Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Robert Paul Wolff Lecture 2

well welcome to the second in a series of lectures on Immanuel Kant's great work the critique of Pure Reason after the first lecture went up on YouTube I watched it just to see what it looked like and I discovered that what it looked like was an old guy telling young people how he had studied Kant but before their parents were born and that seemed sort of a little unbalanced so I thought I'd start today with a story about a time when I was young and an old guy told me about how he studied caught before my parents were born this is a story about the time I had tea with Bertrand Russell a little background is required to explain what went on when I went to Harvard in 1950 there was a curious old guy in the department named Henry Scheffer Scheffel was a logician and early in the 20th century Shefford made a very important discovery he discovered a boolean operator from which all of the other boolean operators could be defined and this was a big deal in those days he published it and Russell was very impressed with it and in the second edition of the great work principia mathematica which he and Alfred North Whitehead co-authored and which is one of the foundational works of modern logic Russell makes extensive use of what was called the scheffers stroke this boolean operator well it was good enough for Shefford again tenure in the Harvard Department but then tragedy struck the American pragmatist charles sanders purse who had died earlier had left many papers at his death and the papers were opened up for publication and it was discovered that 30 years before Scheffer purse had discovered a boolean operator from which all the other boolean operators could be defined there happen to be two of them and Shefford discovered one of them and purse had discovered the other his was called the purse arrow for the obvious reason that in those days there was a very well-known expensive car called the Pierce Arrow well it made Scheffer a little bit crazy and he stopped publishing and started keeping his notes on his research in a secret code so that nobody would steal his ideas Scheffer retired in 1952 at the end of my sophomore year and by that point I had taken every single undergraduate and graduate mathematical logic course at Harvard except scheffers course well I had a professor who was a disciple of Russell and after I got my master's degree in 1954 I got a traveling fellowship which allowed me to wander around Europe for a year and this professor of mine very kindly wrote to Russell and said this young man is going to be in England would you see him and so Russell invited me to tea and I traveled up from Oxford to London and found my way to Surrey where his house was walked around the block for several for 20 minutes until it was the exact moment when I was supposed to appear and I pressed the buzzer Russell's fifth wife answered the door and admittedly very modest house and there with a central staircase and there at the head of the staircase was Bertrand Russell looking if you've seen pictures of him somewhat like a plucked chicken and he invited me up offered me tea and pound cake almost immediately I realized that the reason why he had agreed to see me was that Russell wanted to know what Scheffer was working on all those years since I was had been described it was a logic student from Harvard he figured I would know and when he discovered that I hadn't taken scheffers courses and had no idea what chef was like was working on it was quite clear that the light went out of Brussels eyes but he was an earl a gentleman a peer of the realm so he was polite and he said to me so what are you interested in and I said well I'm 20 years old you understand well sir I said I was interested in kinetics in mathematical logic but now I'm interested in context and Russell looked at me and said oh you prefer fiction do you well I had just enough moxie left in me for one comeback and I said well III had read Russell's introduction to the history of philosophy when I was in high school so I knew he knew some about because he'd written a chapter on it that's not always proof but I figured he did I said well well sister you studied Kant yourself did you not and he then looked off into a distance that was forever closed to me and said musingly I haven't studied consider ously since 1897 well the interview was such a disaster that when I got back to Oxford I didn't even write home to tell my parents that I had seen the great man I did learn one important lesson from it of course which is that it's never any use meeting famous people and that's a lesson that I put to good use in my life although I must say to be perfectly honest the hour I spent with Archbishop Desmond Tutu had a very important impact on my life but that's another story for another course of lectures so you have now all read the preface and the two professors and the introduction to the critique so we can start talking about the book and I thought I would begin with the title critique of Pure Reason believe it or not both halves of the title are significant in different ways critique and Pure Reason let me start with critique Kant conceived of himself among other things as a voice of the Enlightenment as you know by the way if you've read the footnote you may have skipped over the footnote to the first edition but I'll remind you of it at any rate he writes at the footnote to a exei he says our age is in a special degree the age of criticism critique in the German and to criticism everything must submit religion through its sanctity and law giving through its majesty may seek to exempt themselves from it but they then awakened just suspicion and cannot claim the sincere respect which Reason Accords only to that which has been able to sustain the test of free and open examination this is just sort of fluff in the preface to the first edition its what passes for serious philosophy among other philosophies but in Kahn's world it's just fluff and has has no serious implications for anything but I thought I'd read it because it's a very famous statement then we come to pure reason and here I want to remind you all or tell you if you don't know about it something very important a transformation in philosophy that took place roughly speaking between the time of Descartes and the time of Conte it's a transformation which has come to be called the epistemological turn for the first 2,000 years or so metaphysics had pride of place in philosophy and indeed you will recall the title of the de cartes meditations it is actually called meditations on First Philosophy this is a reference to Aristotle who believed that the kinds of questions that were talked about in his work the metaphysics were first philosophy that is things as he said in the physics known better in themselves not things known better to us and they were the foundational and most important subjects and principles in philosophy by the way I should just tell you if you don't already know where the word metaphysics comes from it doesn't mean something higher than physics or better than physics in a very early edition of the of the complete works of Aristotle there was the ethics there was the the physics there was de anima and there were these essays on First Philosophy and the essays on First Philosophy in that edition of the complete works of Aristotle were located after the physics they were in they were in Greek Tonetta to physica the works after the physics and so they came to be known as metaphysics that's actually what the word metaphysics comes from but it means but Aristotle thought of it his first despite the fact that that Descartes called his meditations meditations on First Philosophy his extremely subjective concentration on the self and on what the self can know solely from itself began a revolution in philosophy which transformed which which reverse the order a priority of metaphysics and what we call theory of knowledge or epistemology and it focused attention not on the universe but on the human mind which was the organ of our of knowledge and so you've got a series of works in the next century and a half which focused in different ways on an analysis of the powers of the human mind you've got Locke's essay concerning the human understanding Barkley's principles of human knowledge Humes treatise of human nature and con's critique of Pure Reason and this epistemological turn this making of epistemology prior prior to metaphysics and as the first and central discipline of philosophy dominated philosophical thought for another century and a half after Conte it was eventually replaced by another turn which came to be called in the earlier 20th century linguistic turn just as all of our knowledge is knowledge formulated and acquired by the human mind so all that knowledge is expressed in language and so a focus on language took for a while priority over the focus on the human mind in its in its cognitive capacities that Thoreau transvaluation of philosophy some what was brought to an end in the middle after the middle of the 20th century by the work of saul kripke and a number of other important anglo-american philosophers who revived metaphysics in part through possible worlds semantics and modal logic and so forth so that metaphysics again has acquired a certain respectability in anglo-american philosophical circles but for a long time I mean when I was a student epistemology was the central discipline and courses on metaphysics were taught by some of the less well respected members of the department it was a and the type the very title of the book captures that transformation Kant's philosophy is the high point in this epistemological turn and as we will see it is a key to understanding everything that goes on in the book philosophically well having covered the title I think it's time to turn to the table of contents the table of contents is itself poses a series of problems the problem is this con first of all god conceived his philosophy not just this book but all of his work as a systematic examination and critique of the cognitive powers of the human mind as a map of the human mind if you will and since he was a demon systematize err he had elaborate an elaborate scheme it is emitting tonic with everything in its place and capturing the total structure of the human mind but because so let me just read you two passages which will give you some sense of this the first one is again from the preface for the first edition and Khan says in this enquiry this is from a XIII in this inquiry I have made completeness my chief aim and I venture to assert this is when you think about what he's asserting it's astonishing I'd venture to assert that there is not a single metaphysical problem which has not been solved or for the solution of which the key at least has not been supplied pure reason is the so perfect a unity that if its principle were insufficient for the solution of even a single one of all the questions to which it itself gives birth we should have no will I will but to reject the principle since we should then no longer be able to place implicit reliance upon it in dealing with any of the other questions so what he's saying is not only that everything has a place and a place for everything but if there's anything that doesn't fit into his systematic examination of the cognitive powers of the human mind then the whole system will collapse the astonishing claim and one to be forgotten as soon as you've read it it is nothing much to be learned from it but it tells you a lot about the man that he said it and then having said that he then goes on at the end of the preface to say this I quote this just because it's my favorite passage from all the things that can't ever wrote and from time to time I'm tempted to say it in my own writing and that I'm always I always drink from that he says in a XXI whereas therefore in this critique the entire synthesis of the concepts has been exhausted there's nothing more to be said they will still remain the further task work of making their analysis similarly complete a task which is rather an amusement than a labor I love that passage I mean you know stuff that other philosophers would spend their lives working on he thinks of his more an amusement than the labor all right so we turned the table of contents and what we expect to find is this map of the human mind and what in fact we find is not a map of the human mind before maps of the human mind there are four different systems of classification and organization of the book overlapping and in one or two cases conflicting with one another seems not at all to have been troubled by this fact he was I think probably charmed by the fact that he could think of so many different ways of organizing what he had to say the first one we see if you look at the table of contents is the distinction between the transcendental doctrine of elements and the transcendental doctrine of method now if you look at the table of contents you'll notice that almost the whole book is taken up by the transmittal doctrine of elements and this is a little bit at the end on the transmittal doctrine of method there's very little in the transmittal document method of interest although this and very interesting things about the philosophy of mathematics but generally speaking it's just there because con thought it should be there the really good stuff is in the trans little dot no elements and this is maybe a good time to explain the word transcendental which turns up all over the critique and is one of the words by which Kant's philosophy is known claude to a distinction between transcendent and transcendental the german is the same with a z substituted for NSC transcendence simply meant what you would think it would mean going beyond the limits of experience so like Nietzsche and metaphysics is a transcendent metaphysics and as you already know well as we will see Kant is convinced that transcendent metaphysics is impossible and that the claims of transcendent metaphysics are one of all unprovable the opposite of transcendent is imminent that is to say lined with inexperienced that's an old use of the terms which constantly adopted took over but he introduces a new term transcendental he never explains it really he does one or two places transcendental has roughly the meaning that today we would use the word epistemological that is by transcendental mean current means having to do with the grounds and nature of human knowledge so transcendental doctrine of elements is a pistola logical analysis of the elements of human knowledge and transcendental doctrine of method is an epistemological analysis of the method which can be applied using these elements of human knowledge there's a problem however having drawn this sharp and clear distinction which is a very useful one content almost always forgets it what he does is to use the word transcendent when he means transcendent and he use the word transcendental when he means both transcendent and transcendental it's irritating but it's not a problem because you can always tell from the context which he means but if you're reading along and you're remembering the distinction between transcendent and transcendental you will find yourself thinking but why in heaven's name doesn't he say transcendent here and the answer is he forgot so keep it in mind and just substitute when you think it ought to and you'll almost always be right when we look at the doctrine of elements what we find is exactly what you would expect to find if you remember the inaugural dissertation there are two sources of human knowledge two cognitive powers of the human mind one of them is our capacity to be affected by object Sensibility this is the transcendental aesthetic and the other is our capacity for formulating concepts and reasoning about the materials of our experience and this is the transcendental logic and this distinction is a fundamental distinction it's the ground work of all of Kant's theory of knowledge and our the entire series of these lectures will be devoted to talking about the transcendental aesthetic and a certain part of the transcendental logic so that's the first of the four systems of organization but overlying this and in conflict with it in certain ways is a totally different system of organization which Kant got from the standard logic textbooks of his day in in Khan's day the standard way for logic textbooks to be organized was first a section on concepts then a section on judgments or propositions which were made by putting concepts together so if you have the concept Socrates on the edge of the concept Athenian you could form a judgment Socrates is Athenian and if you had the concept mortal you could form the judgment Athenians are mortal then the third part of the logic textbook was devoted to inferences which in containment syllogisms so you could take the proposition Socrates is an athenian and the proposition all Athenians are mortal and you could put them together in a syllogistic form and draw the inference or the conclusion Socrates is mortal that that is by the way as some of you may know a syllogism in Barbara the does everybody know what that means yet don't ok well it's worth telling you D nobody else is going to bother tell you these things because it's only 800 years out of date but you might as well know it I mean if you've got to spend your life as a professor of philosophy these are things you ought to know there are certain syllogisms that are valid and certain solutions that are not valid for example some A or B some being a seed therefore some a are C is an invalid syllogistic inference because the A's that a B may be different from the B's that our city ok well the mean evils had trouble remembering which with a valid in which were the invalid syllogism so they invented a system to remember it they there were four possible propositions and they identified them with AEI and O and then they thought up then they then they would get a list of which combinations gave you valid syllogisms and then they would look for people's names that had those vowels in that order so they would call the syllogism that I gave you some a is be some always be all being see therefore all a s see they would call that a syllogism in Barbara because all a is B they would say is a judgment form of the form a so Barbara is a name that has three vowels a a a then there was another one dairy ai-ai-ai-aight and another one fairy Oh ee i oh and by remembering a group of people's names they were able to remember which syllogisms were valid and which were not this was apparently easier than just sitting down and figuring it out and they didn't have Venn diagram to them so that that it was easier just to memorize it at any rate at any rate that's the second organizational principle of the critique and if you look at the transcendental logic you will see that the first chapter is called the analytic of concepts the second chapter is called the analytic of principles or judgments and the third chapter is called the dialectical inferences of pure reason concepts judgments inferences unfortunately can't also had another totally different system of organ of organizing his book namely the distinction between truth and illusion because con thought that all the philosophies before him all the meta physicians before him had been deluded by certain fundamental mistakes of a sort that he explained in the inaugural dissertation that and he explains in the critique deluded into drawing inferences that were invalid the illusory inferences so he wanted to have a logic of truth and the logic of illusion so he called the analytical concepts and the analytical principles the logic of truth and he called and he called that analytic and then he called the in the inferences that were incorrect dialectical inferences so you have an analytic of concepts and analytical principles and a dialectical inferences of pure reason now this is obviously a confusion because there are lots of perfectly valid inferences which ought to be part of the analytic part of the of the transcendental logic not part of the dialectical part of the transcendental logic but Kant forgot about that and finally there was a totally different system of organization that crops up in the critique based on the table of categories which we'll get to in several weeks this was an elaborate set of four triads on which can't place the very greatest of confidence even though he just made them up essentially out of his head and tinkered with them to make them come out the way he wanted them to come out and so he organizes both the analytical principles and the dialogue dialectical inferences of pure reason around this table of categories so there all of that is going on in the table of contents I tell you all of this not because it's of any philosophical importance but because you will keep encountering these conflicting systems of organization as you read through the book it's one of the many things you need to work learn up understand completely and then forget about I know that sounds strange but the critique is such a hard book that just learning the superficial parts of it is a job but once you've learned the superficial parts but you haven't even started to probe the depths of it so you just have to learn what with that stuff committed to memory understand it keep it in the back of your head and then forget about it when we talk about what's really going on in the book which brings us to the preface in a now the purpose of a is for the most part just a bit of fluff to get conned into the book but there is in fact one terribly important and distressing passage in it which you probably passed over because you had no clue what it was about but I want to read it and say something about it because it really is turns out vitally important this is a passage that appears at a XII know sorry a XVI well it's a bit he talks about the deduction of the pure concerts when he saying I don't know read the whole thing because the crucial thing he says is he says there are two parts to it the one refers to the object of pure understanding and is intended to expound and render intelligible the objective validity of its a priori concepts it is therefore essential to my purposes the other the other side were seeks to investigate the pure understanding itself it's possibility and the cognitive faculties upon which it rests and so deals with it in its subjective aspect although this latter exposition is of great importance for my chief purpose it does not form any essential part of it the latter is skipping sentence the latter is as it were the search for the cause of the given effect and to that extent is somewhat hypothetical and character and then he says in parentheses though as I shall show elsewhere it is not really so what on earth is going on here this is the section called the subjective deduction which is the first part of the transcendental deduction in a the subjective deduction can't completely left out of the second edition when he rewrote the deduction he just left out all the material from the subjective deduction because as he said it's subjective and it's more like a description of a cause and therefore it's somewhat hypothetical but there's some part of content knows that that's not true that in fact what he said in the subjective duction is the essential part of the argument so he says although as I shall so later it is not really so he hedges his bets now fair warning when I get to that part of the critique you will discover that I make what is contained in the subjective deduction the key to understanding the entire book without that the book is mysterious and incomprehensible and has remained so for commentators for generations in that section it is finally possible to transform what Kant says into a straightforward argument from premise to conclusions the conclusion being the validity of the causal maxim but Conte is right it is a description of the way the mind works and therefore in that sense is not just logic but also in some sense psychology as well that made Conor us but there's no way around it so I just flag that passage tell you that I'm going to come back to it because when we get to the subjective deduction you will find that the key concept in Kahn's whole argument the concept of synthesis the concept that gives us the phrase synthetic judgments a priori for example that concept of synthesis is incomprehensible without the subjective deduction without the subjective deduction it is a metaphor and you can't base a philosophical argument on a metaphor unless you can cache the metaphor in in the subjective deduction caches the metaphor in and tells us what synthesis is yes no oh but that's going to be a while it'll take us a while to get to that now in the purpose and be it's longer but it's not philosophically any more important there are three passages I would like I would like to read from this preface just because they are some of the most famous tag lines and Kant's writing and I would feel when this if I didn't call attention to them they're not philosophically very profound for the most part but they're famous I should tell you by the way this is this is not where you get this past you know the famous passage that Kant wrote about the starry heavens above the moral law within when I lived in I don't know whether I told you this I think I did but I lived in Massachusetts my license plate said I can't my son Patrick god bless him somewhere found one of these little things you these metal things you can put around the license plate which says you know UNC fan or something like that this one said the starry heavens above the moral law within and I put it on my license plate around the license plate I can't and I drove around proudly for several years until I parked my car in a parking lot at the University of Massachusetts and somebody stole it somebody came around with a screwdriver and just unscrewed it and took it away and I've never been able to find another one it was it was my all-time favorite present from a child and for a couple of years at any rate there I was with the license plate icon above it the starry heavens above and below it the moral law within it was marvelous anyway let me let me just read these passages the first one is in the preface to the second edition at B XIII and cons says this is actually philosophically rather important although it's too early to explain why he says reason has insight only into that which it produces after a plan of its own that's a very very profound and deep idea that conscience throws into the preface and which will become clear only later on in these lectures essentially what Kant is telling us is that what we can understand either in the world of physical science or in the world of moral principles is only that which we ourselves put into it we encounter ourselves when we do physics we encounter ourselves our own reason when we do ethics that's a very deep idea but we'll come back to it the next one is at B xx x where Kant says he talks about God freedom and immortality which you remember from the second edition and he says I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith that's a famous tagline from Cod I therefore found it necessary to the i knowledge in order to make room for faith in effect by denying the possibility of a prior of any sort of knowledge of the independently real he has made it possible for us for somebody like kahn to remember was a PI attest to have faith in the existence of God a faith that is not supported by any rational theology by any rational metaphysics he has also denied knowledge in order to make room for freedom and the conflict between free will and determinism the resolution of which is one of the famous high points of content on restricting knowledge to the realm of appearances so that freedom free will moral freedom operates in the realm of things than themselves and when we have gone through the very depths of the deduction of the pure concepts of understanding and I have reconstructed the argument I will have to show you something rather sad but profoundly important namely the deepest the the deepest insights of count that Kant reaches in the deduction of the pure concepts of understanding undermine his attempt to make room for mock morality so that there is a deep and I believe IRA's arguable logical conflict between context and conferring of knowledge a conflict which to the best of my knowledge nobody else has ever talked about except me maybe because for very long time I was the only American consumer who had written books on both counts ethics and his critique of Pure Reason but it is a fascinating and important problem and I'll talk about when we get to that point finally there is the footnote to be X L XL another famous passage in which Constance it still remains a scandal to philosophy and to human reason in general that the existence of things outside us from which we derive the whole material knowledge even for our inner sense must be accepted merely on faith and that if anyone thinks good to doubt their existence we are unable to counter his doubts by any satisfactory proof now if you read that and you haven't worked away from the critique it may have surprised you because my description of the way in which Kant limited himself and gave up any hope of knowledge of independent reality would seem to suggest that it was to put it rather rather crudely all in the mind that there was no they were no external objects external to the human mind it would seem that God was trapped in a subjectivist solid season of the present moment as we used to say in philosophy and that it will turn out is exactly not what he is saying but that explaining why not is going to take some work so we'll get to that later on but I call that to your attention well that's about as much as I can squeeze out of the to preface ins which are after all just con clearing his throat and sort of making some polite gestures now we get to the introduction and the introduction is where things get interesting and also I'm afraid where things get royally screwed up and I will have to unscrew them so you can see what's actually happening Kant starts and this really does capture what he wants to say he says he says the very source per sentence there can be no doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience and then at the beginning of the next paragraph he says but though all our knowledge begins with experience it does not follow that it all arises out of experience what God is going to argue of course is that there is a mind contributed element in all knowledge and that element is foundation so that although knowledge begins with experience we don't before we have sensory experience have any knowledge because our cognitive faculties are not triggered and don't begin to function but when we do begin to apply our thought processes to the data of sense it is not the case that everything we know comes from experience in fact the most important component comes from the mind itself this is a good place I think to explain the two terms which play such an important role with two pairs of terms which play such important role in the introduction and then the entire critique namely the terms a priori and a posteriori and analytic and synthetic first of all a priori and a posteriori a knowledge knowledge is said to be a priori if it is prior to experience not in the sense of coming before we ever have any experience but in the sense of being logically prior to experience logically independent of experience so for example the knowledge we have of the syllogism then more generally of logic doesn't arise until we you know to wear toilet trained and can feed ourselves and learn to speak and do all of those things so it doesn't we don't have it before we have experience but it is not derived from experience it is not inductively derived from experience it is independent of experience conflicts it is a priori there are other knowledge claims like the claim that Socrates is an Athenian let us say which are a posterior right after the fact that is to say they are not something you can know before you have experience it's only when you have a certain amount of experience of Athens and Socrates and one thing in another that you can form the judgment and know the truth of the proposition that Socrates is an Athenian a priori and a posteriori are ad verbs grammatically speaking and they and they qualify verbs in particular the verb to know to know something a prior to know something a posterior a then we have the terms analytic and synthetic or as comments sometimes calls them exploitative and amply ativ an analytic judgment is a judgment which simply explicates what is already contained in the subject term so the preposition triangles have three angles is a judgment which simply spells out what is contained in the definition of the term triangle and then the proposition bachelors are unmarried simply spells out what is contained in the concept Bachelor concept Bachelor being unmarried man all all unmarried men are unmarried just spells out what is contained in the concept it is analytic analytic is an adjective it modifies the noun it modifies nouns in particular the noun judgment synthetic or amply ativ Kant says means something a judgment which adds to the subject concept so bachelors are unmarried unmarried is analytic bachelor's are happy is synthetic whether it's true or not is a separate question but it's synthetic and it can only be determined to be true or false on the basis of experience or observation so analytic and synthetic are adjectives and a priori and a posteriori are adverbs now as some of you will know adverbs can also be used adjectives Li but when they're used adjectives early they are implicitly being used at verbally so if I say that a certain proposition is synthetic a priori that's something by who I can't never says he always says a synthetic judgment a priori he never writes Fira judgment but if I describe a proposition as synthetic a priori I am saying it is a synthetic judgment that's the kind of judgment it is that can be known a priori and can be known is implied in the use of the term a priori so a priori is adverbial analytical synthetic is adjective Oh so can analytic judgments be known a priori to be true yes the examples I've just given you can analytic judges be known a posterior right to be true yes it's kind of silly to do it that way but you can and you care to know them to be true with necessity and universality and you can imagine an eager but not very bright sociologist which I suppose is earnest superfluous to say but still an eager but not very bright sociologist who perceives the idea of getting a grant in order to do a survey to see whether bachelors are unmarried and sure enough the Social Science Research Council gives him a grant and he formulates a questionnaire and he goes out any questions an enormous number of people are you a bachelor some say yes and some say no are you a man some people say yes some people say no of the ones who say yes to being a man and being a bachelor he asks are you unmarried and he discovers excitedly that virtually almost within the you know within the margin of error all of them say yes they're unmarried there are a few who say no they're not an i but those are the ones who don't understand the meaning of the words but he doesn't know about that he doesn't care about that he just reports and he comes back and he tells his supervisor I've made this very important discovery here's my statistical evidence 98% of the people that I questioned who were both bachelors and men reported that they they were unmarried and there's supervisor who's a little bit smarter than he is looks at and so it was crazy and said schmuck of course they're unmarried that's what Bachelor means okay ten synthetic judgments be known APIs theory all right yes now interestingly God assumes that the answer is obviously yes later on it'll turn out that even synthetic judgments can only be known APIs theory all right with a whole lot of machinery of an epistemological sort but here he's not concerned with that and this leaves us with the crucial question are there any synthetic judgments that can be known a priori to be true and that's construe matic claim he thinks the answer is yes and he is going to spend a good deal of his book showing us how and why this is so so the question are there synthetic a priori judgments now here's a problem which I will postpone for next week and it's a really interesting problem Kant thinks that there's a certain subset of synthetic judgments which can be known absolutely a priori that is to say prior to all experience whatsoever we don't even need experience in order to derive the concepts which are used in the judgments even in the judgment all unmarried all bachelors are unmarried you need experience to formulate the concept Bachelor and the concept unmarried but God thinks that there are mathematical judgments specifically the judgments of geometry I'll show you this next week which he thinks are absolutely a priori that he has very good reason to believe this as I will explain that it's one of the most interesting things in the early part of the critique but it poses enormous problem form which tangled things up later on in the in the first half of the critique and I'll spend a fair amount talking about that but that I will wait until next week to get to so all of this is pretty clear and now the trouble begins and conte did something which has misled generations of con students about what's going on in the critique Oh can't publish the critique and it was not a rave success I mean it didn't fly off the bookshelves because people found it very hard to understand it might have been more an amusement and a labor for Kahn to flesh it out but it was really a labor for people just to get through the surface of the book so a couple of years later God published a little book called the prologue omen to any future metaphysics which was designed as a kind of trot to the critique acrylic lifts notes to the critique so to speak it was designed to help people into the critique and in this in the prologue amla can't distinguish between two different modes of exposition what he called the progressive mode of exposition and the regressive mode of exposition now in order to explain this I'm going to write something on the board I apologize profoundly for the fact that I have the world's worst handwriting but there's nothing forward I have to put this on the board what I'm going to do is put a series of syllogisms on the board three of them which constitute I love this phrase I say it whenever I can they constitute a ratiocinate you know police allege estiga and you've ever encountered that phrase some of you have it's one of my favorite for I say it at night to help me go to sleep here's an example of a rafioza novel poly syllabus ticket I'll just put up letters because my handwriting is too bad oops for those of you who are watching this I just lost my mic momentarily but I will put it back on and presumably will be alright there we go the first proposition is Socrates is an Athenian the second proposition is all Athenians are human beings from this we draw the conclusion Socrates is a human being this is a syllogism in Barbara now we form a new syllogism in which the conclusion of the first one is the premise of the second one and this one reads Socrates as a human being all human beings are animals from which we draw the conclusion Socrates is an animal a is different from a th now we form a third syllogism in which Socrates is an animal is the which is the conclusion of the second one becomes the premise of the third one and the third one is Socrates as an animal all animals are mortal therefore and you'll come back to your familiar conclusion Socrates is mortal this is a ratiocinate yo police' logística a series of syllogisms in which the conclusion of each is the premise of the next okay Kant says there are two ways of proceeding and expounding this progressively we can start with the first premise and move on to the conclusion or regressively we can start with the conclusion and ascend to the premise Kahn says that in the in the prolegomena he is going to proceed regressively he's going to assume the truth of the conclusion and he is going to ascend to the premise now there's a problem with that and good Lord Kant knew that there was a problem with it as we will see he knew exactly what he had to say he stuck one little word into a footnote with made it sort of alright the problem is that's not the only premise from which that conclusion follows there are endlessly many premises from which that conclusion follows for example we could start with the premise Socrates is a God all gods are mortal therefore Socrates is mortal the premise is for the major premise is false Socrates isn't a God the minor premise let us give it to the Greeks is false the gods weren't mortal they were immortal that weren't but the two premises both of which are false have the property of implying a true conclusion so if you started from s is Socrates is mortal you could ascend to the premise Socrates as a God and the fact that you were assuming the truth of the conclusion wouldn't give you any reasons for supposing that the premise was true oh god what the Khan think he was doing well he knew what he was doing but he could have made our lives now the problem is as you'll see in a minute he was so taken with his way of pounding this that he added it to the second edition of the introduction which screwed everything up for generations the problem is this in the prologue omen count assumes the conclusion synthetic propositions can be known a priori and he ascends by the regressive method to the premise which is presumably he doesn't say the categories applied to all of my perceptions so in effect he's saying from the assumed conclusion we can get the premise but it doesn't follow from that assumed conclusion but the premise is true because any number of premises could be used as the premise from which that conclusion is derived unless and this is where it can't saved himself if you've ever read if you've ever read the prologue Romana I'll just tell you that this is in a section called the general problem how is cognition from pure reason possible and there's a footnote even if you've read the prologue oh man you probably skipped over the footnote let me alert you when Khan puts in footnotes it's usually worth reading he says in one of his footnotes the analytical method that's what he's calling the regressive method so far as it is opposed to the synthetic 'l is very different from that which constitutes the essence of analytic propositions it signifies only that we start from what is sought the conclusion as if it were given and ascend to the only conditions under which it is possible ah the only conditions under which it is possible well that makes everything alright let me explain suppose that P states the only conditions under which Q is true okay if P is the only condition I did have a pen here somewhere and I've left it somewhere huh oh well here we go the reason I'm reading this off for those of you with students let me give you a piece of advice if you ever do any logic in class write it down bring it with you and read it off otherwise you will make a mistake and you will stand there looking like an idiot trying to figure out what went wrong I got to tell you a story I can't help myself this is my proudest moment as a graduate student the great logician alfred tarski came to lecture at Harvard some of you if your logic students have heard the name alfred tarski is one of the great figures of the middle of the 20th century tarski was a big bluff round-faced man with a slow deliberate manner we all turned out I mean this was an important event and tarski had a board there and he proceeded to deliver a lecture on some utterly incomprehensible subject I have no idea I didn't at the time understand it and did this to this day I don't know what he was talking about but I paid close attention I was a logic student after all and he as he talked he put on the board perfectly inscribed lines of code as though he were carving them into stone with a chisel and as he went along he went line after line after line after I I had no idea what he was talking about and as a student of willard van orman quine I had been taught I've had it beat into my head count the number of left parentheses on the number of right parenthesis in every logical expression so having nothing better to do like counter the number of left and right parenthesis and I noticed he'd left the right parenthesis off line six okay he gets to the end of the talk and there is that sort of embarrassed pause before the first question is asked so young Robbie Wolff raises his hand everybody looks very impressed and he says yes and I say excuse me professor toski but I believe you left the bright parentheses off the end of line six and he turns stricken as though I had called into question the foundations of his life's work he said oh oh thank so much and he carefully inscribed the right parenthesis everybody looked around as if to say Wow wolf really knows what's going on having made my chops I then had the good sense to shut up whereupon willard van orman quine who was sitting behind me and who knew perfectly well what was going on asked tarski a real question and the two of them spent the next hour having a delighted to debate while the rest of us sat they're mystified i never said another word but my reputation in the department was made anyway that's why i always careful to arrive with a piece of paper suppose we say that p states the only condition under which q is true this means if not P if P isn't true if not P then Q isn't true then not Q god have terrible handwriting but if not P then not Q we all learn in baby logic is equivalent to if Q then P right that's equivalent to if Q then P so if P is the only premise from which Q follows then q and tails P in which case if you assume Q you can derive P from it so long as P is the only condition under which Q is true and that cook can't through in that word only because something in him wouldn't allow him to get it wrong so he stuck the word only and okay now that still doesn't show you that Q is true unless you can independently prove P if you can prove P and you can show that if Q then P if you can do if P entails Q then you're in business so he's got to find a premise from which P follows from which he then derives Q and that premise we will see is his interpretation of des cartes starting point cogito I think only it's not in his in conservation it's not the proposition I think it is to get ahead of myself the proposition the I think attaches to all of my representations that's where the argument starts and it leads to the conclusion that he wants well Cobb was so enamored by his mode of exposition in in the prolegomena that he stuck it into the second edition of the critique so what you get in the second edition of the critique in the introduction as you will see you get several sections which are only in B and not in a they are the sections four and five and it is here that we get the famous four questions whenever I read these famous four questions naturally I think of the four questions which are asked at a Jewish Seder you're all familiar with that wherefore is this night different from all other nights at this night we recline in etcetera etcetera etc I can't resist slandering a famous political commentary oh no David Brooks is the political commentator from the New York Times I was I was brought up in a non-religious Jewish family when I was 12 years old my mother said to me Robbie that's what I was called then my sister my oldest sister was named Barbara so she had the nickname Bob's and therefore I couldn't be called Bob so I was Robbie she said Robbie all the other little boys are going to be bar Mitzvahed we go to Hebrew school and they're going to be more plants but they're gonna have a big party and they're going to get a lot of presents and you can do that if you wanted to now you are the product of a mixed marriage your father is an agnostic and I'm an atheist so but you can be bar Mitzvahed if you want to be and have a big party or we will give you $100 and you can buy some presents for yourself so I thought about it and not realizing I was going into the only field the only profession in which the knowledge of Hebrew might actually be useful I took the hundred bucks and I bought an 80 Gold's railroad trains as Lionel railroad train which I covered in which Nady wanted to sell and that was my last experience with organized religion but I had been to a couple of I had been to a couple of satyrs in my life and at all the satyrs I've been to there is a tradition now it's the youngest child girl or boy but in the old days it was the boy the youngest boy there gets to ask the famous four questions and the youngest boy always turns out to be a fat faced little kid dressed up in a suit with a mother who's fussing over and patting him on the head and making sure he eats enough food and is enormous ly proud I mean this is just a tradition in Jewish and my mother for example took my sisters Phi Beta Kappa key and my Phi Beta Kappa key and she had a pair of earrings made out of them I mean there's nothing there's nothing more ultimately Jewish mother than that so David Brooks always looks to me like that fat faced little Jewish boy and a sailor who's gets to ask the famous four questions and I can never see him on television without waiting from the opens mouth and say wherefore is this night different from all other nights all right anyway the famous four questions are of course how is pure mathematics possible how is pure science of nature possible and God says we know that they are possible because we have mathematics and we have Natural Science the question is how are they possible then the third question is how is metaphysics as natural disposition possible which is an odd question but we'll see later on is an important part of Kant's larger project Khan thinks that we all have a natural tendency to reach for the unconditioned which we cannot achieve and indeed in the later part of the crew he actually argues that that natural tendency has cognitively and scientifically positive effect for example the attempt on the part of Newton to find a unifying way of from which a unifying set of principles from which he could derive Kepler's laws of planetary motion and Galileo's laws of terrestrial motion was an example of that reaching for unity and Einstein's search for a unified field theory is the same so Khan thought the correctly understood metaphysics as natural disposition which was a dope driving a driving of the human mind for total unity and total explanation act we had a cognitively positive role to play the last question is how has metaphysics of science possible and of course to that answer was it isn't he had already decided shortly after the inaugural dissertation to reject once for all the claims of Descartes and Leibniz to have rational knowledge of independent reality that is to say metaphysical knowledge the problem with putting this into the introduction to the critique of course is that he isn't going he isn't going to answer the question how are they possible he's going to show that they are actual he's going to prove that we have a priori knowledge of the synthetic propositions of Euclidian geometry and or he thinks he is we'll get to that next week and he's going to prove that we have a priori knowledge of the synthetic propositions of Newtonian physics well the trouble is this is a hard book and those are easy questions to understand and generations of students have read this book and slapped on to this these four questions because that's the thing they think and they can understand so they think Conte is merely explaining how this is possible given the assumption that it is possible whereas that's not what's going on in the book at all there's a good analogy how many of you have read work of the metaphysics of morals almost everybody else if you have another critique yet but you've read everybody's about the groundwork and philosophy you remember the famous four examples of the categorical imperative well the groundwork of metaphysics of model is a very hard book to understand and so you read along mystified by it until you latch on to these famous four examples promise keeping truth-telling developing your talents and so forth and you forgot finally something I can understand all right I know what it is to tell the truth I know what it is to keep a promise if that's what comms is talking about then I understand the book the trouble is they're lousy examples of the categorical imperative two of them aren't examples of anything at all and two of them are only arguably or marginally examples of categorical garden none of them is a successful example of the categorical imperative so they are misleading as an indication of what the book is about these four questions are utterly misleading and Khan was just dead wrong to put them into the second edition introduction which everybody reads and thinks oh okay now I know what it's about all right that's what's going on in these opening passages yeah basically questions about another basic thing surely is the way grunt uses the term experience the a1 and b1 and in his illustrious predecessors the guys who are talking about last time because I think on real there's not a sharp distinction between the understanding Sensibility so IndyCar char lightness it is experience to clearly distinctly perceived an eternal truth our God and in log or humans experience of sensual to be reasoning or understanding so I just can't seem to take it for granted that there are these two completely separate faculties understanding and Sensibility and what experience is is the way the games they work together alright for those of you who couldn't pick that up from my lapel mic the basic question is comps major predecessors did not draw this sharp distinction between sensory experience and the contributions of reason indeed many of them thought that reason is simply a perfection of sensory experience or it brilliant improves upon sensory experience carries us beyond the sensory experience comp claims that these are two completely different sources of components of knowledge which only when they work together yield knowledge what's going on now in part that will be the beginning of my next lecture let me just say in advance the foundation of the distinction is that Cod thinks that sense of sensibility we are placed in direct relation to individual things and through conception or understanding we are placed in in direct relation through general concepts to individual things just to give you a concrete example it's one thing to look at a particular horse and see have sensory perceptions of that horse it's another thing to bring that experience under the general concept horse which is a concept under which many other things are also brought and to bring the mind into in direct relationship to the horse by way of this general concept under which that particular thing Falls and doesn't think that either of these can be reduced to the other he thinks that one needs both in order to have knowledge does that help at all not really that explains how he's using it very nicely what I'm worried about is that in setting up this critique of Reason comp seems to want to start from no assumptions what so and this looks like a big assumption it looks like a premise so one might wonder what's an easy drawing on both here or Baumgarten why does he think he's a tiny janessa why does he think the question is why does conflict that is entitled to the distinction between sensibility and understanding as a premise rather than something that he needs to argue for part of the explanation is this and it turns up for example in his refutation of the ontological argument for the existence of God no matter how much you how much more detailed you make a concept no matter how specific you make the concept it does not thereby become a direct and immediate experience of an individual thing it just becomes a more specific general concept there's no point at which a general concept becomes so specific that it somehow transmutes into an immediate relation to an individual thing only sensibility brings us into immediate relation to individual things now that's the con has arguments for that but it's not a trivial claim and it's a claim that others might dispute the conflicts that you cannot take the concept like man like animal and make it more specific and arrive there by it the concept of horse make that more specific and make the concept more and more specific until finally what you arrive is an experience of a horse anymore he thinks then you can take a concept and make it so specific that you arrive at an experience of God in order in what you could arrive it to be sure at a concept that was so specific that there is actually in the world only one actual thing that falls under that concept but it would still be logically possible for there to be more than one thing that falls under that concept it would just have to be something that satisfies all of the notes or characteristics which are listed in that concept so the concept never becomes an immediate apprehension of an individual the only way Kant thinks that we can apprehend an individual is by having it affect us as he says that is to say affect us so that we have sensations that we have perceptions with sensation + form spatial temporal form which is a perception only in that way can we be in relation to an individual thing it's also very helpful but what not just what not persuasive so that shifts the premise to the notion of concepts being discursive yes pres and de Carter Spinoza perhaps them likeness some concepts are already objective this is by the way for those who who were watching the video professor Nelson a member of the department who has done me the great courtesy of attending these lectures his point is that this sharp distinction between discursive concepts and non-discursive perceptions although for Kant it is a foundational distinction is not one that is shared by his predecessors in the same way and it is a distinction that some of them at least have this correctly would argue is not a foundational distinction and that would be something that they would have to argue out between them it's not something that is obvious under simply given as soon as you start talking about the subject we'll get it let's postpone more of this until next week when we will come to the transcendentalist there you can see what God has to say about sensibility and that will that will enable us again to raise these questions so what is really going on in the critique once we get past this unfortunate introduction into the into the second edition text of a mode of exposition that was appropriate for the prolegomena but is not appropriate for the critique the answer is as I've said before Khan will be looking for a premise that he thinks is of such a nature that it cannot consistently be denied by somebody arguing against him from which he will then attempt to derive as a conclusion the validity of the causal maxim and other propositions but most notably the causal maxim and that is as I say when I consider the central argument of the critique now next week we will start in on the text itself the first part of the doctrine of elements the transcendental aesthetic and one thing I will just alert you to a fact that much of what is in the transcendental aesthetic is not significantly changed from what was already in the newer in the inaugural dissertation conferred he had more or less gotten to the truth of the matter in the inaugural dissertation with regard to sensibility and it was was with regard to understanding that he thought he had his work cut out for him so we will find for one thing that the transcendental aesthetic is quite short you read the whole thing for next time and it's not terribly long we will find also that he makes a claim there which by now you should realize he shouldn't make namely that from an analysis of sensibility alone we can arrive at a priori knowledge namely the knowledge of geometry and arithmetic but he's interested mostly in geometry now if he's right that it takes both concepts and intuitions to give us knowledge then until he's talked about concepts he shouldn't really stake out a claim that we have knowledge of geometry but he and he realizes that later on in the critique as you'll see when he gets to a later part that we will talk about this semester but here he really rushes past that opening section because he knows that the problems he really needs to deal with can be found in the transmittal logic the analytic of concepts and the analytic of principles so with that I will say farewell for the moment and I will see you next week

Channel: Alex Campbell

Views: 86,019

Keywords: Kant, Critique, Bertrand Russell, Critique of Pure Reason, Transcendental Idealism, Synthetic, A priori, German, philosophy, metaphysics, epistemology, 18th century, Robert Paul Wolff, Descartes, analytic, Hume, Locke, Lewis, C.I. Lewis, lecture 2

Id: Al7O2puvdDA

Length: 74min 24sec (4464 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 13 2016