Immanuel Kant' "Critique of Pure Reason"

Immanuel Kant- “Critique of Pure Reason”

In “Critique of Pure Reason”, Immanuel Kant explores the idea of complex predetermined thoughts that are known prior to experience. He agrees with much of what Hume has to say about thoughts. They both agree that you are able to have basic thoughts that are known to be true even without experience, basic thoughts that require experience, and complex thoughts that require experience. The place they differ is when it comes to complex thoughts that can be known prior to experience. Kant explains that these thoughts include metaphysics, physics, science and math. Kant uses four different phrases to explain his idea; a priori, a posteriori, analytical judgment, and synthetic judgment. A priori means to know prior to experience. A posterior means to know after experience. Analytical judgment is to be able to understand a sentence or thought without having to connect two things together. Synthetic judgment is when two ideas have to be combined together to understand the sentence or idea. “All bachelors are unmarried”. This sentence can said to be a prior and analytical. The knowledge is there prior to the experience and the idea can be understood without connection two things. To be a bachelor is to be unmarried. These types of sentences can be considered kind of redundant. “Kelly is a mother”. This sentence would be considered an a posteriori synthetic thought. To know if Kelly is a mother or not you would have to know Kelly. This requires experience. Once you have that experience you put two and two together which is synthetic. Kant and Hume agree on these two statements but Kant believes that you are able to have a complex thought that does not require experience. He uses math as his example. Kant says that addition or subtraction is an a posterior synthetic thought because you can experience the addition or subtraction of apples for example. Kant argues that multiplication is an a prior synthetic thought. There is no way to experience the multiplication but yet it is still known to be true. The multiplication of 7x5=35 is a known fact that can be proven but there is no way to experience it. During the discussion in class we talked about why Kant is hard to read and we came up with the conclusion that understanding Kant’s theory is hard because of the language and structure he uses. We talked about how this piece was translated from German to English and how that can effect and alter the message. Kant also wrote to explain and all the possible counterpoints. So as you were reading it felt like he would contradict himself. It was hard to follow and conclude a clear message from it.