Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Paul Guyer is professor of philosophy and the Florence R. C. Murray Professor in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania. The author of eight previous books on Kant, he is also general coeditor of The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant.

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"This is an excellent book. Extending the discussion of the Kant-Hume relationship to moral philosophy, teleology, and aesthetics is novel, important, and interesting. Guyer's knowledge of Kant's texts and his sensitivity to their nuances, developments, and philosophical import are evident throughout."--Eric Watkins, University of California, San Diego

"Clear and comprehensive, this book demonstrates a level of expertise in both Kant and Hume studies that would be very difficult to match. It will become required reading for scholars wanting to understand the complex relationship between these two seminal modern thinkers--in ethics and aesthetics as well as in metaphysics and epistemology. It also persuasively makes the case for thinking of Kant's agenda as at least partly dictated by a desire to respond to Hume on various issues."--Andrew Chignell, Cornell University

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"This is an excellent book. Extending the discussion of the Kant-Hume relationship to moral philosophy, teleology, and aesthetics is novel, important, and interesting. Guyer's knowledge of Kant's texts and his sensitivity to their nuances, developments, and philosophical import are evident throughout."--Eric Watkins, University of California, San Diego

"Clear and comprehensive, this book demonstrates a level of expertise in both Kant and Hume studies that would be very difficult to match. It will become required reading for scholars wanting to understand the complex relationship between these two seminal modern thinkers--in ethics and aesthetics as well as in metaphysics and epistemology. It also persuasively makes the case for thinking of Kant's agenda as at least partly dictated by a desire to respond to Hume on various issues."--Andrew Chignell, Cornell University

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Knowledge, Reason, and Taste

Kant's Response to HumeBy Paul Guyer

Princeton University Press

Copyright © 2008 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-13439-0

Introduction

IN THE Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics that could come forth as Science that he published in 1783 in the hope of both defending and popularizing the Critique of Pure Reason that he had published two years earlier, Immanuel Kant famously wrote "I freely admit that the Erinnerung of David Hume was the very thing that many years ago first interrupted my dogmatic slumber and gave my investigations in the field of speculative philosophy a completely different direction" (Prolegomena, Preface, 4: 260). I have left Erinnerung, which typically means "recollection" or "remembrance," but could also mean "reminder" in the sense of "admonition," untranslated in order to sidestep a scholarly debate about chronology-did Kant mean that it was only the recollection of Hume some years after he had first read the early German translations that interrupted his dogmatic slumbers, or did he mean that the admonition of Hume had interrupted his dogmatic slumbers as soon as he read him, many years before writing the Critique of Pure Reason and the Prolegomena? What is important for my purposes in this collection of essays is that, however he got there, by the time Kant reached his philosophical maturity at least one way he conceived of his philosophical task was that of putting key principles on more secure foundations than all those earlier ones that Hume had shown to rest not on reason but at best on experience and custom, and at worst on mere dogmatism.

What principles? Kant repeatedly stated that Hume had cast doubt on whether the concept of causation expresses a genuine necessity that is "thought through reason a priori ... and has an inner truth independent of all experience" (Prolegomena, Preface, 4: 249), and settled instead that it expresses nothing more than our own feeling of necessitation in response to the frequent association or repetition of impressions of external objects. He clearly thought that Hume had raised a genuine problem about the real foundations of the concept of causation and the necessary truth of both the general principle that every event has a cause as well as particular causal laws, and thought that Hume had not sufficiently resolved this problem, although Hume himself may have been content with his solution. But Kant also held that Hume had put his finger on a more general problem without realizing what he had done:

Thus I first investigated whether Hume's objection could be made general, and I soon found that the concept of the connection of cause and effect is far from being the only one by means of which the understanding thinks the connections of things a priori for itself, rather that metaphysics consists entirely of such concepts. I sought to assure myself of their number, and since this succeeded according to my wish, namely from a single principle, I went on to the deduction of these concepts, from which I was assured that they were not derived from experience, as Hume had worried, but had arisen from the pure understanding. This deduction, which seemed impossible to my acute predecessor, and which no one other than him had ever even thought about, although everyone had confidently used the concepts without asking on what their objective validity is grounded, this, I say, was the most difficult thing that could ever be undertaken in behalf of metaphysics; and what is the worst thing about it is that metaphysics, no matter how much of it is everywhere available, could not give me the least assistance, since this deduction must first establish the possibility of a metaphysics. Now since I was successful in the solution of the Humean problem not just in a special case but with regard to the entire faculty of pure reason, I could thus take sure although always slow steps in order finally to determine the entire scope of pure reason in its boundaries as well as to determine its content completely and in accordance with universal principles, which was then the very thing that metaphysics needed in order to execute its system in accordance with a secure plan. (Prolegomena, Preface, 4: 260-61)

In this statement and others like it (Pure Reason,B 19,A 764- 68/B 792-96; Practical Reason, 5: 13, 5: 50-57), Kant claims that the doubts Hume had raised about the existence of an a priori concept and principle of causation were only an example of the kind of doubts that could be and indeed should be raised about the previously merely dogmatic foundations of all the central concepts of metaphysics, and that none of these concepts and principles could be secure until they had all been given a proper foundation or "deduction" by Kant himself. As Kant rightly points out, Hume had raised no objection to our ordinary use of causal concepts and beliefs and, by implication, our ordinary use of the other concepts and beliefs that are in the same boat, nor did Kant himself think that scientists in their laboratories or craftsmen in their shops have to suspend all their activities until their key concepts had been put on a sound footing. But in his view Hume had without realizing it raised a challenge for all of metaphysics that had to be answered before philosophy could proceed. Moreover, Kant held that unless the metaphysical concepts at stake were both properly founded and properly limited, that is, restricted to the properly demarcated sphere of human experience, perfectly reasonable doubts about their cognitive value beyond this sphere could end up undermining our confidence in their use within this sphere, and thus cast doubt about our use of these concepts for the purposes of ordinary cognition and ordinary science after all. Thus, in a crucial passage in the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant writes about Hume, whom he calls "perhaps the most ingenious of all skeptics" (A 764/B 792), that:

The skeptical aberrations of this otherwise extremely acute man, however, arose primarily from a failing that he had in common with all dogmatists, namely, that he did not systematically survey all the kinds of a priori synthesis of the understanding ... had he done so ... He would thereby have been able to mark out determinate boundaries for the understanding that expands itself a priori and for pure reason. But since he merely limits our understanding without drawing boundaries for it, and brings about a general distrust but no determinate knowledge of the ignorance that is unavoidable for us, by censuring certain principles of the understanding without placing this understanding in regard to its entire capacity on the scales of critique, and, while rightly denying to understanding what it really cannot accomplish, goes further, and disputes all its capacity to extend itself a priori without having assessed this entire capacity, the same thing happens to him that always brings down skepticism, namely, he is himself doubted, for his objections rest only on facta, which are contingent, but not on principles that could effect a necessary renunciation of the right to dogmatic assertions. (A 767-68/ B 795-96)

Kant recognized that Hume had been satisfied with his own explanation of key concepts and principles as resting on "nothing but a custom arising from its experience and its law," and thus as "merely empirical,...