Preface - Contemporary Philosophy - Lecture Notes, Study notes of Philosophy

Download Preface - Contemporary Philosophy - Lecture Notes and more Study notes Philosophy in PDF only on Docsity! Kant CPR, “B Preface” The question: Can metaphysics be placed on “the secure course of a science,” where ‘science’ is understood as a system of clearly established, indisputable truths. One example: Logic, the “formal rules of all thinking” (secure and complete). Logic is accomplished as a science so readily because it is purely formal, abstracts from all content. The situation is much more complex in situations where reason has something other than itself as an object (either as determining it or actualizing it—theoretical vs. practical reason). In either form, reason operates by determining or actualizing it’s object in a priori form, and that part of any science that expresses its object in this fashion is what Kant calls the “pure” part. Thus we can distinguish between mathematics and physics on the basis of the fact that reason’s activity in both aims at the establishment of certain a priori truths, but that such truths make up the whole of mathematics, but only the principles of science (the matter of which is empirical). The development of the physical sciences suggests to Kant a rather straightforward observation: experience is not blind, “…reason has insight only into what it itself produces according to its own design” (Bxviii). Only thus, can we explain how particular observations (data) can be the basis of general laws (assume that order is operating to perceive a set of phenomena as orderly). It is only when this was recognized, according to Kant, that the study of nature became a science in the 'pregnant' sense of that term. What do we make of this example as we turn away from the natural sciences to philosophy? The first thing we have to recognize is that metaphysics has failed to achieve this level of 'science.' Character of metaphysics: like mathematics it is pure (a priori), but unlike mathematics (which has an intuitional basis) purely conceptual. If the question at hand is to be answered affirmatively, Kant believes that a process akin to that which we observed in the natural sciences is called for. What does this mean? It is commonly assumed that knowledge is a matter of the conformity of the intellect to the object of knowledge. This is the assumption behind the correspondence theory of truth. If working on this assumption has failed to produce the desired results (establishment of metaphysics as a science) perhaps it's time to try another assumption: objects must conform to our faculty(ies) of knowledge. One benefit of this assumption is obvious: metaphysics pursuit of a priori knowledge would be impossible on the prior assumption, but is possible (formally speaking) on the latter. Docsity.com