Hume vs Kant Causality

In the Critique of Pure Reason, philosopher Immanuel Kant aims to thoroughly explain his philosophy of the metaphysical world. Within the Transcendental Aesthetic, Kant focuses on confirming that space and time are a priori intuitions. He provides reasoning and arguments as to why they are transcendentally ideal but empirically real, making space and time subjectively necessary for experiences. Simultaneously, Kant distinguishes space and time from secondary qualities, which belong to our senses through experience, by confirming that unlike space and time, secondary qualities are not empirically real. Kant does run into conflicts with his theory, he still successfully claims that space and time are transcendentally ideal but empirically real, as well as distinguish them from secondary qualities by supporting his theories with reasoning.

Kant heavily emphasizes his ideas of morality and how they are simply represented by a term he dubbed a priori. A priori is the thought that all moral ideas are already determined at birth. Any new ideas are simply practical, not moral. He is quoted as saying “[...] solely a priori in the concepts of pure reason; and that every other precept based on principles of mere experiences [...] can indeed be called a practical rule, but never a moral one,” (5). He remarks that mere experience is important as it helps to gain a

Immanual Kant theorised that moral rules are based on reason, in other words the ability to think and form logical judgements.(2) He believed that this moral reasoning is a priori, which meant that there is no knowledge needed of the outcome of an action to know if it is right or wrong.(2) His theory is an example of a deontological theory – the

Once Hume establishes the ultimate source of knowledge, he then attempts to probe into the various types of ideas, and how ideas relate to one another ?  He suggests that all ideas are related in one of three ways:  First, Hume utilizes the concept of resemblance.  He explains this concept through an analogy of a photograph.  In his words, "a picture naturally leads our thoughts to the original."3  The basic idea here is that an impression leads one to remember the object, which one has experienced.  The second way in which ideas give rise to one another is through Contiguity.  Basically, contiguity suggests that thinking of one object inevitably leads one a discourse concerning the others.  The third way Hume offers is that of Cause and Effect.  This seems to be the most obvious of the three.  When we think of a cause, we invariably envision its effect.  When we imagine placing our hand on a hot stove, we generally accompany that idea with its perceived effect, i.e. getting burned.  These principles, which Hume refers to as "connexions", form the "glue" that bind all ideas together.

     Hume began his first examination if the mind by classifying its contents as Perceptions. “Here therefore [he divided] all the perceptions of the mind into two classes or species.” (27) First, Impressions represented an image of something that portrayed an immediate relationship. Secondly, there were thoughts and ideas, which

Kant vs. Betham, principles of utility and philosophy the rational and irrational. The understanding of the fundamental of nature, knowledge with the existence of reality and predominant or dominate that deals with principles of utility. The criteria of rational knowledge of principles – is the way of clarifying and prioritizing what is explained and interpreted through our actions, motive and consequence. This is a mixture of both reason and unreason; in addition, too reason and passions. Compared to a non-rational or irrational aspect of the human approach or temperament. Thus, this is a way of thinking and rationalizing what we establish around us. Principles of utility is a way of thinking what we obtain around ourselves as human beings.

Hume describes empiricism stating, “All our ideas or more feeble perceptions are copies of our impressions or more lively ones,” (DA,166), inferring that what we

David Hume was a Scottish philosopher known for being an empiricist and for being skeptical of religion. Like Hobbes, he was also a big influence on western philosophy. Among his many works, his major writing include, treatise of human nature and enquiry concerning the principles of morals. In an enquiry concerning the principles of morals, Hume introduces his fovarism towards the role of sentiment. He argued reason solely cannot be a motive of any action and that reason can never resist the motive of passion "reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions,"(pg 415). He explains that Moral distinctions are developed from the moral sentiments such as feelings of approval and disapproval felt by an action. Hume believes that pleasure and pain are the causes of the passions that drive our actions. According to Hume, it is the pleasure and pain that are the causes of the passions which drives our actions. He claims that it is the actual experience of the pain or pleasure, not the reason we adduce to their causes that drives us to act.” Morals excite passions, and produce or prevent actions. Reason of itself is utterly impotent in this particular. The rules of morality, therefore, are not

Kant believes that evertythnging is the nouminal world, and the we are perscieveing theis nouminal wourld though our lens which we call reason (Or concepts). We then use our senses to interpret what we are percieveing. He came to this conclusion when he was trying ot find a synthesis between hume and Descares. Descartes was wrong in his thinking, or at least is is evident that there is something missing from his rationalist thinking. Kant used to believe this but after reading the empirist remarks of Hume he began to see the need for use of our sensory perceptions within reality as well. So the synthesis is that all knowledge comes from the combination of conepts and intuitions (reason and sensory perceptions), without reason we would have no lens to perceive what the nominal wourld is telling us, and without senses we would have no way of understanding what our reason is telling us. But even with this we need to remember that the best that we can do is perceive what is, but that does not determine what something is, the nominal would exists beyond our perception and is still a mystery. This leaves open room for metaphysics, because God, and our souls can still exist beyond our plain of sensory, or reason.

Kant’s new foundation of modern science forever changed the philosophical world. He recognized defects in both the rationalists’ and the empiricists’ traditions. These two terms, rationalist and empiricist, are the two ideas that make up Epistemology. Epistemology in itself is the idea of what knowledge can be and it deals with what knowledge is and how we deal with it. Rationalism is the concept of ideas that we naturally have and deduction, this is A Priori. Empiricism is the concept in induction, sense perception and no innate ideas, which is A Posteriori. These two ideas were so different they were thought to be polar opposites. Both sides had many influential philosophers

Kant changed the Western tradition of philosophical thinking and altered it forever. Once he read through David Hume very carefully he proclaimed it awoke him dogmatic slumbers and forced him to have skeptical arguments. He described that natural science really got going once human beings began to use a structure within their scientific investigation. “Kant’s proposed plan of attack is to question the prevailing assumption about the passivity of the mind and see if assuming that the mind plays an active role in the knowing process gets us any further” (Stewart, Blocker, Petrik, p. 204, 2013). With this new view Kant dives into the difficult question of investigating the knowing process.

Next, Hume explores the existence of “necessary connextion” when the will commands a new idea. Again there are three arguments. In the first argument the soul’s production of an idea is examined: it “is a real creation; a production of something out of nothing” (45).

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) is much concerned about the operations of the mind. Though he believed in the existence of the mind, he held a different view from the empiricists when it comes to the nature and function of the mind. He set out to prove that Hume was wrong by claiming that some truths were certain and were not based on subjective experience alone. Kant argued that the very ingredients which are necessary for even thinking in terms of a causal relationship could not be derived from experience and therefore must exist a priori, or independent of experience. Though he did not deny the importance of sensory data, he thought that the mind must add something to that data before knowledge could be attained; that something was provided by a priori (innate) categories of thought (unity, totality, time, space, cause and effect, reality, quantity, quality, negation, possibility-impossibility, and existence-nonexistence). Kant claimed that the subjective experiences of human has been modified by the pure concepts of the mind and is therefore more meaningful than it would otherwise have been.

Kant is not looking to take any part of what the historical philosophers posited for granted, instead, he wants to clear the slate and be able to create a new era of epistemological thought. He wants to delve into what knowledge is and be able to prove the possibilities and limitations of knowledge. Kant realizes that his project has never been attempted before and Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, Hume, Descartes, and others believed that knowledge about the world was possible, but Kant was now going to question this notion (Kant, 6.) It must be asked if anything like metaphysics can be a real body of knowledge? Can the human mind really pronounce supersensible creatures before we analyze the mind that is doing the pronouncing? Kant would say that we have entered into a region of subjectivity that has not been seriously contemplated in the past and that all reason is limited, therefore we cannot know certain metaphysical concepts (Kant, 27.) He believes that the mind is finite and therefore cannot proclaim anything that is beyond what is experienced, all we can know is what is in the realm of our experience. Classical metaphysics, according to Kant, is a pretense to wisdom but is not wisdom itself because Kant’s wisdom is to understand the human mind and its limitations, which classical metaphysics does

Science tries to posit explanations for our existence here and for the existence of everything around us. No matter how many “proofs” exist though, each has to have derived from some “thought” or “idea” that has no concreteness to it. As Hume first explains in his Enquiry, there are relations of ideas that lead us to justify certain scientific proofs empirically. Kant calls this analytic versus synthetic.