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Essay on Kant on Hume's Ethical Theory
Introduction
Hume's conclusions, Kant realized, rested on the premise that knowledge is empirical at its root. The problem that Hume identified was that basic principles like cause and effect cannot be empirically derived. Kant's goal, then, was to find some way to derive cause and effect without relying on empirical knowledge. Kant rejects analytical methods for this, arguing that analytic reasoning can't tell you anything that isn't already self-evident. Instead, Kant argued that we would need to use synthetic reasoning. But this posed a new problem - how can one have synthetic knowledge that is not based on empirical observation - that is, how can we have synthetic a priori truths. Kant's famous quote from the first third of the book is, “thoughts without content [are] empty, and intuitions without concepts [are] blind.” Kant did not have any trouble showing that we do have synthetic a priori truths.
Discussion
He reasoned, geometry and Newtonian physics are synthetic a priori knowledges and are fundamentally true. The issue was showing how one could ground synthetic a priori knowledge for a study of metaphysics. This led to his most influential contribution to metaphysics - the abandonment of the quest to try to know the world in itself, instead acknowledging that there is no way to determine whether something is experienced the way it is because that's the way it is, or because the faculties we have with which to perceive and experience are constructed such that we experience it in a given way. He demonstrated this with a thought experiment, showing that we cannot meaningfully conceive of an object that exists outside of time and has no spatial components. Although we cannot conceive of such an object, Kant argues, there is no way of showing that such an object does not exist.................
