Humanities 102 26 March 2014

Enlightenment: Copernicus to Kant

Matthew Gumpert

1.Thomas Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought (1957):

The idea that the earth moves seems . . . absurd. Our senses tell us all we know of motion, and they indicate no motion for the earth.

2.Isaac Newton, Principia (1686):

. . . the whole burden of philosophy seems to consist in this: from the phenomena of motions to investigate the forces of nature, and then from these forces to demonstrate the other phenomena . . . from these forces . . . I deduce the motions of the planets . . . I suspect that they may all depend upon certain forces by which . . . bodies, by . . . causes hitherto unknown, are either mutually impelled toward one another . . . or are repelled . . . from one another.

3a.David Hume, Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748):

All reasonings concerning matter of fact seem to be founded on the relation of Cause and Effect. By means of that relation alone we can go beyond the evidence of our memory and senses . . . A man finding a watch . . . in a desert island, would conclude that there had once been men in that island . . . it is constantly supposed that there is a connexion between the present fact and that which is inferred from it . . . The hearing of . . . [a] voice in the dark assures us of the presence of some person . . . Heat and light are collateral effects of fire, and the one effect may justly be inferred from the other.

3b.A priori vs. a posteriori knowledge:

• A priori knowledge is knowledge based upon ideas which have nothing to do with experience = knowledge about which we can be absolutely certain = knowledge which is non-contradictable.

• A posteriori knowledge is knowledge based

solely upon experience.

4.Hume, Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding:

. . . the knowledge of this relation is not, in any instance, attained by reasonings a priori; but arises entirely from experience, when we find that particular objects are constantly conjoined with each other . . . No object ever discovers, by the qualities which appear to the senses, either the causes that produced it, or the effects which will arise from it; nor can our reason, unassisted by experience, ever draw any inference concerning real existence . . .

5a.Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics (1783):

I openly confess, the suggestion of David Hume was the very thing, which many years ago first interrupted my dogmatic slumber, and gave my new investigations in the field of speculative philosophy quite a new direction.

5b.Speculative philosophy

Speculative philosophy = metaphysics = philosophy in search of the true and hidden nature of reality

Reality = things in themselves = the noumenal (as opposed to the phenomenal) realm

Appearances = perceptions = the phenomenal realm

5c.Transcendental idealism

• Transcendental = that which goes beyond the senses or experience.

• Idealism = the belief that knowledge can be acquired through the operations of the mind independently of experience; opposed to empiricism = the belief that knowledge is based in the senses.

6a.Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (1781):

I entitle transcendental . . . all knowledge which is occupied not so much with objects as with the mode of our knowledge of objects in so far as this mode of knowledge is to be possible a priori . . . what here constitutes our subject-matter is not the nature of things, which is inexhaustible, but the understanding which passes judgment upon the nature of things . . .

6b.Objects and things in Kant’s transcendental subjectivism

• Objects = the objects of our senses = appearances = phenomena = perceptions.

• Things = things in themselves = the realm of the noumenal as opposed to the phenomenal

• Transcendental Subjectivism = philosophy concerned with the human mind (as opposed to the world external to the mind)

7. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason:

Hitherto it has been assumed that all our knowledge must conform to objects. But all attempts to extend our knowledge of objects by establishing something in regard to them a priori, by means of concepts, have, on this assumption, ended in failure. We must therefore make trial whether we may not have more success in the tasks of metaphysics, if we suppose that objects must conform to our knowledge. This would agree better with what is desired, namely, that it should be possible to have knowledge of objects a priori, determining something in regard to them prior to their being given. We should then be proceeding precisely on the lines of Copernicus’ primary hypothesis. Failing of satisfactory progress in explaining the movements of the heavenly bodies on the supposition that they all revolved around the spectator, he tried whether he might not have better success if he made the spectator to revolve and the stars to remain at rest . . .

8.P.F. Strawson, P. F., The Bounds of Sense: An Essay on Kant’s «Critique of Pure Reason» (1966); on Kant’s transcendental

idealism as -

. . . the theory of the mind making Nature . . . It is only . . . because objects of experience must conform to the constitution of our minds that we can have the sort of a priori knowledge of the nature of experience which is demonstrated . . . in the Critique itself . . .

9.Frederick Copleston, A History of Philosophy (1964): on Kant’s Copernican revolution:

Kant’s «Copernican revolution» does not imply the view that reality can be reduced to the human mind and its ideas. He is not suggesting that the human mind creates things, as far as their existence is concerned, by thinking them . . . It means rather that the mind imposes, as it were, on the ultimate material of experience its own forms of cognition, determined by the structure of human sensibility and understanding, and that these things cannot be know except through the medium of these forms . . .

10.Frederick Copleston, A History of Philosophy (1964); the Kantian subject as -

. . . . a man with red-tinted spectacles. On the one hand it is obvious that the man who sees the world as red because he is wearing red-tinted spectacles does not create the things which he sees . . . On the other hand, nothing could be seen by him, that is, nothing could be for him an object of vision unless it were seen as red . . .

A man who puts on red-tinted spectacles does so deliberately . . . We have to imagine, therefore, a man who is born with his power of vision so constituted that he sees all things as red. The world presented to him in experience is then a red world . . . Two hypotheses are then possible. It may be that everything is red. Or it may be that things have different colours, but that they appear as red because of some subjective factor (as is, indeed, the case in the analogy) . . . the man would naturally embrace the first hypothesis . . .

11a.Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals (1797)

There is no possibility of thinking of anything at all in the world, or even out of it, which can be regarded as good without qualification, except a good will.

11b.Duty vs. Inclination

A will which acts for the sake of duty is a good will.

To act out of duty is to act solely out of respect or reverence for a moral law.

The law = principle = imperative: tells us what we ought to do.

12.Hypothetical vs.Categorical Imperatives

hypothetical imperative: represents “the practical necessity of a possible action as a means for attaining something else that one wants.”

categorical imperative: represents “an action as objectively necessary in itself, without reference to another end.”

13.Principles vs. Maxims

Principle = imperative = universalizing moral law

Maxim = a subjective principle of volition (= willing)

14.The Categorical Imperative

Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.

15.Freedom

Freedom Must Be Presupposed as a Property of the Will of All Rational Beings.