display all the ideas for this combination of philosophers
14 ideas
| 22052 | Kant's nature is just a system of necessary laws [Bowie on Kant] |
| Full Idea: In the first Critique, nature is just a system of necessary laws. | |
| From: comment on Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason [1781]) by Andrew Bowie - German Philosophy: a very short introduction 1 | |
| A reaction: This seems to have provoked rebellion in Schiller and the early Romantics, and Kant tried to add teleology to his picture of nature. Leibniz saw nature as dimly alive, and Schiller focused on organisms. Biology is not very lawlike. |
| 8256 | Kant identifies nature with the scientific picture of it as the realm of law [Kant, by McDowell] |
| Full Idea: For Kant the idea of nature is the idea of the realm of law, the idea that came into focus with the rise of modern science. | |
| From: report of Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason [1781]) by John McDowell - Mind and World V.4 | |
| A reaction: Any doubts about the existence of laws of nature (e.g. Ideas 5470, 6781, 5474) would pull the mat out from under this view. I am inclined to view nature as the realm of natural kinds, which give rise to the regularities we call 'laws'. |
| 22053 | The Critique of Judgement aims for a principle that unities humanity and nature [Kant, by Bowie] |
| Full Idea: The Critique of Judgement aims to show how judgement functions 'according to the principle of the appropriateness of nature to our capacity for cognition'. It is meant to provide a principle of the unity of humankind and nature. | |
| From: report of Immanuel Kant (Critique of Judgement II: Teleological [1790]) by Andrew Bowie - German Philosophy: a very short introduction 1 | |
| A reaction: Hence this work is often overlooked as a key part of Kant's 'system'. At first he probably didn't realise he was creating a system. Kant set an agenda for the philosophy of the ensuing thirty years. |
| 5591 | Reason must assume as necessary that everything in a living organism has a proportionate purpose [Kant] |
| Full Idea: Regarding the nature of living beings in this world, reason must assume as a necessary principle that no organ, no faculty, nothing superfluous, or disproportionate to its use, hence nothing purposeless, is to be met with. | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason [1781], B425) | |
| A reaction: Extraordinary to treat this as an a priori truth! In fact Darwin seems to have discovered that most organs have a purpose, but sometimes they have become redundant, and certainly they can be disproportionate. Did Kant really need that massive intellect? |
| 18237 | Without men creation would be in vain, and without final purpose [Kant] |
| Full Idea: Without men the whole creation would be mere waste, in vain, and without final purpose. | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Judgement II: Teleological [1790], C3 442), quoted by Christine M. Korsgaard - Aristotle and Kant on the Source of Value 8 'Kant' | |
| A reaction: The standard early twenty-first century response to that is 'get over it'! The remark shows how deep religion runs in Kant, despite his great caution about the existence of God. His notion of 'duty' is similarly religious. |
| 5615 | Extension and impenetrability together make the concept of matter [Kant] |
| Full Idea: Extension and impenetrability together constitute the concept of matter. | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason [1781], B646/A618) | |
| A reaction: Descartes had settled for extension alone. Kant's simple claim is probably now just a historical footnote, as we would now turn to physicists to define matter. Extension might survive, but impenetrability is not a key notion in quantum mechanics. |
| 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. |
| 19669 | For Kant the laws must be necessary, because contingency would destroy representation [Kant, by Meillassoux] |
| Full Idea: Kant considers the hypothesis of the contingency of the laws of nature to be refuted by the mere fact of representation. ...If representation were no longer structured by causality, it would no longer structure any aspect of the phenomenon at all. | |
| From: report of Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason [1781]) by Quentin Meillassoux - After Finitude; the necessity of contingency 4 | |
| A reaction: This is based on the belief that a contingent nature would continually change, which Meillassoux denies. |
| 19672 | Kant fails to prove the necessity of laws, because his reasoning about chance is over-ambitious [Meillassoux on Kant] |
| Full Idea: Kant's belief in the necessity of laws is revoked as an instance of aleatory reason's unwarranted pretension to reach beyond the limits of experience. | |
| From: comment on Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason [1781]) by Quentin Meillassoux - After Finitude; the necessity of contingency 4 | |
| A reaction: A glimpse of Meillassoux's master argument. He cites Cantor on the uncountable transfinite, claiming that chance in nature involves the transfinite, but normal reasoning about chances should be restricted to what is countable. |