Kant’s Philosophy: Synthetic A Priori, A Posteriori, and Transcendental Critique
Kant’s Philosophy: Judgments and the Critique of Pure Reason
Continuation of Kant’s Ideas
1) Synthetic a priori judgments: These judgments expand our understanding of reality and possess universal validity and necessity. They do not depend on experience and are found in mathematics and physics.
2) Synthetic a posteriori judgments: These judgments broaden knowledge but require verification through experience. They are not universal or necessary but are contingent.
3) Analytic a priori judgments: These do not extend our knowledge of reality and do not rely on experience. They are universal and necessary.
Understanding the operation and limits of reason allows us to explain why science and synthetic a priori judgments are possible.
The Critique of Pure Reason
The Critique of Pure Reason is divided into three main sections:
A) Transcendental Aesthetic
This section analyzes the first faculty involved in knowledge: sensibility. This capacity is present in all animal species, allowing them to represent their environment. Each species perceives the world uniquely due to its sensory apparatus. Kant argues that the nature and operation of our sensitivity condition our view of the world. Sensibility opens the world and is formed by structures that enable, constrain, and shape perceptions of impressions, ordering them in space and time. Our views of the world result from a synthesis between sensory material and our internal structures.
B) Transcendental Analytic
Impressions provided by the aesthetic are not, in themselves, knowledge. They are structured and ordered prints from space and time, but they are disjointed and lack meaning. The understanding interprets these impressions. Understanding is the ability to think or make judgments from what intuition gives us through sensibility. It does this through concepts:
- Empirical concepts: These come from comparing experiences and extracting common features. Examples include concepts like ‘home’ or ‘person’.
- Pure concepts or categories: These do not come from experience but are structured a priori by the understanding. They are spontaneous creations of the mind used to group and organize the output from sensibility. There are 12 pure concepts: Totality, Plurality, Unity, Reality, Negation, Limitation, Substance, Cause, Reciprocity, Possibility, Existence, and Necessity.
Pure concepts are empty of content until filled by the material provided by sensibility, thus providing pure knowledge.
C) Transcendental Dialectic
This is the third cognitive process. In the world, there are views, concepts, and knowledge. Reason is the faculty that seeks general principles. Reason relates different concepts and the resulting judgments to develop arguments or reasoning that increasingly provides general knowledge, marked by a priori principles of reason. There are three fundamental ideas:
- Soul (I): Reason includes all phenomena from subjective inner experience and unifies them under the idea of ‘I’.
- The World: This includes all phenomena of external experience and counts them as phenomena from a single world.
- The Notion of God: This groups the contents of internal and external experience. It is the most general idea and includes both ego phenomena and the world.