An Introduction to the Epistemology of Immanuel Kant: With Special Consideration of Transcendental Aesthetic

Abstract

In the Critique of Pure Reason Immanuel Kant attempts to resolve the problem of how it is possible for men to make synthetic a priori judgments. This was a problem which had been developing in his thinking for many years. His encounter with Hume's attack on the principle of causality, however, brought his thinking face to face vith a threat to all knowledge, a threat which he wss compelled to challenge. Kant was the first to realize fully the implications of Hume's analysis: he came to tne conclusion that, if the Humian analysis of causality were correct, a similar analysis would eliminate all certainty in mathematics and in all science. All empirical knowledge would be reduced to a skeptical morass from which there was no escape. Kant set for himself the task of saving man's knowledge from this fate. Human knowledge may be divided into two basic types: a oosteriori and a priori. Hume had acknowledged the limited validity of a posteriori knowledge which is that knowledge derived from experience. Such a posteriori knowledgeh had one crucial weakness: it was always contingent and uncertain. Kant agreed with him on this point. "The fundamental presupposition upon which Kant's argument rests -- a presupposition never itself investigated but always assumed -- is that universality and necessity cannot be reached by any process that is empircal in character." [From introductory section]