Kant's Philosophy: Unifying Rationalism and Empiricism

Block I (Kant): Summary - Overcoming Rationalism and Empiricism

"Sapere Aude!" (Dare to think!) The Enlightenment ideal champions Reason's independence from external authority, emphasizing progress through science. Kant merges rationalism and empiricism, inspired by Newton's synthesis of reason and experience. Rationalism, focusing on innate concepts, risked detachment from reality, while empiricism, grounded in experience, struggled with universality. Kant critiques rationalism's dogmatism and empiricism's skepticism, proposing that knowledge arises from perceptions shaped by inherent mental structures.

Classification of Judgments

Scientific judgments must expand knowledge and hold universal validity. Analytic judgments are inherent in the subject, universal but not expansive. Synthetic judgments add to the subject, being extensive but not necessarily universal. A priori judgments are known independently of experience, ensuring universality. A posteriori judgments derive from experience, offering extensiveness but lacking universality. Kant introduces synthetic a priori judgments, combining extensiveness with universality, crucial for scientific knowledge. He examines the mind's faculties: Sensitivity, Understanding, and Reason, to understand how these judgments are formed.

Transcendental Aesthetic

Sensations form intuitions through space and time, a priori forms of sensibility. These aren't derived from experience but are preconditions for it. Phenomena, perceived within space and time, are distinct from noumena (things-in-themselves). Mathematics relies on synthetic a priori judgments, with geometry dealing with space and arithmetic with time, ensuring their universality and applicability to experience.

Transcendental Analytic

Understanding organizes experience through categories, pure concepts like causality. These a priori forms unify phenomena, making physics possible. Categories apply only to phenomena, not to things-in-themselves. Synthetic a priori judgments in physics, like causality, are universal and necessary, not derived from experience but applied to it.