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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 June 2010
My topic is historical rather than philosophical. I want to consider what Kant aimed to achieve in the Critique of Pure Reason. In 1909 Prichard wrote, “Kant's problem is similar to Locke's. Locke states that his purpose is to inquire into the original, certainty, and extent of human knowledge.” Many have maintained that Kant's purpose was to mediate between rationalism and empiricism in epistemology. Hermann Cohen held that the aim of the Critique is to provide a theory of experience, an account of empirical knowledge. Ernst Cassirer and other neo-Kantians have held that its aim is to furnish a philosophy of science.
1 Kant's Theory of Knowledge, p. 2.
2 Kants Theorie der Erfahnmg
3 “Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik,” Kant-Studien, XXXVI, p. 2.
4 Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik, p. 16. Similarly, G. Krüger writes, “The Critique is not epistemology.” (Philosophie und Moral in der Kantischen Kritik, p. 227)
6 Critique, Bxxii
8 Critique, Axii
7 Critique, Bvii
8 “Philosophy is a mere idea of a possible science which nowhere exists in concrete), but which we endeavour to approach by many different paths, until the one true path … has at last been discovered.” (Critique, B866)
9 Critique, Bviii
10 Critique, Bxiv
11 “The youth who has passed through instruction in school has been accustomed to learn. Now he thinks that he will learn philosophy. Yet this is impossible … In order to learn philosophy, it would actually have to exist in the first place. One would have to be able to point to a book and say: see, here is wisdom and reliable insight; learn to understand it and grasp it; build henceforth upon it, and you will be a philosopher. Until someone shows me such a book of philosophy to which I can refer, as … in mathematics, he must let me say that we abuse men's confidence if we … deceive them by pretending that a philosophy is already available.” (Nachricht von der Einrichtung seiner Vorlesungen)
12 “The study of nature has entered on the secure path of a science, after having for so many centuries been nothing but a process of merely random groping.” (Critique, Bxiv)
13 Critique, B22. “The aim of the Critique of Pure Reason was to discuss the very possibility of metaphysics.” (Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics which claims to be Scientific, Appendix) “The Critique and the Critique alone contains … all the means by which metaphysics can be established as a science.” (Ibid., Solution to the General Question)
14 Introduction to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, p. 73. Similarly, Paton writes, “The nature of mathematical thinking and its relation to the empirical world, the ultimate presuppositions of physical science, the possibility of a metaphysical knowledge transcending our finite experience—these are three fundamental problems … Kant professes that he is able to solve.” (Kant's Metaphysic of Experience, I, p. 89)
15 “There is no need for a critique of reason in its empirical use … or in mathematics.” (Critique, B739)
16 Critique, B27, Axii.
17 See note (13)
18 A Commentary to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, p. 570.
19 “Nach hundert Jahren,” Kant-Studien, XXXVI, p. 241.
20 Kant, p. 303.
21 Critique, B856
22 Op. cit., p. 76, n. 2.
23 Critique, Axii
24 Critique, Bxviii
26 Über eine Enideckung, nach der alle Neue Kritik der Reinen Vernunft durch eine Ältere entbehrlich gemacht werden soil, Zweiter Abschnitt.
26 Kemp Smith, op. cit., p. 10.
27 Kemp Smith, op. cit., pp. 33, 70.
28 Kemp Smith, op. cit., p. 390. Paton, op. cit., I, p. 72.
29 Paton, op. cit., II, p. 81. Paton, “Kant's Analysis of Experience,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, XXXVI, pp. 187 ff. Kemp Smith, op. cit., p. 44.
30 Critique, B166, B218.
31 See note (29).
32 “Propositions in regard to things generally” (Critique, B748)
33 ” The Critique … is occupied not so much with objects as with the way of our knowledge of objects in general.” (Critique, B25)
34 “Metaphysics … considers everything in so far as it is.” (Critique, B873)
35 Critique, B18, B546
36 Critique, B252
37 Critique, B5
38 “Metaphysical knowledge … cannot have for its basis either outer experience, which is the basis of physics proper, or inner experience, which is the basis of empirical psychology.” (Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics which claims to be Scientific, #1)
39 Critique, B13
40 Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics which claims to be Scientific, # 2
41 Critique, B19
42 “All metaphysicians are solemnly and lawfully suspended from their occupations until they have satisfactorily answered the question, How is synthetic a priori knowledge possible? … However, if they want to carry on their business not as science, but as an art of wholesome oratory adapted to the common understanding of men, they cannot fairly be forbidden …. Only then can they be called wise and useful men, the more so as they give up the claim to be metaphysicians. Metaphysicians profess to be … philosophers. … What they maintain must be science, or it is worth nothing at all.” (Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics which claims to be Scientific, # 5)
43 “The possibility of analytic propositions can very easily be understood. … The possibility of a posteriori synthetic propositions … requires n o particular explanation. … There remain therefore only synthetic a priori propositions, the possibility of which must be sought for or investigated.” (loc. cit.)
44 Critique, B25
46 “Geometry proceeds with security in knowledge that is completely a priori, and has no need to beseech philosophy for any certificate.” (Critique, B120)
46 Critique, Bxv-xvi
47 “For a priori principles … it is possible to furnish a proof from the … sources of the possibility of knowledge of objects generally.” (Critique, B188) “If any knowledge is to have objective reality, that is, is to refer to an object and to have sense and meaning in regard to it, the object must be capable of being given in some way. If objects are not capable of being given for them, concepts are empty; by means of them we have indeed been thinking; but by such thinking we have not actually acquired knowledge of anything. … For an object to be given, the representation of it must refer to experience (either actual or possible).” (Critique, Big4f.) Cf. B147.
48 “Synthetic propositions in regard to things generally … are transcendental.” “In transcendental knowledge … proof proceeds by showing that experience itself, and therefore the object of experience, would be impossible without a connection of this kind. Hence the proof must also show the possibility of arriving synthetically and a priori at some knowledge of things which was not contained in the concepts of them.” (Critique, B748, B811)
49 Kant illustrates:“ ‘Every judgment must have a ground’ is a … principle of knowledge. … ‘Every thing must have a reason for it’ is … a principle about objects. … The principle of sufficient reason is put ambiguously … because the word ‘every’ may mean ‘every judgment’ … or ‘every thing’. … If by ‘every’ is understood ‘every thing’, a quite different sort of proof is required.”
(Über eine Entdeckung, nach der alle Neue Kritik der Reinen Vernunft dutch eine Ältere entbehrlich gemacht werden soil, Erster Abschnitt, A)
50 Critique, Axv