1. Background: The Enlightenment and Rationalism

Kant’s background

• Born in 1724 in Konigsberg, Prussia, and lived there his whole life (-1804)

• This is during the 18th century enlightenment and rule of Frederick the Great (1740-1786)

The Enlightenment and its crisis

• Concerns the battle against superstition entailing epistemic criticism and scientific progress — humanity’s exist from self-incurred immaturity

• It also entails the battle against despotism, consisting in moral and political developments as well as criticism of dogma and unexamined belief

• Newtonian physics paints a deterministic picture, which undermines moral agency and responsibility

• It also suggests that all things can be explained scientifically and through materialism, jeopardising belief in immaterial objects like the soul

An outline of Kant’s solution

• He aims to critically examine reason itself and establish its limits and the extent of our knowledge

  • “Hence, it is the first and most important occupation of philosophy to deprive dialectic once and for all of all disadvantageous influence by blocking off the source of the errors.” (B xxxi)

• We are unable to know about noumenal objects - beyond our understanding - like God, but this means that we can’t disprove these things either

  • “Thus I had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.” (B xxx)

Rationalism and Leibniz’s foundation for metaphysics

• Germany’s philosophical orientation is primarily rationalist, not empiricist

• Leibniz proposes that metaphysics should rest on a set of basic axioms like the Principle of Non-contradiction and the Principle of Sufficient Reason

Optimism - Leibniz argues that the actual world is the best of all possible worlds

Monadology - The world consists of simple mental substances

Pre-established harmony - There is no genuine causal interaction between finite substances, they merely coincide but are all sustained/caused by God

• His students, like Wolff develop his philosophy such that Kant refers to it as Leibnizian-Wolffian philosophy and is a proponent of it until the Critique

Implications of Leibniz’s foundations

• Necessitarianism - everything has a complete concept and explanation, rendering everything completely knowable through reason (even if God’s is the only reason powerful enough)

• This necessitarianism isn’t Spinozan in the sense it is seeing (purposive) rather than blind

Metaphysics and science

• Metaphysics is the science in charge of solving rational problems by analysing concepts and relations

• Science is a systematic body of knowledge which makes consistent and lasting progress which converges on a view over time, with a method and first principles (Euclid’s geometry and Newton’s physics have axioms)

Kant’s Copernican Revolution

• Kant argues that knowledge claims are relativised to the human standpoint and we have a priori knowledge of metaphysical truths to the extent we play an active role in constructing the objects of our knowledge

  • The mind-independent world of things-in-themselves is unknowable

• “I can assume that the concepts through which I bring about this determination also conform to the objects… or else I assume that the objects… conform to those concepts.” (B xvii)