Kant Critique of Pure Reason
Uploaded by sandpiper1 on Oct 26, 2011
This paper examines Sections 7 and 8 of the Critique and asks if Kant’s arguments make sense. (8+ pages; 1 source; MLA citation style)
I Introduction
Immanuel Kant’s philosophical treatise is a work that attempts to use reason to examine reason. Kant is concerned with the question of how we know what we know. This is not a trivial question, for it gets to the very heart of what it means to be an organism with the power of cognition.
II Types of Knowledge
Kant says that there are two types of knowledge: a priori and a posteriori. The latter is empirical knowledge; knowledge that we derive from experience. When we say, for example, that some cats are black, we know this because we have seen cats, and we understand that some are black, and some are not. But we have observed the physical creature known as “cat” and understand that the animal comes in many different species and colors. This is empirical knowledge, knowledge based on experience.
A priori knowledge is much tougher—it’s based on nothing, really. It is what we know because we know it; we can’t point to any particular source as a first cause for our knowledge of the subject; we just know what it is we know. We might say that we have a priori knowledge of God, since we cannot empirically prove his existence yet believe that he exists. This argument, however, runs directly into the problem of those who do not believe in God and deny that there is such a thing as a Supreme Being. Philosophers have been arguing over this one for centuries, and because it is so completely abstract it may not serve us well here. Consider instead the concept of space: not outer space, as in space exploration, but space as the medium through which we move. No one ever has to define or explain the fact that we exist in a dimensional universe; we know without being told that there is “up”, “down”, “back”, “forward”, “left” and “right.”
Or to take another example, we are aware of substance; the physical world. No one has ever had to teach us that some things are solid, others liquid, etc. We just know these things without any formal experimentation to prove that they exist or have properties of...