Understanding Kant’s Epistemology and Metaphysics
Kant .1. Epistemology (Critique of Pure Reason) The conditions that enable the laws are judgments (uttered statements). Critique of Pure Reason: Aesthetic I. Transcendental, pure forms used to explain mathematics and science. The sensitivity is used to sort data in existence (data of the senses (empirical), pure forms of sensibility (space, which allows us to explain the outside and while enabling us to explain the internal order of experience) who are a priori). II. Transcendental Analytic, which comes with understanding, that makes judgments. III. Dialectic Transcendental reason. Kant’s transcendental idealism, empiricism (the limit of knowledge is experience) and rationalism (there are a priori issues in the human mind, which make possible the knowledge). The physical category is based on the cause, which is a priori. Category: Concepts are pure transcendental conditions necessary for our understanding of phenomena. The intellect cannot but think the phenomena is to apply the categories. But these, being pure, lack content. That content is what gives the data from sensitivity. Kant takes scientific judgments according to Hume. The relationships between ideas (formal sciences) call a priori analytic judgments and these judgments do not extend knowledge, but are always a priori true. The issues of fact (empirical sciences) are for Kant a posteriori: if they extend knowledge, but do not know whether or not they are true. For something to be science, you have to develop expertise and be true (synthetic judgments a priori). This shows that math is science because it makes a priori synthetic judgments, like physics. Metaphysics is not science because it cannot make synthetic judgments a priori. With which scientific judgments are synthetic a priori, to be science. The math would have two branches, arithmetic (sequencing) and geometry, based in space. This directly relates to time and space, pure forms, so they are pure (a priori) but as they join the sensitivity that makes it applicable to experience, which are synthetic judgments. Trials can be as empirical concepts or pure concepts (a priori) that he calls that are 12 categories of quantity (unit: particular trial, plurality: plural trial, total trial equipment) and relationship quality (substance, causality: pure concept of our understanding and reciprocal action). Metaphysics is not a science, since its purpose is to reach a rational understanding of the world as a whole, the soul, or God, noumenal objects of which we have no sensible intuition. The critique of pure reason closes to metaphysics as a science and knowledge of things in themselves, what is suprasensible. 3. Transcendental Metaphysics. It has three large rooms: Rational Psychology, Cosmology, and Theodicy (natural theology). In psychology, there are rational psychic phenomena (soul) that are immaterial and immortal, that we can think of something that is not subject to space and time. The reason incurs paralogisms. In cosmology, we seek physical explanations to find a reason for physical phenomena (cosmos) and find two scenarios that cannot be proven (antinomies), the main ones: “that the universe has no beginning in time and space limit, but the universe is infinite.” – All when there is composed of indivisible elements, but everything can divide indefinitely. – The movement has seized a cause, but no cause seized. – There is a necessary, but there are no necessary beings (divinity). In theodicy, there are psychic and physical phenomena, and God is put as ideal. Demonstrating the existence of God: – Ontology (St. Anselm and discards) the existence. – Grounds (St. Thomas) by causation. – Theological by the purpose.