Start to read the blog of Robert Paul wolff. Start to watch his lectures on Kant.
From the wiki page: Kant builds on the work of empiricist philosophers such as John Locke and David Hume, as well as rationalist philosophers such as Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Christian Wolff. He expounds new ideas on the nature of space and time, and tries to provide solutions to the skepticism of Hume regarding knowledge of the relation of cause and effect and that of René Descartes regarding knowledge of the external world. This is argued through the transcendental idealism of objects (as appearance) and their form of appearance. Kant regards the former “as mere representations and not as things in themselves”, and the latter as “only sensible forms of our intuition, but not determinations given for themselves or conditions of objects as things in themselves”. This grants the possibility of a priori knowledge, since objects as appearance “must conform to our cognition…which is to establish something about objects before they are given to us.” Knowledge independent of experience Kant calls “a priori” knowledge, while knowledge obtained through experience is termed “a posteriori”.[2] According to Kant, a proposition is a priori if it is necessary and universal. A proposition is necessary if it is not false in any case and so cannot be rejected; rejection is contradiction. A proposition is universal if it is true in all cases, and so does not admit of any exceptions. Knowledge gained a posteriori through the senses, Kant argues, never imparts absolute necessity and universality, because it is possible that we might encounter an exception.
notes
- background for The Critique of Pure Reason
there was a great debate between Rationalists and Empiricists about a wide range of questions, including the nature of space and time, whether reason or sensibility is the source of human knowledge, and the scope, limits, even the possibility of such knowledge. On the rationalist side, there are Decartes, Leibniz, and Christian Wolff. On the empiricist side, there are British philosophers, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. So it is a debate between Continental Rationalists and British Empiricists.
- notes on blog on July 21, 2011 20250202
The Inaugural Dissertation of 1770 was Kant’s attempt to resolve the dispute between Rationalism and Empiricism.
TODO: part3
references
- Norman Kemp Smith, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, English translation.
- Robert Paul wolff, Kant’s Theory of Mental Activity, 1963.
- Peter Strawson, The Bounds of Sense