David Hume looks at the causality of knowledge in his work, which eventually formed the skepticism that shaped modern day metaphysics and philosophy in general. In an attempt to answer Hume, Kant wrote an answer to Hume’s skepticism in his book Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (1783) . Considering the importance given to causality in reasoning by both authors, their opinions on the topic are very central to philosophy and have continued to generate a lot of controversies (Backmann, 2013) .
In the prologue of his book, Kant recognizes the importance of Hume’s viewpoints in arousing him out of a dogmatic slumber on the causality on knowledge of concepts that we have in our mind. Kant appreciates that most of the other philosophers who were critical of Hume’s views on causality and effects missed the whole point of Hume’s argument which he intended to respond to. In his response to the human doubt, Kant suggested an experiment to be conducted to review the concept of cause. The after math of his experiment saw him claim that experience is derived from understanding rather than understanding being derived from experiences as previously thought.
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Kant had a strong opinion on how metaphysics entirely depended on the controversy surrounding the possibility of having synthetic judgment. In this analysis, Kant acknowledged that Hume was the closest philosopher to addressing this issue but failed because of his very general approach to it. According to Kant, Hume had a generalist look at the subject which made him lose the mark on the subject.
Kant’s argument represents a Copernican revolution in philosophy because of the different approach Kant chose to apply in explaining cause and effects. The decision to say that experience is derived from experience rather than the opposite represents a significant resemblance to the view taken by Copernicus in explaining the revolution of the earth around the sun. During Copernicus's time, the scientists thought that the sun and stars revolved around the earth and thus explained the different seasons of the year. However, after great analysis and research, Copernicus took an opposing view to the rest of the scientist by claiming that the earth was the one revolving around the sun and stars (Friedman & Nordmann, 2006) .
By holding the perceptions of the mind as the central aspect that causes pure reasoning, Kant took the approach taken by Copernicus on focusing a stationery aspect on which the rest revolve around. In Kant’s argument on perception; the ideas that are processed by the mind utilize the basic perception that is registered in the mind and build one them to create the final picture of the idea (Frierson, 2003) . For example, in explaining how somebody who has never seen a golden mountain will conceptualize such an idea Kant pointed out that the person’s mind will combine the already existing perception of gold and mountains in the mind to create the whole idea.
In his attempt to synthesize realism and empiricism, Kant deviated from the normal approach that was taken by the other philosophers at the time. In rationalism, philosophers always posed that senses cannot be trusted because their knowledge is inferior as it changes always. On the other hand, empiricists thought that senses are the primary sources of knowledge. Kant’s argument in that regard was to show that a person can gain knowledge from reality as opposed to how things seem. In this case, Kant offered a different viewpoint to those held by philosophers of the time.
The realists and empiricist differ on whether there exist innate ideas. Whereas the realist says, they exist the empiricists deny their existence by insisting that any complex ideas are generated off simple ideas. The realists always provide an example of Descartes’ concepts of identity, self, and identity. On the other hand, the empiricists believe that these complex concepts exist only through the conceptualization of smaller concepts. In his argument, Kant’s points out there is a difference between what we experience in real life and what that real phenomenon may be in reality therefore ushering into being another view that we should beware of the two worlds we exist in, that is, the apparent world and the real world (Heikes, 2010).
In the argument of the self, realists believe that the self is real and discernible through intellectual intuition which is contrary to what the empiricists believe. The discerning of the self is one of the contentious points that divided the two different schools of thought in philosophy. In his theories, Kant also added his voice to the debate by showing that Hume and other empiricist are wrong for claiming that the concept of the self as proposed by Descartes is unsupported by the senses (Paley, 2002) . He proves that by showing how the discovering of the self is a precondition of having any experience at all.
Hume always held the position that morality is a feeling by the people and thus not real however Kant disputed that by showing that if morality is well understood by the people, it will provide the connection between the ‘ noumenal ’ world and the phenomenal world. With this argument, Kant concludes that if the notion of morality is real the concept of human freedom is real, and thus people are not bound by the laws that are put in place in the society (Paley, 2002) .
In conclusion, Kant ‘r evolutionalised ’ philosophy by changing the way people viewed the world; he showed that the mind constructs experiences within the constraints of time, space, causality and effects through its innate categories. This implied that no matter the level of thinking or intellectualism, the view of a person on the world would be slightly differentiated from what the world is in reality.
References
Backmann, M. (2013). Humean Libertarianism . Berlin: De Gruyter.
Friedman, M., & Nordmann, A. (2006). The Kantian legacy in nineteenth-century science . Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Frierson, P. (2003). Freedom and anthropology in Kant's moral philosophy . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Heikes, D. (2010). Rationality and feminist philosophy . London: Continuum.
Paley, W. (2002). The principles of moral and political philosophy . Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Fund.
