Yasmina Lembachar PHI111-01 Professor J. Meehan Will the sun rise tomorrow because it rose today?

Hume and Kant

In their quest to shedding light on the darkness that obtrudes the human mind, philosophers have long strived to uncover the way it operates in grasping and understanding reality, how metaphysical knowledge could be attained and whether it could even ever actually be. In An Enquiry of Human Understanding, Hume sets out to investigate the origin of ideas and ascribes the causality of events to mere habit, after attempting to lay out a map of how experiences and ideas are processed by the human mind. However, although having enlightened Kant and allowing him along with other thinkers to explore a somewhat uncharted territory in terms of metaphysics that of the knowledge of causality Kant's response in his Prolegomena to any Metaphysics is highly critical of Hume's work, which he found to be incomplete and useless in that it does not offer any satisfactory answer to the issue raised. He thus proposes a solution to the Humean problem and asserts its certainty in the face of Hume's skeptical contemplations.

Hume's journey begins with the advocacy of an abstract and abstruse kind of philosophy that is thought of as less practical and thus pointless but which he thinks of as both imperative in shaping men's thinking (instead of their behavior) and essential in his analysis of the operations of the mind. He thus argues that metaphysics, which he describes as profound reasonings, are the foundation to all other reasonings as they allow for greater accuracy and certainty; and although sometimes leading to theoretical dead-ends, Hume thinks that grasping truths or the impossibility of grasping said truths is healthier to the human mind than letting it drown in the obscurity of ignorance. Having settled on the importance of metaphysics, he introduces the notions of ideas and impressions, arguing that all

ideas derive from impressions. His argument lies on the following premise: Memory and imagination may mimic or copy the perceptions of the senses, but they cant create a perception that has as much force and liveliness as the one they are copying. (Hume 7) Hume divides the mind's perceptions into the aforementioned categories based on their force and liveliness: stronger and livelier perceptions acquired through our senses fall into impressions, while ideas and thoughts are but fainter versions of reflected upon memories; and while impressions are confined to one's sensory experience and to human authority, ideas, on the other hand, could run as wild as one's imagination permits and are not subjected to the narrow boundaries of the laws of physics. However, their seemingly infinite nature only lies in the infinitely many combinations of impressions they can morph into, for ideas are nothing more than a melting pot of existing impressions that could defy reason and realism and take many forms. For example, one could think of a pink-colored sea, although never having encountered one, whereas a blind man could never fathom such a thing as he could never experience colors. However, a common property to both is the way their minds tie ideas together and move on from one to another: Hume claims that ideas are associated either because of their resemblance to each other, their contiguity in either time or space, or by causality inferred by the occurrence of events as a result of other ones.

The notion of causality is mainly used in establishing matters of facts: statements which do not adhere to the law of contradiction and whose opposites are plausible, as opposed to relations of ideas, which assert a priori knowledge that is logically true. Matters of fact thus have the potential of being right as they do of being wrong, and substantiating them requires more careful thought than a simple proof by contradiction. For example, the sun could rise just as it couldn't tomorrow. However, we assume that it will because it has repeatedly in the past, but Hume argues that All that past experience can tell us, directly and for sure, concerns the behaviour of the particular objects we observed, at the particular time when we observed them. (Hume 15) This reasoning is thus not infallible as it does not rely on any certainty but rather predicts the future based on past impressions and experience. Indeed, by

extending our knowledge of a particular object or event to similar ones, we presumptuously assume that what appears to be similar objects behave the same way, and that what was once the effect to a cause will permanently be the same as well, thus running the risk of falling into error. The only basis to our knowledge of matters of facts is thus mere custom, however flawed our reasoning might be. Nevertheless, Hume describes this sense of habit as something that is present to the memory or senses, and a customary association of that with some other thing. (Hume 22) and ascribes the causality of matters of facts to the power it exerts over the human mind: an unexplainable and overpowering feeling that is responsible for trusting past experiences with seemingly equal or similar objects to inform us on future effects.

Hume's conclusion, however, did not prove to be too satisfactory a solution to Kant. Although acknowledging Hume's efforts in conjecturing over the causality problem, Kant strictly believes in attaining and proving the certainty of metaphysical statements, including the knowledge of causality, and thus proceeds to make his own argument. He first introduces the idea of analytic and synthetic judgements, coupled with a priori and a posteriori knowledge: analytic judgements are merely statements of obvious realities and share the common principle that is the law of contradiction, while synthetic judgements expand some given knowledge through the use of reason and logic and thus require and share a different principle that has yet to be discovered. On the other hand, a priori knowledge refers to any knowledge acquired through pure reason and independently from experience, whereas a posteriori knowledge stems and arises from experience. Kant argues that most of what Hume thought of as relations of ideas (or analytic judgments) was in fact synthetic a priori knowledge, which led him into his erroneous conclusions. Indeed, arithmetics, although based on some analytic judgements, only use them as a basis for extended judgements that require synthetic activity from the mind. He argues that mathematical concepts stem from intuition, a somewhat passive intake of experience governed by the frameworks of space and time, and which is merely the form of our

sensibility (Kant 11). Intuitions thus provide for an a priori knowledge of things not for what they are in and out of themselves, but for how they appear to be: whatever is presented our senseswhether outer (space) or inner (time)is experienced by us only as it appears, not as it is in itself (Kant 12). Whether things in themselves actually exist or not doesn't matter as much as the fact that only their appearances are available to our understanding and to our senses. This notion of pure a priori intuition is illustrated with the use of geometrical congruence: a three dimensional space is known to be infinite, lines can be extended indefinitely as well, and both these facts are perceived through sensible intuition since they can not be produced by experience.

Experience by itself is thus unable to provide us with knowledge of things in themselves. However, experience, when associated with judgement, informs us more about their nature: When an appearance is given to us, it is up to us to choose how to judge the matter. The appearance depends on the senses, but the judgment depends on the understanding, and the only question is whether a given judgment is true or not. (Kant Note III) The subjective nature of judgement thus makes it a little delicate for universal judgements to be made about objects. Kant believes that being able to make judgements that have a normative epistemological value is possible, whether we have access to the absolute Forms or not, meaning judgements, although rooted in intuitions and perception, could either be absolutely right or absolutely wrong; and in order for a judgement to be universal and necessary, it has to be objectively valid. The understanding of one subject has to be congruent to all other judgements in order to be right, and the congruence of one's judgement with all other judgements can only infer the validity of said judgement. Kant then provides us with a descriptive and comprehensive table of the different types of judgements one could fall into when producing one, the different concepts of understanding and the universal principles of natural science. He classifies judgments and concepts based on their quantitative characteristics, their quality, relation and modality, while principles are divided into four classes (axioms of intuition, anticipations of perception, analogies of experience

and postulates of empirical thinking).

Kant reaches a few critical points in his critique of the human mind's understanding of knowledge as he differentiates between experiences and intuitions, senses and understanding, and subjective and objective judgements. He assures us that any hint of a Humean doubt can now be removed as he concludes: None of these three concepts is supplied by reason; they haveas I have showntheir seat in the understanding. These concepts and the principles drawn from them stand a priori before all experience; they are applicable only to experience, but within that domain they have undoubted objective rightness. (Kant 27) Causality, substance and two-way causal interaction thus all pertain to the field of a priori knowledge and do not arise from experience, as Hume was led to believe. Therefore he believes he has solved Hume's problem in determining the origin of causality and knowledge.

References Hume. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Kant. Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics .