British Journal for the History of Philosophy 16(4) 2008: 801–810

REVIEW ARTICLE

KANT, HUME AND CAUSATION

Gary Banham

Paul Guyer: Knowledge, Reason and Taste: Kant’s Response to Hume

(Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2008) pp. ix–267. £23.95
(hb). ISBN 13: 978-0691-13439-0

Paul Guyer is one of the foremost Anglo-American writers on Kant and in

focusing this work on Kant’s response to Hume he addresses a connection
that has always been taken to be central within the reception of the Critical
Philosophy. Guyer’s intent here is, however, to widen the understanding of
the relationship between Kant and Hume. Rather than just focusing on the
question of how Kant takes himself to be responding to Hume’s problems
concerning causation, Guyer here gives some reasons for viewing the
Critical Philosophy generally as formed through responses to Hume. In
illustrating this argument, Guyer treats us to a taxonomy of types of
scepticism and discusses the nature of Hume’s problems with the self,
practical reason, taste and teleology in order to show how Kant can
profitably be seen in each case to be responding to him. Hence, Guyer
presents the engagement with Hume as important for each of Kant’s major
critical works. Nonetheless, despite this breadth of focus, there are some
problems with connecting the discreet inquiries presented here together
given that the work is not, as Guyer himself stresses, ‘comprehensive or
systematic’ (20). While this work offers an unusually extensive account of
the relations between Kant and Hume it is far from engaging with all the
important points of contact and dispute between them. Further, despite
articulating a case for viewing Kant’s response to Hume as wider than
merely correcting the latter’s description of the nature of causation, two out
of the five chapters do deal with this topic and the response Guyer offers to
it is particularly revealing of his own hermeneutic postulates with regard to
the Critical Philosophy.
Prior to engaging specifically with the question of causation, however,
Guyer’s first chapter provides a framing that is important for the work as a
whole, guiding as it does the investigation of the particular topics that
follow. The initial chapter concerns the varieties of scepticism and the
nature of Kant’s view of common sense. Against the claims of Karl

British Journal for the History of Philosophy

ISSN 0960-8788 print/ISSN 1469-3526 online ª 2008 BSHP
http://www.informaworld.com DOI: 10.1080/09608780802407605
802 GARY BANHAM

Ameriks,1 Guyer here makes a case for viewing the response to scepticism as
important for Kant. The basis of this claim consists in seeing Kant as
engaged with three distinct sorts of scepticism. The first variety is described
by Guyer as ‘Pyrrhonian’ and concerns the problems that arise from natural
reason leading to dialectic. The response to this form of scepticism is what
requires the operation of critique in a general sense and leads to the writing
of the Transcendental Dialectic. It is distinguished from the scepticism said
to arise from attempts to justify first principles by reference to experience
alone which Guyer views as the basis of Kant’s characterization of Hume as
a sceptic. Finally, the third form of scepticism is the one that is usually
meant when scepticism is referred to in the work of contemporary analytic
epistemology, Cartesian scepticism. The viewing of the response to
Cartesian scepticism as key to the understanding of the Critique is arguably
the point with which Karl Ameriks is in disagreement. Guyer, by contrast,
considers Kant’s refutation of it as ‘by far the predominant concern of
Kant’s theoretical philosophy’ (29) despite conceding the fact that relatively
little attention is paid to it in the pages of the Critique.2 Guyer concedes that
response to Cartesian scepticism was not key to the organization of the
Critique but that the form of scepticism with which Kant was more
concerned arose rather from the nature of human reason itself and that this
point ensures that Kant cannot simply endorse the standpoint of common
sense since common sense is, rather, the source of deep philosophical
perplexity.
If critical reflection on common sense is required for philosophy to clarify
the structure of reason, then critique itself is based on such a reflective turn
of thinking. Rather than focus primarily on the nature of this reflection,
Guyer is concerned instead with the other primary form of scepticism to
which the Critique is engaged in replying on his account, namely, the
empiricist denial of universal and necessary first principles. Kant relates the
denial of the necessity of these principles by empiricist thinkers to the view
that we have a relation not merely to phenomenal objects but to objects-in-
themselves and that it is the latter that would have to be the basis of
necessary characteristics if objects are to possess such characteristics at all.

1
Karl Ameriks, Kant and the Fate of Autonomy: Problems in the Appropriation of the Critical
Philosophy (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
2
The discussion of it is taken to be important nonetheless by Guyer due to the fact that the
refutation of idealism was not merely the subject of a short section of the second edition of the
Critique but also attended to in a series of reflexionen written subsequently. Guyer does not
however give a serious argument for this here as it was rather the focus of the central section of
an earlier work. See Paul Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Knowledge (Cambridge and New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1987) Part IV and for a different discussion, see Frederick Beiser,
German Idealism: The Struggle Against Scepticism, 1781–1801 (Cambridge, MA and London:
Harvard University Press, 2002), Part I, Chs 3–7. For a discussion of the reflexionen that Guyer
treats as important in regard to the topic of the refutation of idealism, see G. Banham,
‘Freedom and Transcendental Idealism’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 14 (2006)
No. 2: 787–97.
 KANT, HUME AND CAUSATION 803

Hence, if this is the source of the form of scepticism that Kant identifies with
empiricism, then the response to it must involve a form of argument that
regressively demonstrates the dependence of such principles on the
postulation of transcendental idealism.3 The chapter on scepticism goes
on to suggest that Kant’s view of moral philosophy also requires a response
to sceptical queries of a similar sort to those found in theoretical philosophy.
It is in this way that the chapter provides a ground for the subsequent
chapters’ inquiry into specific topics. Even granting this claim, however,
does not help enforce the view of the importance of Cartesian scepticism, as
little is said within this chapter, or subsequent to it, to support its
importance.
It is in the second and third chapters that Guyer turns to the topics that
have been the source of most interest in the discussion of Kant’s relation to
Hume, namely the understanding of Hume’s problems about causation and
Kant’s responses to them. It is here also that I will articulate an account that
diverges from Guyer’s in important ways. Before stating it, however, it is
useful to make clear the senses in which Guyer’s discussion marks an
advance on most of those presented. This is in his care with regard to
Hume’s texts on causation. Guyer carefully presents the questions raised by
Hume in the Treatise and the subsequent Enquiry and in treating Kant’s
responses to these questions focuses not just on the account of the Second
Analogy but also on other passages of the Critique before turning in
conclusion to the contributions of the Third Critique. While the nature of
the treatment given is one I wish to argue is problematic, the extent of it is
much broader than usual in current literature on the topic and in being so,
significantly helps advance the argument concerning its interpretation.
Before turning to the description of Hume’s problems with causation,
Guyer first mentions some general statements of Kant’s understanding of
these problems in the Prolegomena, although in doing so, misses a point to
which we will have reason to return later. Guyer is puzzled by Kant’s claim
that the Humean problem arises from a doomed attempt to gain insight into
‘the possibility of a thing in general as a cause’ (x28, Ak. 4: 311) since this
apparently ‘does not sound like anything said by Hume’ (74) although we
have already noted that something like this has been said to be the basis by
Kant of empiricist scepticism concerning necessary and universal first
principles. The reasons why Kant takes this to be part of Hume’s account
will be part of my reply to Guyer’s discussion.

3
Despite his rejection of transcendental idealism, Guyer does not in this book present any direct
argument against it. For this he refers back to Guyer (1987) section V. The status of the claim of
transcendental idealism that he gives has been subjected to serious criticism in recent years. See,
for two contrastively different approaches to it from Guyer’s: Henry Allison, Kant’s
Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense Revised & Enlarged Edition (New
Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2004) and Rae Langton, Kantian Humility: Our
Ignorance of Things in Themselves (Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press, 1998).
804 GARY BANHAM

In turning to Hume’s problems, Guyer begins with the earlier treatment in

the Treatise referring to Hume’s genetic inquiry into the origin of our belief
in the idea of causation, although somewhat oddly interpreting this inquiry
as one into the ‘meaning’ of causation (76). This leads naturally enough to a
description of Hume’s naturalistic psychology and his account of simple
ideas of relation, an account that is evidently a critical inheritance of
Locke’s discussion. Guyer argues that Hume’s initial treatment of these
simple ideas is not directly concluded as Hume introduces two supplemen-
tary questions, one concerning the belief we have in the general principle of
causal connection (every event some cause) and the other concerning our
belief in particular causal connections where this second question leads to
some more specific inquiries into the nature of inference. The inquiry into
the general principle is, however, treated as being one that does not go far
due to the point that causes are logically distinguishable from effects, so
there is no contradiction in separating them from each other. This point is
led by Hume to undercut the general principle, since we can have no
demonstrative proof of it. Therefore, the bulk of Hume’s discussion in the
Treatise turns on the investigation of the claim for particular connections
with these clearly not grasped as the result of demonstrative reasoning.
Whereas in questioning the general principle, Hume merely pointed to the
fact that it is in principle possible to distinguish cause and effect and no
contradiction results from their separation, when treating the particular
connections we assert Hume points to a disposition whose rationality he
questions. This is the disposition to belief that the future will resemble the
past and in calling this into question Hume connects the belief in particular
connections to the principle of induction. As Guyer points out, the result of
this for Hume is to present not the conclusion that the disposition in
question is unreasonable but that it is not determined by reason. It is, rather,
determined by association and the ability of ideas to have communicated to
them the liveliness of impressions. On these grounds Hume arrives at the
naturalistic conclusion that necessity is not found in the qualities of objects
but rather in internal impressions of the mind (I.iii.14: cited 82). Guyer
argues that this position is not a sceptical one with regard to particular
causal connections, but, since it does not provide any bases for belief in the
general principle, that it has a sceptical effect with regard to it.
Guyer distinguishes the investigation carried out in the Treatise from that
in the Enquiry by arguing that in the latter, Hume begins with an
investigation of our particular causal beliefs rather than from a response to
the general causal principle. However, he also points out, but does not
develop, for reasons I will return to, that Hume here also invokes the limited
ability of human reason to penetrate beyond the superficial appearance of
objects. After bypassing this point Guyer turns instead to the argument that
causal inferences are grounded not on a priori reasoning but on constant
conjunction, although this cannot justify induction. Subsequent discussion
of the psychological basis of our belief in causation in the Enquiry is not
 KANT, HUME AND CAUSATION 805

treated as significantly different from the account in the Treatise, although

the naturalistic statement that scepticism is not capable of taking hold of us
is amplified in the latter work. Guyer denies that the general principle of
causation is mentioned in the Enquiry and subscribes to the view that Hume
is happy with his positive account of causation and is not a sceptic with
regard to anything of any consequence here.4
While the treatment given of Hume’s problems is one I will be
questioning, it is worth first giving Guyer’s account of Kant’s responses
to Hume before turning to a critical description of an alternative account.
The basis of this response is grounded on three points according to Guyer.
First, Kant provides a different type of psychological investigation than
Hume that requires the discussions of the transcendental deduction and
schematism as an alternative to Hume’s naturalistic psychology. Second,
Kant describes a defence of the general causal maxim in the Second
Analogy. Third, Kant responds to the question about particular causal
connections in the ‘second Introduction’ to the Critique of Judgment
although without providing a defence of induction. With regard to these
three stages of Kant’s response Guyer indicates that the point of the first
stage is to argue that Hume cannot, on the basis of naturalistic psychology,
justify the necessity of our use of the concept of causation. While Guyer is
not persuaded by Kant’s transcendental psychology, however, his main
problem at this stage is that by this argument Kant can provide no ground
for our belief in particular causal connections. The second stage of Kant’s
response as given in the Second Analogy involves an argument to the effect
that the causal principle is a condition of the possibility of experience but it
is faulted by Guyer on the grounds that it presupposes ‘the availability of
particular causal laws’ (113). The third stage of the response in the second
‘Introduction’ to the Critique of Judgment does attempt to address this point
by pointing to the need for particular causal claims to be grounded in a
presupposition of a system of connection in nature but this still does not
address Hume’s problem with induction (121). On balance, Kant’s response
to Hume can be said to rest only on a general justification of the general
causal maxim and provides no real support for a response to his problem
with specific connections between particular events.
In responding to Guyer’s description of Hume’s problems and Kant’s
responses to them, I will first stress what, in my view, he has left out of
Hume’s account and how, in leaving it out, he has significantly prevented
Hume’s problems being seen in the way Kant saw them. The contrast Guyer
gives between the problems as given in the Treatise and the problems as
given in the Enquiry turn on a suggestion that the latter work avoids the
concern with the general principle from which the former begins. The
Treatise discussion of the general principle is one we have noted Guyer to

4
‘The Hume of the Enquiry whom Kant is supposed to have known is even less of a sceptic
about causation than is the Hume of the Treatise’ (92).
806 GARY BANHAM

ground merely in the point that causes and effects are logically distinguish-
able from each other. This point leads him, in Guyer’s view, to sink the
question concerning the general principle into a question about the
particular connections we claim with given events. However, Hume follows
Locke in assuming that simple ideas are first given in particular experiences
and only subsequently generalized into principles of wide scope, so there is a
prior commitment here that Guyer does not mention nor address. As Hume
puts it in the Treatise: ‘This multiplicity of resembling instances, therefore,
constitutes the very essence of power or connexion, and is the source, from
which the idea of it arises’ I.iii.XIV, my emphasis). This requires the case to
be that Hume takes resemblance to be a primitive given on which he can
ground the dispositive habit that he will use to give his appeal to impressions
of reflection. On this basis he can appeal to a natural ground for causation.
In the Enquiry he does raise a problem about the general maxim despite
Guyer’s claim to the contrary and he does so in a manner that Guyer
dismisses. This is when Hume refers to the ‘ultimate springs and principles’
of general causes which, he argues in an echo of Locke that Guyer
acknowledges, are not available to human reason (86). Despite acknowl-
edging this however Guyer takes this reference by Hume to be no more than
‘just a bit of rhetoric’ (86). However, in Locke the ground for this argument
concerning what was and was not available to human reason was a view
concerning the real essence of objects. While there is no direct parallel to this
view in Hume, what there is, and what is elsewhere referred to by Guyer, is a
problem concerning the status of objects due to the fact that: ‘The farthest
we can go towards a conception of external objects, when suppos’d
specifically different from our perceptions, is to form a relative idea of them,
without pretending to comprehend the related objects’ (I.ii.VI). Since we
cannot know objects in general, even as causes, we must turn to a
naturalistic psychology instead.
When we add these points to our view of Hume’s account of causation
and his problems with it, we can see it to be essentially structured as follows.
We begin only with particulars and infer general principles subsequently on
the basis of them with resemblances, however, being a primitive given. We
have no insight into the most general principles of causes because objects in
general are not given to us and what we must rest on is a naturalistic
psychology. The general causal maxim is nowhere treated to a positive
account.
When we look at Kant’s response to Hume’s problems, it is again
necessary to diverge from Guyer’s account by adding other points that he
has neglected. Just as we found Hume’s prior commitment to particulars as
the ground of a view of general laws as a product of abstraction, so, if we
turn to Kant, we find a different account there of concept formation with
regard to observation of events. Kant does not subscribe to the view that
concepts are based on observation of particulars in which particulars are
related through resemblances in order for universals to arise. Rather, he
 KANT, HUME AND CAUSATION 807

takes it to be the case that pure concepts of universal scope are already given
and would have to be given in order for such a thing as an identity, a
resemblance and a difference to be recognized at all. The relation of
resemblance is not for Kant a primitive given in what we observe; rather, the
concepts on which such an observation of resemblance must arise are
necessarily possessed independently of any such experience. Particular
observation and particular events have a condition that enables them to
be recognized as such, which is the previous possession of the ability to
recognize the distinction between them by reference to pure concepts. This is
effectively the argument of the Transcendental Deduction as when Kant
states that: ‘Pure understanding is thus in the categories the law of the
synthetic unity of all appearances, and thereby first and originally makes
experience, as regards its form, possible’ (A128).
This response to the first part of Hume’s inquiry, namely his genetic
discussion of psychological conditions of belief in causation, requires the
sense that the particular connections within experience are grounded in a
general way on universals even though the latter are not discovered by
natural reason but require, for their explicit recognition, philosophy. The
next point to add is that, since Hume regards his inquiry as one either
concerning the general conditions of objects or naturalistic psychology, he
has no ground for the notion of appearances to which Kant’s solution of his
problem refers. This is why, despite it not appearing to Guyer that Hume
says anything about things in themselves, Kant takes it that he does
implicitly appeal to them. Kant sees that the problem with objects Hume has
is a consequence of his inheritance of the Lockean notion of real essences.
Hume is unhappy with taking them as merely given to us and appeals to
natural conditions for them but in so doing he misses the possibility of a
transcendental basis for law. It is precisely due to this point that Hume
subsequently frames the question concerning causal connections with regard
to particular inferences as grounded on induction. Hume has to see it this
way as he has denied himself the resource of appeal to the transcendental
principles. Inference is all that is left and with it comes the problem of
induction. As Kant explicitly points out, however, with induction you can
never arrive at universal validity (A196/B241).
The Second Analogy argument that Guyer treats as presupposing
particular causal laws in its justification of the general maxim cannot and
does not have this structure. Kant in fact explicitly states in the course of the
argument of the Second Analogy that the primary contribution of
understanding is ‘making the representation of an object possible at all’
(A199/B244) which it could hardly do if it simply assumed the prior
existence of particular causal connections. How understanding makes the
object possible at all is through ordering representations in relation to the
time series as Kant explicitly argues (A201/B246–A202/B247) with the point
here that for temporal presentation in experience to be given is for an order
of perceptions to be present and this order is the basis in each particular
808 GARY BANHAM

instance of the claim to a causal relation. This order need not involve a lapse
of time but it requires determinability in time (A203/B248). Such
determinability is necessary for each connection and cannot be derived
from any particular, so Kant does not suppose the particulars as the ground
of the universal principle but follows a procedure that is quite the reverse.5
The question that Kant subsequently treats in the Critique of Judgment
concerns the application of the general principles that are constitutive of the
possibility of appearances in general to the actual nature of the world in
which we live. The ground of possibility for a practice actually adopted by
us is thus searched for. The practice is one of formulating the laws of the
given nature as being laws that are related in their form to the general laws
that make the very relation to appearances as such possible. The basis of this
is formulated through the principle of reflective judgement, the principle of
relation of diversity and homogeneity. It is the relation of homogeneity and
diversity to each other that Kant describes as the formal principle of
purposiveness in nature and which hence is connected to the formal
principles that make possible the recognition of particularity as such. The
ground of connection of laws in empirical nature is thus founded on the very
ability that enables recognition of the manifold as a manifold unfolded in
the Critique of Pure Reason. However, while the particular recognition of
the manifold as manifold is sufficient to give the appearances that are the
ground of nature in general, the connection of diversity and homogeneity as
regulative maxims in the investigation of the specific nature of which we are
part is ultimately founded on an appeal to the transcendental distinction, as
it requires discussion of the supersensible substrate.
Reaching this point requires turning from Guyer’s flawed account of the
Kantian response to Hume’s problems concerning causation to his wider
discussion of the Critique of Judgment in this work. Since the work of
Guyer’s under review is intended to show the ways in which Kant’s
philosophy is profitably read as a response to Hume, the discussion of the
Critique of Judgment is set out through this prism despite the oddity in some
respects of doing so.6 Guyer does give accounts in the process of both
Kant’s treatments of taste and teleology, making his account of the work
more advanced than is common. Guyer does not, however, seek to provide a
discussion of how the two halves of the work are to be related to each other
or why the discussion of both the antinomy of the critique of taste and the
antinomy of teleological judgement appear to involve resolutions that

5
Guyer’s general approach is, however, one that is constitutively incapable of responding to this
point as is made clear when he defends his ‘epistemic’ approach to Kant as requiring
interpreting him as ‘offering a theory of the origin of our concepts and of the conditions of the
possibility of confirming our judgments, but not as insisting upon a theory of our constitution
of the objects of our judgments’ (160n). Since this is the basis of Guyer’s approach, a form of
verificationism is inevitably the result.
6
The Critique of Judgment is clearly engaged in a response to a whole range of philosophers with
the crucial second half discussion of teleology engaged deeply with Spinoza.
 KANT, HUME AND CAUSATION 809

require both the distinction between appearances and things in themselves

and the reference to the supersensible substrate. Missing these points, Guyer
fails to elaborate on the question of what kind of connection is possible
between teleological and mechanistic principles despite clearly recognizing
that their unification is Kant’s task. The reference Kant makes to the
‘indeterminate concept’ of the supersensible (Ak. 5: 412) indicates a need for
an understanding not merely of the relationship in Kant’s work of concepts
and Ideas but also of determinate concepts to indeterminate ones with some
clarity ensuing over the role of the latter in the formation of the system of
Critical Philosophy. Contemporary Anglo-American philosophy has in a
general sense sought to rescue such notions as vagueness and rehabilitate the
reference to conceptual and sub-conceptual elements of comprehension that
defy strict and definite clarification and yet the use of such methodology is
not advanced with regard to the hermeneutics practised in Kant interpreta-
tion. Without some further inquiry, however, into the status and role of
indeterminate concepts in Kant’s work, it is unlikely that further advance
will occur in the comprehension of his unjustly maligned architectonic.
Guyer’s book has many good qualities. It is clearly written, careful in
response to many problems and wide-ranging in its attention to its topic. It
is not, however, really a book in the full sense but a collection of occasional
pieces with only one of the chapters having been originally written for
publication here. In the exclusive focus on Kant as a respondent to Hume
Guyer necessarily downplays other important connections, such as the
arguably more substantive relation Kant has to Leibniz. The description of
Kant’s response to Hume’s psychology is considerably weakened by Guyer’s
general dismissal of transcendental psychology, something especially
problematic in the chapter on practical reason.7 The chapter on the Critique
of Judgment is far too compressed to deal with the problematic of reflective
judgement and the accounts of taste and teleology take centre stage over the
procedure of which they are illustrations. The connection between the
treatment of causation and the nature of the self attempted in Guyer’s third
chapter goes far too quickly through questions about the transcendental
unity of apperception and asserts somewhat simply a hasty account of
empirical apperception. A number of these problems are connected to
Guyer’s own philosophical positions which dictate selection of Kant’s
positions in regard to Guyer’s predetermined views of philosophical viability
and prevent this enquiry from seriously being a contribution to the history
of philosophy.
Despite these problems, this work is one that has much value since it both
presents a much wider rationale for relating Kant to Hume than is common

7
See, for example, the strange claim that Kant’s moral psychology must be thought of as
empirical (184), a claim that prevents any serious investigation of Kant’s account of practical
feeling as an alternative transcendental philosophy anthropology, a claim explicitly made in
Kant’s notion of ‘anthroponomy’.
810 GARY BANHAM

and sets an agenda of questions that require response from those who
disagree with its central contentions. More historically nuanced work that
takes more seriously Kant’s transcendental idealism would present a more
rounded view on how Kant took himself to have responded to Hume (and
others). For a guide that presents a view that is likely to prove influential
and that includes sustained discussion of the central questions that relate
these thinkers, this is hard to beat.

Department of Politics and Philosophy

Manchester Metropolitan University