display all the ideas for this combination of philosophers
6 ideas
| 14560 | A ball denting a pillow seems like simultaneous cause and effect, though time identifies which is cause [Kant] |
| Full Idea: If I consider a ball that lies on a stuffed pillow and makes a dent in it as a cause, it is simultaneous with its effect. Yet I distinguish the two by means of the temporal relation of the dynamical connection. | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason [1781], B248/A203) | |
| A reaction: Mumford and Lill Anjum use this example to defend simultaneous cause and effect, whereas Kant seems to be in the grip of an a priori assumption that cause must come first. At the micro level Kant may be right. Two books lean on one another? |
| 5545 | Appearances give rules of what usually happens, but cause involves necessity [Kant] |
| Full Idea: The concept of cause always requires that something A be of such a kind that something else B follows from it necessarily and in accordance with an absolutely universal rule. Appearances may give a rule that something usually happens, but not necessarily. | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason [1781], B124/A91) | |
| A reaction: I must side with Hume when it is put like this. As all empiricists are keen to tell us, a strong feeling of necessity is not enough to guarantee it. Has Kant confused 'natural' and 'metaphysical' necessity? We can't learn natural necessity a priori. |
| 9755 | The concept of causality entails laws; random causality is a contradiction [Kant, by Korsgaard] |
| Full Idea: For Kant, the will is a causality, and the concept of a causality entails laws; a causality which functions randomly is a contradiction. | |
| From: report of Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason [1781]) by Christine M. Korsgaard - Intro to 'Creating the Kingdom of Ends' Ch.1 | |
| A reaction: This seems to be a rather Humean view, which may be confusing the epistemology (of how we might detect causes) from the ontology (of what causation is). Where is the logical contradiction in random unpredictable causes? |
| 17709 | We judge causation by relating events together by some law of nature [Kant, by Mares] |
| Full Idea: Kant says that we can judge one event to cause another if we can relate the two events to one another by some law of nature. | |
| From: report of Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason [1781]) by Edwin D. Mares - A Priori 07.3 | |
| A reaction: I take this to have got things exactly the wrong way round, since it leaves no notion of the foundations of the laws being used to do the explaining. The laws have to be primitive or supernatural. |
| 5562 | Experience is only possible because we subject appearances to causal laws [Kant] |
| Full Idea: It is only because we subject the sequence of appearances and thus all alteration to the law of causality that experience itself is possible. | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason [1781], B234/A189) | |
| A reaction: Remarks like this make me sympathise with Hume. Kant puts it too strongly. It strikes me as theoretically possible to 'experience' a sequence with no thought of causality. |
| 5523 | Causation obviously involves necessity, so it cannot just be frequent association [Kant] |
| Full Idea: The very concept of a cause obviously contains the concept of a necessity of connection with an effect and a strict universality of rule, which would be entirely lost if one sought, as Hume did, to derive it from a frequent association. | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason [1781], B005) | |
| A reaction: It is not clear (in the next paragraphs) whether Kant is saying causation is necessary because it is knowable a priori, or knowable a priori because it is necessary. I am quite sure that Hume cannot be dismissed as glibly as this. |