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staffweb.hkbu.edu.hk D1 35 min read original 7.Philosophy as Meditative Doubt by Stephen Palmquist (stevepq@hkbu.edu.hk) Imagine a tree. Perhaps the drawing I've made here (see Figure III.1) will help you to do so (although it will also demonstrate that youdon't have to be an artist in order to be a philosopher!). Just how is it that philosophy is like a tree? There are, in fact, many different possible ways of applying this analogy. One interesting way is suggested by the philosopherwhose ideas we shall be discussing today. He worked out his own version of the myth that guides this course, by claiming philosophy is like a tree that has metaphysics as itsroots, physics as its trunk, and the othersciences as its branches. In such a case, which may well have been an accurate reflection of how philosophy functioned in the seventeenth century, the leaves of the tree would probably best be correlated to knowledge, though the philosopher in question did not carry his analogy this far. For our purposes here in Part One of this course, we can at least agree that metaphysics certainly does have a function similar to the roots of a tree. By the time we have completed the first nine lectures, I hope the reasons for thiswill be clear enough. Later on, however, Ishall suggest revisions of some of the other aspects of this version of the myth, in order to bring it up to date (see Figure VII.1). Ren? Descartes (1596-1650) is a name some of youwill already be familiarwith, because of the contribution he made to the field of mathematics. Not only did he contribute to the furtherdevelopment of algebra, but he invented the system of coordinate geometry that we all learned in school. When he turned his attention toward philosophy, he recognized an inherent problem in the tradition. D1 — staffweb.hkbu.edu.hk https://www.readability.com/articles/nvdycmmz 1 de 30 15/12/2015 19:59

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staffweb.hkbu.edu.hk

D1

35 min read • original

7.Philosophy as Meditative Doubt

by Stephen Palmquist ([email protected])

Imagine a tree. Perhaps the drawing I've made here (see Figure III.1)

will help you to do so (although it will also demonstrate that you don't have

to be an artist in order to be a philosopher!). Just how is it that philosophy is

like a tree? There are, in fact, many different possible ways of applying this

analogy. One interesting way is suggested by the philosopher whose ideas

we shall be discussing today. He worked out his own version of the myth

that guides this course, by claiming philosophy is like a tree that has

metaphysics as its roots, physics as its trunk, and the other sciences as its

branches. In such a case, which may well have been an accurate reflection

of how philosophy functioned in the seventeenth century, the leaves of the

tree would probably best be correlated to knowledge, though the

philosopher in question did not carry his analogy this far. For our purposes

here in Part One of this course, we can at least agree that metaphysics

certainly does have a function similar to the roots of a tree. By the time we

have completed the first nine lectures, I hope the reasons for this will be

clear enough. Later on, however, I shall suggest revisions of some of the

other aspects of this version of the myth, in order to bring it up to date (see

Figure VII.1).

Ren? Descartes (1596-1650) is a name some of youwill already be

familiar with, because of the contribution he made to the field of

mathematics. Not only did he contribute to the further development of

algebra, but he invented the system of coordinate geometry that we all

learned in school. When he turned his attention toward philosophy, he

recognized an inherent problem in the tradition.

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For two thousand years the systems of Plato and Aristotle, in one form

or another, had dominated virtually all philosophical thinking in the west.

When Christianity came on the scene, most of the early church Fathers

adopted some version of Platonic idealism as the basis for their theology.

This trend culminated in the philosophical and theological system

constructed by St. Augustine (354-430), whose influence remained so

dominant for most of the so-called Dark Ages that Aristotle was virtually

forgotten in Europe. Fortunately, various Arabic scholars kept Aristotle's

writings alive during that period, using them as the basis for constructing

various forms of Islamic philosophy and theology. Eventually, Aristotle's

realism returned to Europe, mainly through the work of St. Thomas

Aquinas (1225-1274), whose massive theological system remains the most

influential source of Catholic theology to this day. By the time Descartes

came on the scene, no significant alternative had been offered to the

idealist (Platonic-Augustinian) and realist (Aristotelian-Thomist) schools.

Was there something wrong with these two systems that hindered other

philosophers from making progress in philosophy?Descartes believed both

traditions suffered from a common flaw. The impasse was created by the

lack of any completely certain truth that

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Figure III.1: Descartes' Tree of Philosophy

could serve as an indisputable starting point for constructing a genuine

system of knowledge (i.e., a science). This insight raised a new question in

Descartes' mind: how could such absolute certainty be established? Neither

Plato's method of dialogue nor Aristotle's teleological method on their own

had been able to produce a solid foundation for a truly rigorous science.

How then could such a foundation be discovered? In reflecting on this

question, Descartes hit upon an idea for a new philosophical method that

would enable us to establish certainty once and for all. Replacing dialogue

with solitary meditation, his new methodwas to doubt. By systematically

doubting everything we think we know about our world and our selves, he

hoped he might come across something that would be impossible to doubt.

This could then serve as an absolutely certain starting point for building a

positive philosophical system.

What then can we doubt? How about our senses? Can you trust your

senses? One day, not long after moving to Hong Kong, I went shopping with

my family in a local mall. It was getting quite late, so we started looking for a

place to eat. As we walked into a supermarket that had food stalls all along

the front, I noticed at a distance a very nice display of Japanese food on sale.

I was quite hungry, so my mouth began watering immediately. We agreed to

try eating at this place, though it was rather crowded. As we came closer I

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was really impressed by the apparently high quality of the meals they had

on display. Only when we reached the counter itself did I realize that the

food on display was not food at all, but plastic! My senses had been utterly

fooled by the ingenuity of some marketing agent. And by your laughter I can

tell that many of you have made similar mistakes.

In the first of the six "meditations" described in Meditations on First

Philosophy, Descartes began his quest for certainty by using the virtually

universal experience of being fooled in this way to cast doubt on the

reliability of our senses. If we were fooled in that one instance, howdo we

knowwe have not been fooled more often? Indeed, if any given impression

our senses are now giving to us might be a false impression, then there

seems to be no possibility of discovering anything certain in our senses.

This discredits Aristotelian realism, since it is based on the assumption

that substances, as perceived primarily through our senses, are ultimately

real.

What about our ideas? Perhaps Plato was right after all, and our ideas

are the proper foundation for all knowledge. But Descartes found it just as

easy to cast doubt in this realm as well. Even ideas that seem to us to be

certain, ideas most people would never think of doubting, can be doubted if

we try. For example, there would be many ways of casting doubt on the

spatial and temporal character of our everyday experience. Most of us have

had dreams that violate spatial laws such as gravity (e.g., when we fly in our

dreams) or dreams in which time seems to go slower or faster than when we

are awake. Howdo we know our everyday experience is not just a dream,

from which we will wake up any minute now? Perhaps there is an evil

demon who is deceiving us all into mistaking this long dream for our real

world. Even if there is no such demon, we have all had the experience of

suddenly realizing that some idea we have held to be true for a long time is

actually false. Any single idea might turn out to be an illusion of this kind, so

there is nothing to prevent all our ideas from being illusory. Hence, Plato's

idealism is of no more use than Aristotle's realism in our search for

something absolutely certain.

How about mathematics? Descartes himself was a mathematician and

certainly believed mathematics to be true. Indeed, many philosophers in his

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day used a mathematical method in their philosophizing. Is it possible to

doubt that, for example, 2+2=4? I'll let you think this one through on your

own, as an encouragement to read Descartes' book for yourself. But suffice

it to say that Descartes believed even mathematics cannot provide an

absolutely certain foundation for knowledge.

Is there anything that is impossible to doubt? As Descartes lay on his

bed in a dark room doing this prolonged thought experiment, he suddenly

hit upon the answer he had been searching for. He found he could not doubt

that at that moment he was doubting. For this would be possible only under

the absurd conditions that a doubt could exist without anyone doing the

doubting! Doubt is a form of thinking, Descartes reasoned in his second

meditation, so thinking must be the basis upon which the certainty of his

own existence could be proved. Hence he came up with the now famous

maxim, "I think, therefore I am" (in Latin, Cogito ergo sum). The existence

of this "thinking being" is the absolutely certain foundation for all

knowledge. This "I" or "ego" stands outside of history and culture as a basic

metaphysical given, It does not depend on any kind of faith, since its

nonexistence is impossible as long as I know I am thinking.

No sooner did Descartes reach this conclusion than he realized that it

presents a new problem that requires some solution. Descartes himself

refused to side with Plato by treating the body as an illusion, for as a

scientist he believed the body is just as real as the mind. Instead he adopted

a metaphysical viewpoint known as "dualism", whereby the mind and body

are both regarded as equally real. Just as the former is a "thinking

substance" (res cogitans), the latter is an "extended substance" (res

extensa). Yet he had nowdemonstrated that our knowledge of our bodies,

together with the whole of extended nature, can never be as certain as our

knowledge of our thinking nature. So on what can we base our confidence in

the reality of the body? And just how is it that the mind and body are

related?

In his third meditation Descartes answered the first question by

appealing to God. He began by constructing what is now referred to as an

"ontological argument" for the existence of God (i.e., an argument appealing

only to the proper understanding of the concept "God"). His proof goes

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something like this: we all have within us an idea of "perfection"; no human

being is perfect, so the perfect Being is not the "I" of whose existence I am

certain; yet this perfect Being must actually exist, for otherwise it would be

less than perfect. That is, if our concept of a most perfect Being refers to a

Being who does not really exist, then that Being would not be as perfect as a

perfect Being who does exist. Descartes then argues that, since we can in

this way be certain that a perfect Being ("God") exists, and since such a

Being must be good in order to be perfect, we can also be confident that such

a Being would not deceive us. In response to critics who claimed such an

argument is circular (i.e., that it already assumes what it tries to prove),

Descartes appealed to the notion of "innate ideas" (ideas that are present in

our mind at birth, and are therefore self-authenticating), claiming that

"God" is an innate idea just as much as is the idea of my own "ego".

Even if we accept Descartes' theological explanation for why we can

have confidence in the reality of the external world, the question remains as

to how our minds actually relate to our bodies, if indeed they are two

ultimately distinct substances. Descartes' solution to this problem never

met with much approval from his fellow philosophers. He surmised that a

small gland at the base of the brain, called the "pineal gland", is responsible

for ensuring a causal connection between the mind and body. In Descartes'

day the prevailing idea of the human body was that it is a living machine, so

that any time one part moves, it must have been caused to move by a

mechanical process whereby some other part, as it were, "bumped" into it.

So Descartes claimed that, when the mindwants the body to do something,

it somehow influences the pineal gland, where it sets off a chain reaction

that ends in the desired action being performed. So if my mind tells me to

throw this piece of chalk up in the air, that idea spins round and round in

my mind until it gathers enough force to make a significant impact, then it

bangs into my pineal gland, sending a series of movements through my neck

and down my arm, until my arm actually obeys the command, like this!

Having explained Descartes' two main ways of defending his

metaphysical dualism, we can now summarize his theory as follows:

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Figure III.2:

Descartes' Solutions to the Mind-Body Problem

Descartes' dualism has several important consequences. For one thing, it

replaces Aristotle's definition of the human person as a "rational animal"

with the notion of a mind imbedded in a fleshly machine. In the field of

natural science this had the significant effect of providing scientists with a

world view that enabled them to attain (or at least, to believe they could

attain) a totally objective perspective on the external world, totally

eliminating any influence the observer's own mind might have on what we

come to know. In this sense, Descartes' dualism can be regarded as paving

the way for Newtonian science. The view that the human ego controls the

material world, though now called into question by many modern thinkers

(see e.g., Lecture 18), is what enabled technology to develop so rapidly over

the past three hundred years.

As far as metaphysics is concerned, the most significant consequence

of Descartes' dualism was that it sparked off a new controversy, commonly

known as "the mind-body problem". Descartes' own position seems highly

implausible; but is there any better way to explain the influence the mind

and body appear to have on each other? The debate over the proper answer

to this question began almost immediately, and is, in fact, still alive in some

philosophical circles today. For example, one of the most influential books

written by an analytic philosopher in the twentieth century, Gilbert Ryle's

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The Concept of Mind, begins by arguing that Descartes' dualism is based on

a "category mistake" and that a proper understanding of the way we use

words like "mind" and "body" can resolve the whole mind-body problem

once and for all.

The mind-body controversy was at its height in the century

immediately after the publication of Descartes' Meditations. We have no

time for an exhaustive analysis of the many arguments that were put

forward. However, it might be helpful to give a brief overview of five of the

most notable alternatives to Descartes' position, as represented in each

case by its most influential proponent. They are as follows:

(1) Materialism: Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) argued that only matter

truly exists. The mind is just a special configuration of brain matter.

Therefore there is no problem of interaction, because the whole system is

physical. This view is similar, though by no means identical, to Aristotle's

realism.

(2) Immaterialism: George Berkeley (1685-1753) argued that only

perceptions truly exist. There is no reason to believe matter has any

independent existence outside of the perceiving mind. Therefore there is no

problem of interaction, because the whole system is spiritual. This view is

similar, though by no means identical, to Plato's idealism.

(3) Parallelism: Nicolas Malebranche (1638-1715) argued that the mind

and body are indeed separate substances, but they do not actually interact.

They seem to interact whenever a mind's thoughts and a body's actions

happen to run parallel to each other; but in such cases the correspondence

is governed directly by God.

(4) Double Aspect theory: Benedictus de Spinoza (1632-1677) argued

that the mind and body (like all spirit and matter) are two aspects of one

underlying reality, which can be called either "God" or "Nature", depending

on how the subject views it. Reality is like a coin with two quite different

faces, both being equally true as a description of the coin.

(5) Epiphenomenalism: DavidHume (1711-1776) argued that the mind

is nothing but a bundle of perceptions arising out of the body. Later

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philosophers refined this idea, arguing that the body (in particular, the

brain) is the primary reality, but it creates or gives birth to the mind. Some

argue that once the mind arises, it has a reality of its own.

I'd like to conclude today's lecture by suggesting one very significant

difference between Descartes' metaphysics and that of Plato and Aristotle.

For Plato and Aristotle, and for most philosophers over the next two

millennia, the answer to the basic question of epistemology ("What can I

know?") was dependent upon a foregoing answer to the basic question of

metaphysics ("What is ultimately real?"). For Descartes, however, the

opposite was true. As we have seen, he began his enquiries by asking what

we can know for certain, and only on the basis of the answer to this question

did he construct his metaphysical dualism.

As we shall see in the following lecture, the next metaphysician whose

ideas we will consider also gave priority to epistemology. Anticipating that

lecture just slightly, we can therefore use the cross as a map of the

relationship between the methods employed by the four metaphysicians

considered here in Part One:

Figure III.3: Four Key Philosophical Methods

One of the chief dangers for beginning students of philosophy is that

they may be overwhelmed by the great diversity of viewpoints and

arguments that have been expressed on a given subject, such as meta-

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physics. Although maps like the one above inevitably over-simplify the

complex relationships between such philosophers, they nevertheless can

help us to get a handle on their basic similarities and differences, as well as

suggesting further insights of various sorts. For example, this diagram

suggests that the development of western philosophy can be regarded as a

process of slowly working backwards from, as it were, the highest and most

aloof insights, to the deepest groundings of human reasoning. We shall see

in the next two lectures the extent to which this suggestion gives us an

accurate description of the contribution Kant made to the roots of our

philosophical tree.

8. Philosophy as Transcendental Critique

The last philosopher whose ideas on metaphysics we will consider in

detail here in Part One of this course is a man whose influence on the last

two hundred years of philosophy, both in the west and in the east, can

hardly be underestimated. He is almost universally recognized as being the

greatest philosopher since Aristotle: a thinker whose ideas one must either

accept or refute, but who cannot be ignored. Indeed, some have claimed,

with justification, that philosophy in the past two hundred years has been

like a series of footnotes to this man's writings! Others have observed that

his philosophical system is to the modern worldwhat Aristotle's was for the

Scholastics: a virtual intellectual reference system. (The Scholastics were

medieval theologians who used philosophy to interpret Christianity, even

speculating on issues such as how many angels can fit on the head of a pin.

Scholasticism reached its peak in Thomas Aquinas' work, but had far less

influence after Descartes.) Like Aristotle, this giant of the mindwrote on

nearly every philosophical subject and had an immediate and lasting effect

on the way people think-philosophers and non-philosophers. Although

today we will be looking only at those aspects of his philosophy related most

closely to metaphysics, we will return to this thinker on numerous

occasions later in the course.

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was born into a working class family in the

Prussian port city of Königsberg (now Kaliningrad). He lived a quiet,

regulated life, never marrying and never traveling more than about thirty

miles from his birthplace during his entire life. Kant is often the subject of

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some rather unfair caricatures, such as that his daily routine was so rigid

that his neighbors found they could set their clocks by his daily comings

and goings! However, I prefer to regard such stories as reflecting the

integrity of a life lived in accordance with one's own ideas. For as we shall

see, Kant's idea of philosophy was that it ought to be a systematic whole,

governed by regular patterns of interrelated ideas. When he died, the

epitaph on his tomb simply said "The Philosopher"-an appropriate title,

considering that the philosophical cycle that began with Socrates reached

its fulfillment, to a large extent, with Kant.

Kant was motivated to conceive a new philosophical method for much

the same reason as Descartes: he asked himself why other sciences have

progressed, but metaphysics has not. Yet his answer to this question not

only ignored the whole mind-body problem, but also called into question

another of Descartes' key contributions: namely, his belief in the absolute

objectivity of the external world. Kant asked a new question: was Descartes

(and most other philosophers) right to assume that the objects we

experience and come to know are things in themselves? The term "thing in

itself" is a technical term he used to talk about the nature of ultimate

reality; it means "the things in the world, considered apart from the

conditions that make it possible to know anything about them." Given this

definition, Kant claimed, things in themselves must be unknowable. In

stark contrast to Descartes, who required his starting point to be an

absolutely certain item of knowledge, Kant posited a philosophical faith in

the reality of unknowable things in themselves as the starting point of his

system. This is just one of many ways Descartes and Kant are diametrically

opposed to each other in their philosophical methods.

Kant called his own way of philosophizing the "Critical" method. The

titles of the three main books wherein he developed his System each begin

with the word "Critique". Each book adopts a different "standpoint"; that is,

it addresses all its questions with a particular end in view. The first

Critique (of Pure Reason), the focus of our attention today, assumes a

theoretical standpoint. This means the answers to all the questions it asks

are concernedwith our knowledge. The other Critiques, as we shall see later

on, sometimes answer the same questions in different ways, because they

assume different standpoints. Recognizing the differences between these

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standpoints is therefore crucial for a proper understanding of Kant's

philosophy. We can picture the interrelationships between the three parts

of Kant's System in the following way:

Figure III.4: Kant's Critiques and Their Standpoints

Comparing Figure III.4 with Figure II.6 suggests that the Critical

method is a new form of the Socratic method. Whereas Socrates' main

concern was to scrutinize himself and others in the search for wisdom,

Kant's Critical method requires the self-examination of reason. In other

words, a true "critique", for Kant, is a process whereby reason asks itself

about the extent and limits of its own powers. The purpose of such

self-examination is to discover once and for all the boundary between what

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Figure III.5: Kant's Transcendental Boundary

human reason can and cannot achieve. In each case the "knowledge" we

gain of the boundary line informs us about what Kant called the "tran-

scendental conditions" for empirical knowledge. His Critical method thus

requires "transcendental reflection", which simply means thinking about

the necessary conditions for the possibility of experience. Something

transcendental is something that must be true, otherwise our experience

itself would be impossible. Whatever is outside the boundary, Kant called

"transcendent": since we can never have any experience of such things,

called "noumena", they can never be known by human reason. But whatever

is inside the boundary line defines the things open to discovery by ordinary,

"empirical reflection". Kant called such empirically knowable objects

"phenomena". This distinction between the empirical, the transcendent,

and the transcendental perspectives, as shown in Figure III.5, is one of the

most important distinctions in Kant's entire theoretical system.

In each of his three Critiques, Kant performed a distinct type of

self-examination of reason: he searched, respectively, for the boundaries

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between what we can andcannot know (theoretical),between what we ought andought not to do (practical), andbetween what we may and maynot hope ( judicial). He saidthese three concerns can besummarized as an attempt tounderstandwho "man" is; sothe four questions shown inFigure III.6 describe

Figure III.6:Kant's Four Philosophical Questions

the systematic relationship between the different parts of his own

philosophical project. It is important to keep in mind the relationships

between these four questions whenever we discuss Kant (especially in

Lectures 22, 29, 32, and 33), because he himself warned that in order to

understand his ideas properly, the reader must have an "idea of the whole"

(CPR 37).

Kant's new method requires us to see the truth in both extremes in any

debate, to recognize how each limits the other, and as a result, to adopt a

standpoint that affirms the legitimate points from both sides. As I hope you

recall from the last lecture, this stands in stark contrast to Descartes'

method: whereas the latter assumes both Plato and Aristotle to be wrong,

Kant's method assumes both are right, as shown below:

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Figure III.7: Descartes vs. Kant on Plato and Aristotle

According to Kant, Plato and Aristotle both made the mistake, like that of

most other western philosophers, of ignoring their opponent's point of view

and adopting an extreme position that ends up expressing only half the

truth. If Kant's view of things in themselves is correct, then Plato was right

to say objects of experience are mere appearances of a thing in itself; for in

saying this, he was adopting Kant's "transcendental" perspective. Likewise,

Aristotle was right to say appearances are the true objects of science (i.e., of

knowledge); for in saying this, he was adopting Kant's "empirical"

perspective. In both cases their mistakes were caused by the fact that they

had not yet recognized their ignorance of the thing in itself. This neglect is

what led Plato mistakenly to believe we could attain absolute knowledge of

mere ideas and it is what led Aristotle mistakenly to believe substances are

the ultimate reality. So the Critical method encourages us not only to

synthesize Plato's idealism and Aristotle's realism, but also to explain both

the truth in each, which has kept them alive for so long, and the errors that

make them inherently unsatisfactory. Let us now investigate how Kant

accomplished this task.

In the second edition Preface to the first Critique, Kant turned to the

established sciences in hopes of finding clues to their success. Logic, he

found, could become an exact science only when its field of inquiry was

clearly limited (CPR 18). Mathematics made progress only when people

began to search for the necessary and universal characteristics we read into

mathematical objects, instead of paying attention only to their accidental

characteristics (19). And natural sciences succeed only when they proceed

according to some predetermined plan (20). Armedwith these hints, Kant

gained one final clue by turning to a particular scientist, whose daring

insight profoundly changed the way we view the universe.

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Nicolaus Copernicas (1473-1543) was a Polish astronomer who dared

to question the long-standing assumption that the earth is a flat disk

located at the center of the universe. This assumption, he believed, had

prevented anyone from explaining why some planets appear to reverse their

motion as they travel through the sky from night to night, and then reverse

again to continue traveling in the direction of the stars. So he decided to

experiment with the assumption that the sun is actually in the center of the

universe, and the earth and other planets are all round balls that revolve

around the sun. Using this new assumption, together with the claim that the

earth revolves around its own axis, he found he could explain

mathematically how all the planets in reality always move in a (nearly)

circular orbit, even though they appear to change directions from the

vantage point of earthly observers.

Kant suggestedwe should try a similar experiment with metaphysics

(see Figure III.8). Not only had philosophers in the past nearly always

assumed things in themselves are knowable, but they had also assumed our

knowledge must conform itself to these objects, rather than

(a) The appearance (b) The reality

Figure III.8: Kant's Copernican Revolution

vice versa. Why not experiment with the opposite assumption? Perhaps in

metaphysics, just as in astronomy, the correct description of what appears

to be true is different from the correct description of what is true in reality.

In other words, Kant proposed that for metaphysics it may be more accurate

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to say objects conform themselves to the knowledge of the subject (i.e., to

the human mind)!

This new "transcendental perspective" might sound quite strange. How

could it make any sense to say, for example, that my knowledge of this piece

of chalk depends not on the chalk itself but on my own mind? According to

our ordinary (empirical) way of thinking, my knowledge that this chalk is

white obviously comes not from any invention of my mind, but from the

fact, plainly observable for all to see, that this chalk appears to be white.

Kant never denied that this is true. What he denied is that such appearances

have anything to do with the chalk's metaphysical reality; instead, they are

under the domain of physics and the other sciences. Kant's point was that

there is another, equally legitimate way of thinking about objects, revealing

a deeper, transcendental reality, and that when we think in thisway, when

we think about what is necessarily true about our experience of this piece of

chalk, then it will turn out that these elements in our knowledge come from

our mind, not from the object itself. The empirical and transcendental

should therefore be regarded as two sides of the same coin, two

perspectives, both providing us with true but limitedways of viewing the

real world.

What then are these transcendental conditions for the possibility of

experience, these absolutely necessary elements whose "movement", Kant

claimed, forms the boundary line between our possible knowledge and our

necessary ignorance? The first half of the Critique of Pure Reason attempts

to discover and prove the necessary validity of a set of these conditions. In

the process of fulfilling this task, Kant argued that all empirical knowledge

is made up of two elements: intuitions and concepts. An intuition is

anything that is "given" to our senses, and is the material out of which we

produce our knowledge. For our purposes, we can think of "intuition" as

referring to "the way our sensation operates". A concept is a word or

thought through which we actively organize our intuitions according to

various rules of thinking.

Kant attempted to prove that space and time are the transcendental

"forms of intuition" and a special set of twelve categories are the tran-

scendental "forms of conception". The categories are arranged in four

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groups of three, under the headings "quantity", "quality", "relation", and

"modality", as shown in Figure III.9. Today we can safely ignore the

Figure III.9: Kant's Twelvefold Division of Categories

details of this part of Kant theory, because Lecture 21 will include a closer

look at the most important category, causality. Moreover, as we will

discover in Week V, understanding the logical form of this set of categories

is more important than understanding Kant's reasons for selecting these

specific twelve. The key at this point is to understand the function of the

categories, along with space and time, their counterpart forms of intuition.

In order to avoid misunderstanding Kant's theory of the forms of

intuition and conception, we must be careful to clarify, when asking a

question such as "How is it possible for me to know anything about this

piece of chalk?", whether this is an empirical or a transcendental question.

If it is the latter, then, according to Kant, the answer is that our own minds

impose upon this object a framework of time and space, through which

weareabletoperceiveitsexistence,andaframeworkofcategories, through

which we are able to think about its nature. I think we would all agree that if

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this piece of chalk did not appear to us in space and time, then we could

never perceive it, and that we require a concept ("chalk"), together with

numerous general rules of thinking, in order to gain any knowledge of this

(or any other) perception. Examining such rules of thinking will be one of

our main tasks in Part Two.

Kant's most controversial claim was that these two necessary

conditions for knowledge are impossible to explain unless we regard them

as rooted in the human mind itself. Since philosophers have argued for two

hundred years about whether or not this so-called "Copernican revolution"

in philosophy really makes sense, I'm sure we won't settle this issue here;

but I hope youwill think through this question more thoroughly on your

own. In the next lecture, I shall discuss some of the metaphysical

implications of the first Critique and give a brief overview of how Kant has

influenced metaphysics over the past two hundred years. My claim will be

that Kant's position represents a fully matured version of the insights

Socrates presented in the form of a seed.

9. Philosophy after Critique

Kant's epistemological legacy had an almost immediate impact on

virtually every area of philosophical inquiry, bringing to a close what is

often called the "modern era" of western philosophy and giving rise to a long

series of "post-modern" or "post-Critical" philosophies. Before sketching

how Kant influenced subsequent developments in metaphysics, I shall

briefly examine the metaphysical implications Kant himself believed his

epistemology had.

Kant argued that the transcendental conditions of knowledge (i.e.,

space, time, and the categories) establish an absolute boundary line that

enables us to judge what we can and cannot know about what is real. Any

concept that has no intuition corresponding to it, or any intuition that

cannot be conceptualized, can never be used to construct knowledge.

Nevertheless, whenever a person obtains some empirical knowledge, his or

her reason inevitably forms certain "ideas" about things that go beyond the

boundary of what we can know. The most important of these, Kant claimed,

are the metaphysical ideas of "God, freedom, and immortality": reason

impels us to postulate each of these, yet we cannot prove any of them to be

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objects we can know are real. The fact that we are necessarily

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ignorant of the three most importantaspects of human life poses a problem, aspictured in Figure III.10, whose solutionis philosophy's primary task. Kant himself solved this problem byclaiming we must change the standpointfrom which we are thinking if we everhope to justify our belief in such ideas. InLectures 22 and 29we will examine twoexamples of how he suggestedwe do

Figure III.10: The Problemof Kantian "Ideas"

this. For now it will suffice to say that Kant himself believed that

recognizing the limitations of knowledge is very good for metaphysics. As

he confessed in CPR 29: "I have ... found it necessary to deny knowledge, in

order to make room for faith." An honest and courageous recognition of

reason's limits may make philosophy a more difficult and dangerous task,

but as we shall see in Lectures 32 and 33, it is the best (if not the only) way

to preserve the meaningfulness of human life.

We can now summarize the main features of Kant's metaphysics in

terms of the following four fundamental tenets:

1. Ultimate ("transcendent") reality-i.e., reality apart from the limiting

conditions through which we learn about it-is an unknowable "thing in

itself".

2. Empirical reality-i.e., the particular aspects of our knowledge-is

determined by the "appearances" we experience (cf. Aristotle).

3. Transcendental reality-i.e., the general aspects of our knowledge

(especially space and time as "forms of intuition", and twelve categories as

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"forms of thought")-is determined by the knowing subject (cf. Plato).

4. Knowledge inevitably gives rise to ideas about what ultimate reality

might be like if we could know it; but attempting to prove these ideas leads

reason into self-contradiction, so they can never become items of scientific

knowledge.

The implications of the philosophical System that arises out of these tenets

are manifold. At this point, let's just look at four of the most significant

implications for metaphysics.

First, if we think of Socrates as planting a "seed" in the history of

western philosophy with his idea that philosophers must begin by

recognizing what they do not know, then the tree that grew out of this seed

first bore fruit with Kant. Kant agreed that philosophy begins with the

recognition of ignorance; indeed, he even claims that the "inestimable

benefit" of his first Critique is "that all objections to morality and religion

will be for ever silenced, and this in Socratic fashion, namely, by the

clearest proof of the ignorance of the objectors" (CPR 30). But he goes much

further than Socrates by demarcating, once and for all, the precise

boundary lines between the areas of "necessary ignorance" and "possible

knowledge": we may be able to think about a concept that cannot be

intuited, or feel an intuition that cannot be conceptualized; but we can know

only what appears to us in a form that lends itself to both intuition and

conception. Moreover, Kant distinguishes between two types of ignorance

(605-606): our accidental ignorance in empirical matters should motivate

us to extend our knowledge, whereas our necessary ignorance in

metaphysical matters should motivate us to look beyond knowledge to the

practical purpose of doing philosophy-namely, to live a better life. We shall

come back to this in Part Three.

With Kant, therefore, metaphysics finally came of age. After two

thousand years of philosophers attempting to combat necessary ignorance

with metaphysical knowledge, Kant completed a cycle in the history of

western philosophy, and in so doing, opened up a whole new set of

problems. For the next implication of Kant's System is that we must now

find a way to cope with our necessary ignorance. How can we do philosophy

without having any knowledge of ultimate reality? The last two hundred

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years of philosophy has been a series of different suggestions as to how this

can best be accomplished. Kant's own solutions, such as his "Copernican"

theory that the subject reads the transcendental conditions of knowledge

onto the object, have been rejected by most subsequent philosophers.

However, I don't think we should be too quick to reject this rather strange

sounding theory. For just as Descartes' "cogito" paved the way for

Newtonian physics, I believe Kant's Copernican revolution paved the way

for relativity physics and quantum mechanics, based as they are on a very

similar notions of the observer participating in the formation of

knowledge.

Because Kant defined such a clear-cut set of limits for human

knowledge, we can say philosophy becomes more complete with Kant than

ever before. Kant himself was well aware of this aspect of his System (CPR

10):

I have made completeness my chief aim, and I venture to assert that there is

not a single metaphysical problem which has not been solved, or for the

solution of which the key at least has not been supplied.

Interestingly, if you think back to our discussion of myths in Lecture 3, you

might recall that a myth is also something that is enclosed in limits. So I

think it would be right to say that with Kant western philosophy

experienced such a major "paradigm shift" that we can say Kant gave

philosophy a new "myth"-the myth of the thing in itself. Of course, as long as

we treat this as an "enlightened" myth-i.e., as long as we always remember it

is a myth, and so treat it not as an absolute truth, but as a basic assumption,

freely adopted on faith-we can avoid many of the pitfalls that "living in a

myth" otherwise tends to have.

One final implication of Kant's philosophy is that its insistence on an

area of necessary human ignorance keeps the philosopher humble. This

might seem surprising, especially for those of youwho have read some of

Kant's own writing, since Kant was certainly not ignorant about the

greatness of his own achievement! For on several occasions he proudly

claimed that his System is superior to those of all past philosophers. My

point here is that, whereas most philosophers appeal to certain speculative

ideas, requiring access to some kind of special, transcendent knowledge

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that is inaccessible to ordinary people, Kant's philosophy replaces these

with hypotheses, thus putting philosophers in general on an even par with

non-philosophers when it comes to their ability to gain knowledge about the

most basic metaphysical issues. Because Kant used such complicated

terminology to express his ideas, this implication of his philosophy is often

overlooked, even by those who spend years studying his writings. Yet Kant

stated this "humiliating" aspect of his Critical System clearly enough on

several occasions. One of the best examples, near the end of the first

Critique (651-652), is worth quoting in full:

But, it will be said, is this all that pure reason achieves in opening up

prospects beyond the limits of experience? .... Surely the common

understanding could have achieved as much, without appealing to

philosophers for counsel in the matter.

I shall not dwell here upon the service which philosophy has done to

human reason through the laborious efforts of its criticism, granting even

that in the end it should turn out to be merely negative ... But I may at once

reply: Do you really require that a mode of knowledge which concerns all

men should transcend the common understanding, and should only be

revealed to you by philosophers? Precisely what you find fault with is the

best confirmation of the correctness of the [Critical philosophy]. For we

have thereby revealed to us, what could not at the start have been foreseen,

namely, that in matters which concern all men without distinction nature is

not guilty of any partial distribution of her gifts, and that in regard to the

essential ends of human nature the highest philosophy cannot advance

further than is possible under the guidance which nature has bestowed

even upon the most ordinary understanding.

In other words, philosophy is special not because it allows us proudly to

claim a higher level of knowledge than ordinary people, but because it

humbles us by showing us the limitations of all our knowledge.

Unfortunately, many of the philosophers who came after Kant refused

to accept this important implication of his System. Instead, the history of

metaphysics over the past two hundred years has to a large extent been the

history of different attempts to avoid precisely this painful implication,

that philosophers have to be humble in order to be good philosophers.

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Philosophers have tried to escape this outcome by denying, suppressing, or

misinterpreting one or more of the standpoints Kant sought to hold in a

fragile balance. The remainder of today's lecture will be a brief overview of

key figures in four post-Kantian movements: German idealism,

existentialism (both pessimistic/atheistic and optimistic/ theistic

versions), linguistic analysis, and hermeneutic philosophy.

The German idealists (most notably, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and

Marx) were the first and most notorious examples of post-Kantian attempts

to regain for human beings the capacity to knowultimate reality. Johann

Fichte (1762-1814) was initially thought by many to be earmarked as Kant's

chosen successor; however, he soon made an obvious break with Kant, by

arguing that the "transcendental ego" actually produces the whole natural

world out of itself. The problematic "thing in itself" could then be discarded,

since there is no longer a need for anything to exist apart from our minds.

Friedrich Schelling (1775-1854) belonged as much to the concurrent

Romantic Movement as to the idealists; this was evident in his emphasis on

art, feeling, and individual diversity. His book, System of Transcendental

Idealism (1800), outlines a position much like Fichte's, whereby the ego

"posits itself" (i.e., makes itself into an object), thus creating the external

world and setting itself the task of coming to know it. Both views reject the

empirical realism Kant valued so highly.

German idealism reached its height with Georg Friedrich Hegel

(1770-1831), whose major contribution was to bring history into the center

stage of metaphysics. He argued that the three-step process used by Fichte

and Schelling (itself having strong roots in Kant [see e.g., Figure III.1])

constitutes a fixed, logical pattern that tells us just how history develops.

This makes it possible for us to gain a priori access to ultimate reality in the

form of what Hegel called "Absolute Spirit". (We shall look more closely at

Hegelian logic in Lecture 12.) Karl Marx (1818-1883) can be regarded as the

concluding figure in this tradition, not because he was an idealist, but

because he constructed his entire philosophy as a reaction against the

Hegelian system. Ironically, this required him to accept many of Hegel's

underlying assumptions, including the basic myth that ultimate reality can

be made known through historical development. But because his focus was

not so much on metaphysics as on political philosophy, we shall postpone

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any further discussion of Marx's ideas until Week IX.

Though not part of German idealism, the American philosophers C.S.

Peirce (1839-1914) and John Dewey (1850-1952) were also influenced by

Hegel in developing pragmatism, an approach to philosophy that

emphasizes common sense more than metaphysical theories as such. What

is real is determined not so much by philosophical reasoning as by finding

out what works in the empirical world. The issue of ultimate reality is

virtually ignored. As such, pragmatism need not be anti-Kantian; but it also

does not fully adopt Kant's position (cf. Lectures 22 and 29).

Another way of reacting to Hegel's absolute denial of Kantian limits

produced existentialism-though in this case Hegel's myth of the centrality

of history was itself called into question more fundamentally. The two

major figures here are Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) and Søren

Kierkegaard (1813-1855), who developed pessimistic and optimistic alter-

natives to Hegel, respectively. Schopenhauer remained far more faithful to

Kant than Hegel did; but he modified Kant's System by identifying the realm

of the thing in itself with an all-encompassing unconscious "will" that

relates to much more than just moral issues, as Kant had argued (see

Lecture 22). He believed the conflict between the will and the external

world creates inevitable suffering, and that this suffering constitutes the

true meaning of life. Kierkegaard also attackedHegel by returning to Kant,

but in a more optimistic way, by regarding life's suffering as a force that

points us to God and ought therefore to be transcended. His position will be

the focus of our attention in Lecture 34.

These pioneers strongly influenced, in turn, two philosophers who

developed existentialism more explicitly. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900),

deeply influenced by Schopenhauer's dark pessimism, constructed a moral

philosophy in direct opposition to Kant, that became the seedbed for most

of the atheistic versions of existentialism that were rampant during the

twentieth century. Paul Tillich (1886-1971), influenced far more by

Kierkegaard, is the philosopher-theologian who developed the existentialist

framework most completely in an "optimistic" (i.e., theologically

affirmative) direction. Nietzsche will be the focus of our attention in

Lecture 23, and Tillich in Lectures 17, 30, 31, and 34.

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Opposed to existentialism for much of the twentieth century was an-

alytic philosophy. As we shall see in Lecture 16, Bertrand Russell

(1872-1970) and Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) were its two major

proponents. Many in this tradition see themselves as following directly in

Kant's footsteps; however, this claim is based on an extremely anti-meta-

physical interpretation of Kant as destroying metaphysics without putting

anything better in its place. Fortunately, more and more Anglo-American

philosophers are recognizing that the old dichotomy between existential

and analytic approaches to philosophy is illegitimate-a development I

believe is best described by the single word, "good" (cf. Figure I.2)!

A philosopher who is often regarded as an existentialist even though he

tried to disassociate himself from the movement is Martin Heidegger

(1889-1976). His approach to philosophy, to be touched on briefly in

Lectures 17, 18 and 34, gave rise to one of the most influential developments

in the last half of the twentieth century: hermeneutic philosophy. Lecture

18 will examine in some detail howHans Georg Gadamer (1900-) developed

a theory of interpretation that remains highly influential to this day. One of

the main reasons for its increasing influence, I believe, is that it puts its

focus elsewhere than on the traditional questions of metaphysics. Indeed,

at its most extreme, hermeneutic philosophy has given rise to a movement

called "deconstructionism", led by philosophers such as Jacques Derrida

(1930-), who believe that not just metaphysics, but philosophy itself has

come to an end. Since we shall be discussing these ideas more thoroughly in

Lectures 18 and 24, there is no need to summarize them here.

If youwere to take a course in metaphysics as part of a philosophy

major, your teacher would probably focus on certain basic problems that

tend to occupy the attention of contemporary metaphysicians. These are

typically associatedwith one of the following four aspects of "reality": (1)

the nature of physical things and our perception of them (e.g., color); (2)

the nature of the mind and the proper identification of mental objects; (3)

the nature of space, time, and relations in space-time (e.g., causality,

necessity, and freedom); and (4) the nature of abstract entities (e.g.,

numbers, possible worlds, and God). Such problems are not new; we have

met most of them in our discussions of classical and modern metaphysics

over the past two weeks, though sometimes under different headings:

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metaphysics proper (e.g., the idealism-realism debate), human nature (e.g.,

the mind-body debate), etc. The names have changed, and the tools

contemporary philosophers use to deal with such problems tend to be far

more complex; but the basic issues have remained unchanged.

What then is the future of philosophy's "roots" as we enter a new

millennium? Much of what passed for metaphysics during the twentieth

century was unfortunately little more than a regression to the kind of

Scholastic philosophy that was typically practiced in the Middle Ages. It

has quite literally meant nothing to anyone outside the walls of academia. I

believe the only way to avoid this tragic outcome is to learn the lesson Kant

was trying to teach us in his first Critique. His goal in developing what is

still regarded by many philosophers as the most complete andwell

defended epistemology was to put metaphysics "on the sure path of a

science" (CPR 21). What he meant is that recognizing our ignorance of

ultimate reality is the sole purpose for studying metaphysics. Once that is

accomplished, we must resist the temptation to continue looking for

answers in the wrong place, lest we either uproot the tree (thus killing it) or

bury our own heads in the soil (thus killing our potential for any further

insight). Instead, the only way to obtain something like "knowledge" of how

life's most meaningful questions are to be answered is to admit that the

answers are not to be found in metaphysics, but lie elsewhere on the tree of

philosophy. Understanding how this is possible will be one of our primary

concerns in Part Two and throughout this course.

QUESTIONS FOR FURTHER THOUGHT/DIALOGUE

1. A. Are you certain of anything?

B. Is it possible to doubt that 2+2=4?

2. A. Is it possible to know anything about ultimate reality?

B. Is it proper for a philosopher to appeal to faith?

3. A. What was the old myth that Kant's philosophy replaced?

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B. Do minds actually impose anything onto objects we experience?

4. A. What would be the ideal philosophical method?

B. What is humility, and is it ever possible to be completely humble?

RECOMMENDED READINGS

1. Ren?Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy2, tr. Laurence J. Lafleur

(New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1960[1951]).

2. Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1949), Ch.

I, "Descartes' Myth", pp.13-25.

3. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, "Preface" (both editions) (CPR

7-37).

4. Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, tr. Lewis White

Beck (New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1950).

5. Stephen Palmquist, Kant's System of Perspectives: An architectonic

interpretation of the Critical philosophy (Lanham: University Press of

America, 1993), Chs. IV-VI, pp.107-193.

6. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy: The lives and opinions of the greater

philosophers3 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982[1928]).

7. John Passmore, A Hundred Years of Philosophy2 (Harmondsworth:

Penguin, 1966[1957]).

8. Michael Jubien, Contemporary Metaphysics: An introduction (Oxford:

Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 1997).

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