be filed in behalf of a boundary dispute would be referred to as deduction driftin deduction schriften and to some extent Kant's own argument is a species of deduction schriften where you show the the pedigree of property claims the pedigree of cognitive claims How far back you can date them. What what? conditions they satisfy what is made possible by the fact that they are in place and I think it would be well-served reading the first critique as if it was something of a brief of something of a legal brief and In places something of a brief coupled with an oral an oral argument Well, is he just another dead Prussian philosopher This is what we find in a contemporary Journal a leading journal in in physics quote In physics it became quite clear in the last 30 years how the cognition of objects can be carried through Surprisingly the strategy which is applied in physics for the cognition of objects follows essentially the conceptual program formulated by count Even if the majority of physicists is not aware of this point So I say this is not not only did in my judgment Jonathan Bennett Misidentified the body not only is the body not dead. But in some fields the body is is very much very much alive What shall we say that about about the overall aim, well, I'm going to give you a puff now, I mean mrs. Oh must come should Split the royalties with me, but I do want to say this much first Contrary to a rumor that got started here four or five years ago. I am NOT a Content ID ID in 322 BC with my friend Aristotle, and I think the whole damn thing's been downhill ever since but But could that possibly be a more consequential philosophical project a Project that respects the perceptual and cognitive resources that we bring to bear on every knowledge claim we make and at the same time does not lapse into a kind of psychology a Metaphysical analysis that I say respects the stamp of human cognition on all of its works but does not lapse into subjectivity a metaphysical project that would inform the sciences of Just what it is that makes some of their undertakings Necessarily successful in virtue of the manner in which we do cognize reality Now I'm going to leave you with a bee in the garden so that you understand that it is possible to maintain objectivity while respecting the perceptual uniqueness of the Precipitant, ooh our garden at home in the right season. I admire Yellow roses we have yellow roses in the garden and they bloom beautifully. I Don't do this alone because there's invariably a honeybee admiring or doing something with the same rose As it happens the peak spectral sensitivity of the normal human visual system is at 5500 angstroms 550 Lily microns You will call that yellow The peak sensitivity in the visual system of the honeybee is in the ultraviolet So the honeybee doesn't see anything yellow and I don't see anything ultraviolet Are we both victims of some sort of hallucination No and once we start waiting through cons arguments, we will see the manner in which the unique perceptual and cognitive Principles we bring to bear on the situation Can preserve the objectivity of the knowledge we claim about that situation? Even while granting that what we are bringing to bear is distinctly human Capital Well, then I shall see you in a week
