Kant’s Theory of Knowledge: A Summary
Kant’s Theory of Knowledge
Summary 1
Metaphysical and speculative knowledge is not based on experience; it does not apply to it. It has not been developed as a science. Metaphysics is based on reason and seeks out the a priori. Metaphysics has failed to become a science; it will never reach a definitive conclusion.
Summary 2
Kant asks whether metaphysics is possible as a science and why we have a natural tendency towards metaphysics when we get nothing from it. He concludes that if we change the way we approach it, we will probably get a better result.
Summary 3
Kant proposed to mimic the methodological change that mathematics and physics made and apply it to metaphysics. Kant believed that the subject was passive when it came to knowledge. However, he changed this idea, implying that it is the object that fits the subject. This way would allow us to know a priori.
Theory of Knowledge
All scientific knowledge must meet a priori conditions, which are universal and necessary. They are transcendental conditions since the subject contributes to knowledge and makes it possible. To know what conditions make scientific knowledge possible, it is necessary to analyze the conditions that make the judgments of science possible. These judgments are synthetic a priori judgments, which are universal, necessary, and do not come from experience. These judgments are possible because the subject has a priori structures that precede sensory experience. Knowledge is, in conclusion, the synthesis of what the subject contributes (a priori) and what is given by experience.
The powers of knowledge are three: sensitivity, studied by aesthetics; understanding, studied by analytics; and reason, studied by dialectics. Each studies what has to be a priori in these faculties.
In the Transcendental Aesthetic, Kant examines sensitivity and sensitive knowledge. Forms a priori (pure) sensitivity of space and time, which are universal and necessary conditions involving the limits of knowledge because we only know what is given to us in space and time. Space and time have empirical reality because the objects that exist in our senses are linked to them. They have transcendental idealism because they are forms of the subject. Kant called the given phenomenon in space and time and is known by the senses.
Kant said that mathematics can be constructed a priori since geometry is responsible for studying the properties of space and arithmetic has to do with time. As mathematics makes judgments based on space and time, and these are a priori, judgments of mathematics are also a priori.
The Transcendental Analytic studies understanding (the power of judgments) and the conditions that make knowledge possible, that is, what is a priori in understanding.
The pure concepts of understanding are the categories and have a synthetic function. To judge is to think, so there are as many categories as there are forms of judgments.
The discovery of pure concepts from the logical classification of trials is called the metaphysical deduction of the categories. The justification for the role of knowledge is called the transcendental deduction of the categories. There are only objects of knowledge if both phenomena and categories are given.
If all phenomena of nature are subject to categories, the rules for the use of categories are the laws of experience, called by Kant the principles of pure understanding.
There is something that mediates between the category and the phenomenon, the transcendental schema, which is produced by the imagination and refers to time.
The “I think,” or the transcendental ego, is the original unity to which everything that has been united by understanding refers. It only occurs if there is an object of knowledge and is in a relationship with it.
Scientific knowledge is universal and necessary but also phenomenal; it comes at a time and space and is known by the senses. What remains outside the sensitive relationship, that is, the thing in itself, is the noumenon. Kant distinguishes two senses in the noumenon: the positive sense, as an object of intellectual intuition, and the negative sense, as a limit of knowledge since we only possess intuition. Therefore, the noumenon can only be thought.
Conclusion
There is only science of phenomena. All science is based on a priori synthetic judgments, which are possible because the subject is an active part of knowledge, contributing something at the time of knowing: the pure forms (space and time) and categories.