Pearl asked:

How to understand Kant’s philosophy?

Answer by Tony Fahey

For anyone coming to Kant for the first time, what has to be said is that his philosophy is extremely complex and, for some, notoriously difficult to understand. However, it must also be said, for those who take the time and trouble to work with it, his philosophy both rewarding and beneficial. Taking the view that the questioner, in this instance, really has a genuine interest in the works of Immanuel Kant, I have set out, with particular attention to his Critique of Pure Reason, what I believe are the most salient points of Kant’s philosophy.

Empiricist philosophy argues that there is a connection between the human mind and the outside world: a connection which is made through sense impressions and their impact on the human brain; an impact which is scientifically investigable and understandable. According to the Empiricist view, human knowledge is something ‘out there’: something that is external to the mind. Human beings, says Empiricism, are not entombed within their own minds: ‘mind’ and ‘world’ are not inseparable.

In his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) John Locke declared that the mind was a tabula rasa – a blank slate. Human beings, he argued, are born with nothing other than the capacity to experience through the senses. The knowledge we acquire is not due to any innate power to reason, but by the accumulation and organisation of experience. David Hume (1711-1776), one of Britain’s most eminent empiricists, followed Locke’s argument. ‘We know the mind’, said Hume, ‘only as we know matter: by perception’. Hume maintained that the mind is not a substance, an organ of ideas, but an abstract name for a series of ideas, memories, and feelings, which all have their source in experience.

The German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was impressed by the Empiricist argument that experience is the basis of knowledge. Indeed, he claimed that reading Hume caused him to awaken him from his ‘dogmatic slumber’. However, he could not accept that all knowledge was derived from experience. ‘Though all our knowledge begins with experience’, he said, ‘it by no means follows that all arises out of it’. In 1781, in response to the claims of Empiricism, Kant published his famous Critique of Pure Reason; his ambition was to show pure reason’s possibility, and to exalt it above the impure knowledge which comes through the channels of sense. By ‘pure reason’ Kant means knowledge that does not come by way of sensory perceptions. There is knowledge, he argued, which, though it may derive from experience, is understood to have its source in other than experience: knowledge that is inherent in the human mind: knowledge which is a priori.

The mind, says Kant, receives data of the phenomenal world through sensory perceptions. However, in order to understand this information these sensory perceptions must be processed by certain conditions inherent in the human mind. As well as the ‘intuitions’ space and time, Kant lists ten categories which were meant to define every possible form of prediction: substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, position, possession, action, and passivity. These concepts (or categories) were reorganised to consist of four types: quantity, quality, relation, and modality. In short, everything we, as humans, experience we can be certain will be imposed within the a priori framework of the intuitions space and time, and subject to the law of causality – the law of cause and effect.

The phenomenal world, says Kant, is a combination of something which our senses present to us and a priori conditions inherent in the human mind. The mind, then, determines the kinds of answers given but not the specific content, which only experience can provide. Space and time, and the law of causality, impose on the mind necessary conditions of both experience and knowledge, but the actual content arises out of something independent in us: before sensations can be known they must be brought into a unified consciousness, which thus is no mere additional sense, but an intellectual synthesis, presupposed by every possible experience.

According to Kant, the world, for humans, is not a datum given by some external power. It is not some objective fact ‘out there’; it is a product of the laws of our own understanding, acting in no arbitrary way, but according to specific principles, which are not peculiar to our separate individuality. For Kant human experience gives a point of view for the interpretation of everything that we can know; between the world, and ourselves there is an inner identity. As human beings we have sensory experiences, that is, we perceive impressions of phenomenon from the outside world through the senses; these sensory impressions are thus shaped by conditions inherent in the human mind. In other words, the mind assimilates the information perceived through sensory perceptions, and the conclusions (or, as Kant calls them, judgements, it arrives at will conform to the a priori intuitions of space and time, and the law of cause and effect. They are a priori but they are discovered by experience.

According to Kant there are two sets of elements that contribute to our understanding of our world. The first set involves external conditions, which we cannot know before we have perceived them through the senses. The second involves the conditions inherent in the human mind. Empiricism argues that the human mind is but a ‘passive wax’ which is pummelled and shaped by sensory impressions. David Hume had reduced the mind to little more than a sponge which absorbed impressions and formulated complex ideas, not by virtue of any innate power, but by force of repetition and habit. Kant refused to accept such a skeptical approach. While accepting that our knowledge of the world enters the mind via sensory experience, he rejected the notion that all our knowledge arises out of these experiences. If this is the case, the question arises as to from whence comes order.

Hume had maintained that it was only the force of habit that made us see the causal connection behind all natural processes. Kant refuted this argument: the law of causality, he held, is eternal and absolute: it is an attribute of human reason. Human reason, he said, perceives everything that happens as a matter of cause and effect. That is, Kant’s transcendental philosophy states that the law of causality is inherent in the human mind. He agreed with Hume that we cannot know with certainty what the world is like in itself, but we can know what it is like ‘for me’ – or for all human beings. We can never know things – in -themselves (noumena), said Kant, we can only know them as they appear to us (phenomena). However, before we experience ‘things’ we can know how they will be perceived by the mind – we know a priori.

Thus, for Kant, the mind contains conditions that contribute to our understanding of the world. As well as the law of causality these conditions include the modes of perception, space and time. Space and time, he says, are not concepts, but forms of intuition. Everything we see, hear, touch, smell, and so on, happening in the phenomenal world occurs in space and time. However, we do not know that space and time is part of the phenomenal world; all we know is that they are part of the way in which we perceive the world. Time and space, he says, are irremovable spectacles through which we view the world. They are a priori forms of intuition that shape our sensory experience on the way to being processed into thought. Space and time are innate modes of perception that predetermine the way we think. It cannot be said that space and time exist in things themselves, things ‘out there’ in the world, rather they inherent intuitions through which we perceive and conceive our world. Time and space, says Kant, belong to the human condition. They are first and foremost modes of perception, not attributes of the physical world.

Kant called this approach the Copernican Revolution in the problem of human knowledge. That is, it was just as radically different from earlier thinking as Copernicus’ claim that the earth revolved around the sun.

Drawing from both Empiricism and Rationalism, Kant formed a synthesis between two schools of thought and created his own model. He argued that both sense and reason are integral to our understanding of the world. He accepted Hume’s theory that all our knowledge comes from sensory experience, but he also agreed with the Rationalists that our reason contains certain decisive factors that determine how we see and understand our world. Everything we experience will first and foremost be perceived as phenomena in space and time, and for everything that happens we will want to know the reason for its occurrence: its causality. For Kant these conditions are inherent in our minds: they are a priori, and they are what it is to be a human being.

Richard asked:

I have made light steps into the realm of philosophy for a few years now, however all of the philosophy I have come into contact with has been of western origin. Therefore I would like to approach eastern philosophy, particularly philosophies with Japanese origins. Which philosophers works should I seek out initially?

Answer by Shaun Williamson

The strict sense of the word philosophy as it is now used refers to an attempt to reach knowledge by means of reason and logic. This philosophical tradition arose in ancient Greece. There is no corresponding tradition in China or Japan. These cultures may have religious and moral thinkers but nothing that corresponds to the Greek tradition of reaching truth by means of rational thought.

Now of course you can use ‘philosophy’ in a much vaguer sense and in this sense almost anything can become ‘a philosophy’.

I can’t think of any traditional Japanese writers that I would regard as being important philosophical thinkers so I can’t help you. It is an accident of history that the idea of rational philosophy arose in the west as did the idea of science and scientific medicine. Everything has to start somewhere.

Barry asked:

What were the influences of Aristotle on Thomas’s Philosophy?

Answer by Tony Fahey

Barry, whilst this is an interesting question, I’m afraid to chronicle the influences of Aristotle on the works of Aquinas is so comprehensive that it is beyond the space available to me in this forum. That being said, since it is such an interesting issue, I have identified what I believe may be some of the more interesting of these influences on Aquinas of the person whom he called ‘The Philosopher’.

Aristotle, Aquinas, and the existence of God

The cosmological or causal argument for the existence of god takes the view that there must be a cause either in the sense of a prior event, or a reason for the occurrence of an event. That is, there must be a reason or cause for everything that happens. If we trace back from effects to their causes, we can either continue indefinitely, or reach a point where we are forced to acknowledge that there must be an ultimate or first cause – some point from which everything begins. The cosmological argument is that this first cause is God.

Amongst those philosophers and theologians that make the cosmological argument for the existence of God are Aristotle and Aquinas. Aristotle calls the first cause the ‘Prime Mover’. But it is a prime mover which itself does not move. There is a God, says Aristotle (for how else does motion begin?), but god himself is changeless. He is the final cause of nature, the drive and purpose of things, the form of the world, the principle of life, and the sum of its vital processes and powers – but he does not move.

Aquinas put forward his arguments for the existence of god chiefly in his two main works, the Summa Theologiciae and the Summa contra gentiles. In the Summa Theologiciae he presents his ‘five ways’ to demonstrate the existence of God. The first way is called the argument from motion, which is better understood as ‘change’. It is in this first way that Aquinas follows Aristotle’s ‘prime mover’ thesis. Aquinas begins by claiming that it is evident that some things are in the process of change. Change, or motion, he says, is an observable fact. It is important to say that Aquinas does not say that everything changes, but that some things sometimes change. Aquinas believes that change requires an explanation – a cause. Change, he says, must either come from chance or design, but he rules out the possibility that change is explainable by chance. If change occurs, he concludes, it must be caused.

Following Aristotle, Aquinas concludes that for any change there must be a first principle that causes the change, but which itself is unchanged. This first principle, he claims, is God. God is the cause of change that is not itself changed. This is what everyone understands as god. Therefore God exists.

Before continuing with further examples of Aristotle’s influence on Aquinas, it should be pointed out that many philosophers (and some theologians) have great difficulty in accepting this cosmological argument. For example, the first difficulty is in the assumption that anything requires a cause. Aquinas rules out the possibility of random or accidental change. Whilst it might be the case that things cause one another, it could still be argued that the cause of events is mere chance and is not connected to a continuous link to a first cause.

Probably the most convincing argument against Aquinas’s cosmological argument is presented by Anthony Kenny in his book The Five Ways. Aquinas, he says, depends for his first argument of causation on Aristotle. According to this analysis, the cause of change must possess a property which will initiate the change. For example, for something to become hot, the thing that causes the change must itself possess the property of heat. But modern science rejects this argument. The grain which makes a cow fat is not itself fat, and microwaves can generate heat without themselves being hot. Aquinas, says Kenny, is not giving a straightforward metaphysical analysis, but an analysis which presumes a classical, and discredited, physics.

More on the influence of Aristotle on Aquinas

Like Aristotle, Aquinas holds that the basis of human knowledge is experience – as Aristotle so famously says, ‘nothing is found in the intellect which was not found first in the senses’ (‘Nihil est in intellectu quin prius fuerit in sensu’). The fact that our knowledge derives from experience does not mean that it ends there. A deeper understanding of the world comes from using the thinking faculty of our minds (the intellect) to bear on our sensory experience, so that we may form ideas, combine them into propositions, and then to reason on the basis that these propositions to develop our knowledge still further. Thus, while Aquinas is an empiricist, he rejects the limitations that Hume imposed on reason, while he is a rationalist, he does not abandon human knowledge’s moorings in the sensible order.. That is, that the mind possesses the innate power to discriminate and to assimilate information. A process altogether different to Plato’s notion of specific innate knowledge expounded in his theory of ideal forms.

As shown above, for Aquinas, as it was for Aristotle, there is nothing in the mind that is not first in the senses. The human mind, he says, has the capacity to separate out – to abstract – the form from the particular conditions in which we find it, so that we can consider the form as a thing apart. However, it is we ourselves, in virtue of the mind’s abstractive power, who give this quality or property a new existence in the mind: a mental existence, as a concept or idea, which has now been withdrawn from its particular material conditions. Aristotle calls it an ‘incorporeal’ or ‘im-material’ state, in the sense that the form is no longer subject to the particular material/corporeal conditions in which we originally found it bound up with matter. Moreover, once formulated, we can turn to attribute this property to particular people or actions we later encounter. That is, we ‘re-cognise’ it when we encounter it in other individual cases in our daily lives.

Again following Aristotle, Aquinas holds that all living things have souls. The difference between human beings and animals and vegetables was not that they had a soul, but that they had a rational or intellectual soul. For Aquinas, body and soul are not the same as matter and form: the soul is related to the body as form is to matter. The body of human beings, as with all material things, is made up of matter and form. It is the form of the human body that is the human soul, not the form of the matter that constitutes the body. For Aquinas there is primary matter and secondary matter. Primary matter is air, earth, fire and water. Secondary matter is the entity constituted by primary matter. In the case of human beings, the human body represents secondary matter infused with a form, the human soul, which is particular to itself.

Like Aristotle, Aquinas holds that Plato’s concept of universal ideas existing in a non physical or non corporeal realm is wrong. However, in this instance, while, like Aristotle, he thinks that there are no innate ideas as such, he does not believe that sensory experience on its own was enough to explain the origin of ideas. Thus, Aquinas can be said to fall somewhere between empiricists and rationalists. That is, like empiricists he believes that initially the mind is a tabula rasa; and like rationalists he holds that experience alone does not account for that which appears on the blank slate.

Theophilus asked:

What is the difference between real and perceived space?

Answer by Jürgen Lawrenz

This depends on what you mean by ‘space’. Are you speaking of a ‘logical space’, or the ‘space between 2 words’, or ‘outer space’ etc.?

You see, your question is unanswerable without this specification. If you are writing an essay on this issue, you have to be sure to add ‘three-dimensional’, which I assume you are asking about.

Even this is difficult to answer. Some thinkers would tell you that there is no difference between them, because this space is what you are perceiving and God only knows if it is real. When you are watching TV, you are not seeing any space at all, but your mind extrapolates from the physical reality of your living space, so that you can understand the events on TV in spatial terms.

The fact that TV images change when you put special goggles on should tell you that ‘space’ is indeed something related to perception.

From this situation you can move easily to the 3D space in which the real events of your life transpire, and then you could say, ‘my mind manufactures an illusion of space around hard objects so that I don’t get hurt by constantly bumping into them.’ If that sounds illogical, consider that your mind does not bother about the air, because usually it will not hurt you. But if you could stick your head out of an aeroplane window at 900 km/h, chances are you won’t get it back.

Take as another example most of the classic Western art that is painted in perspective. What is the meaning of this technique? Essentially that you should look at a picture as if looking through a window. But all those paintings are flat. The spatial illusion is deliberate and exploits the mind’s power to do this.

Philosophically this translates into the problem that the agent — you and I — are in possession of perceptual equipment that has evolved so that we can navigate through the world with reasonable safety. In other words, our understanding of the world as spatial is survival equipment. Accordingly as far as you and I are concerned, space is real. To question its reality is to propose the examination of a world ‘objectively’, i.e. from a non-human standpoint. To do this you would, in practice, need to blindfold yourself, take drugs to desensitise every nerve in your body and immobilise yourself totally. If you wait long enough, the answer will come to you when you are dead.

I am not usually a skeptic. But there are philosophers who pontificate on this issue. Dozens of them have preached the message that ‘all is illusion’. If this were true, then we would be extinct. In any case, it is not genuinely meaningful to carry doubt this far. There are limits to human knowledge, and the difference between real and perceived space brings it well to the fore.

The underlying problem for philosophy is this: that all living creatures have to navigate and negotiate their habitat, and create some form of understanding it. You cannot call this an illusion. In fact, it is the meaning of life. The true illusion is to deny that what we perceive and experience is real. Then we must let robots inherit our world. Although they would also be living in a totally illusory world, they wouldn’t know it and hence such questions would not occur to them. And that’s where the real and only meaningful difference lies.

Adrianna asked:

What are Anselm’s aims in the ontological argument?

What definition of God does Anselm’s argument depend on?

Answer by Tony Fahey

Anselm’s argument for the existence of god is called the ontological argument, and can be found in chapters two and three of his Proslogion. Very roughly, his argument, or definition, goes like this: god is the most perfect being; it is more perfect to exist than not to exist; therefore god exists. It should be said that Anselm was a monk and bishop of Canterbury who held that faith is prior to and provides the context for understanding. Thus, for Anselm, it is not the case that we understand first in order to believe, rather it is that we believe in order to understand. According to Anselm, if God is defined as a being than which nothing greater can be conceived or thought, then God must exist, since it is greater to exist in reality than just in the mind as notional or conceptual

One of the earliest critics of Anselm’s ontological proof was his contemporary Gaunilo (also a monk), who, in his Liber pro Insipiente, opposed it on the grounds that humans cannot pass from intellect to reality. According to Gaunilo, Anselm’s argument would imply that anything, no matter how fictitious or chimerical, which was thought in the mind, would have to exist in reality. To prove his point Gaunilo uses the example of an ‘island more blessed than any other, a perfect island… greater than which nothing greater can be conceived’. Given Anselm’s ‘proof’, he argues, if one can conceive of such an island in this way, then it follows that such an island must exist in reality as well as in the mind – this, of course is absurd. In his defence, Anselm claimed that his argument applied exclusively to God.

Renee asked:

Why does science tend to be materialistic in its metaphysical assumptions?

Answer by Shaun Williamson

Science is not philosophy and science has no metaphysical assumptions. Science studies the physical world and tries to devise the most powerful theories possible to explain the physical world. However these theories must be fully supported and tested by the experimental evidence.

Science studies the physical material world, that is all. Science has no philosophy, it makes no metaphysical assumptions. However some scientists may stray over the the line between philosophy and science and they may try to persuade us that science favours a particular set of metaphysical beliefs. They are wrong. Science can never lead us to metaphysical conclusions.