Kant’s Synthesis of Knowledge: A Priori and Empirical
Kant’s Synthesis of Knowledge
Copernican Revolution: Kant argues that human knowledge is a synthesis between the empirical and the a priori. A priori knowledge unifies and synthesizes sense experience, which is empirical, plural, and amorphous. Knowledge results from the interaction of the a priori forms of the knower and the multiple data supplied by the object of knowledge, which is the phenomenon. The a priori has primacy because it adapts to understanding and regulates the objects of knowledge. This is the core of transcendental idealism, which differs from both rationalism and empiricism.
Transcendental Analytic
At the level of sensitivity, there is a multiplicity of sensations ordered in space and time. Sensitivity is not decisive in the state of human knowledge, but it provides universal truths that enable science and place humans at a higher cognitive level than animals. The result of the activity of understanding is judgments. The analytical study of transcendental understanding focuses on the faculty of judgment. Matter is an empirical intuition. The forms that structure the subject matter at the level of understanding differ from those at the level of sensitivity. Kant calls these forms pure concepts or categories. The categories are schemes that order the phenomena of sensibility, forming a union of matter that leads to knowledge of objects.
Transcendental Aesthetic
This is the study of sensory knowledge and sensitivity. Knowledge results from the union of matter and form. Matter is what we receive from the outside, which Kant calls “the given,” a chaos without order or structure. This concept cannot be explained a posteriori because we know it a priori, united and transformed by the understanding. Form is the set of elements that structure, order, and conform to the given. Matter, when received, is transformed into feelings and structured. It is subsequently ordered by the a priori. The result is sensitive knowledge. The structures that order the a priori are space and time, which are pure intuitions. Space allows the subject of experience, and time is the dimension in which all experience takes place.
Categories of Understanding
There are twelve types of judgments, determined by category type: quantity (particular, singular, universal), quality (affirmative, negative, limited), relation (categorical, hypothetical, disjunctive), and modality (problematic, assertoric, apodictic). These categories include axioms of intuition (unity, plurality, totality), anticipations of perception (reality, negation, limitation), analogies of experience (substance-accident, cause and effect, action-position), and postulates of empirical thought (possibility, existence, necessity). Without these categories, we would only have a multiplicity of dispersed feelings. They enable our knowledge. Pure concepts are the condition for all knowledge. Causation is a scheme pertaining to the subject. The categories are referred to experience, and the synthesis results in a priori synthetic judgments. The claim that everything that happens has a cause is because physics is composed of synthetic judgments a priori and because it is a science.