Hume and Kant: A Comparison of Causality Critiques

Posted on Mar 27, 2025 in Philosophy and ethics

Comparison of Hume and Kant on the Principle of Causality

Hume:

  1. Empirical, a posteriori.
  2. Contingent, not strictly universal.
  3. Logically possible exceptions exist.

Kant:

  1. A priori. It is one of the 12 categories of understanding.
  2. Necessary and strictly universal.
  3. Derogation is possible only from particular causal laws, not the principle itself.

Influence of Hume on Kant

  1. Sensory experience is the beginning of our knowledge.
  2. Experience cannot provide universal and necessary knowledge.
  3. Experience is the limit of our knowledge: the categories can only be applied to phenomena. The application of the category of causality does not provide any knowledge of noumena.

Kant’s Opposition to Hume

  1. Not all our knowledge comes from experience.
  2. The universality and necessity of our knowledge comes from what is contributed by the subject: the a priori forms of sensibility and the categories of understanding.

Psychological Interpretation of Kant

The noumenon remains unknowable. Man only knows what he makes himself.

Manuel García Morente Logic: It cannot be said that there is no place and time. There is no other reality than the man known for.

Arguments on Hume’s Critique of the Principle of Causality

The principle of causality was accepted as universally and necessarily true before Hume, often dogmatically upholding the perfect correspondence between the order of thought and reality. Some substantiated this correspondence by appealing to God, while empiricists obtained it empirically and applied it to prove the existence of God and the world (Locke) or only the existence of God (Berkeley).

Agreement with Hume
  1. The principle of causality is not intuitively or demonstratively certain. If it is analytic, it is tautological, but says nothing about reality.
  2. It transcends experience and does not provide knowledge about reality because we perceive only the spatiotemporal contiguity between cause and effect and their constant conjunction, but not the necessary connection.
Disagreement with Hume
  1. I agree with Kant, Einstein, Popper, and the Gestalt psychologists: it is impossible to start with pure observations without the active participation of the subject. However, contrary to what is established by Kant and Popper, I think this way of knowing a priori does not guarantee the universality and necessity of our knowledge. We have a psychological propensity a priori to find regularities in our observations, which enables us to formulate scientific theories, but does not demonstrate their truth.
  2. The principle of causality, even as a metaphysical principle because it is not verifiable or refutable, should not be discarded. Metaphysical propositions are meaningful and have played and continue to play a large role in the formulation and discovery of scientific theories.
Conclusion
  1. I believe that we must have faith in the existence of regularities and causal relationships, because only then can we formulate explanatory theories that go beyond concrete experience.
  2. I think we are doomed to think causally, but could not conclude from this, as did Kant, that the causal relationship be objective.
  3. Established theories based on faith in the existence of causal relationships can only aspire to be tentative explanations that will be replaced when they fail to respond adequately to our questions.