_001 Kant & Rationalism

Immanuel Kant was an 18^th Century, rationalist German philosopher. He thought all philosophical questions could be answered through reason. Let’s examine why he thinks this:

Imagine you have a filter over your eyes, which only let you see in black and white. From our experience of the world, we would naturally conclude that the entire world is black and white. But of course this is not the case. Kant argued that we must be wary of empiricism (observation) because we will always view the world through this mental filter i.e. we can never view the world objectively.

For this reason Kant said that knowledge must come from “a priori synthetic statements”. To understand this, we must look at the types of truths:

An analytic statement is true in itself, true by definition, a manipulation of language. In other words, we never gain any new knowledge from analytic statements; it just explicitly states what was already implicit within the statement.

“All bachelors are unmarried men” – we know that from the definition of a bachelor. “Bachelors” and “unmarried men” are synonyms, so we are only re-arranging the knowledge we have, not learning anything we didn’t already know.

Synthetic statements are not true in themselves, and David Hume suggested that all synthetic statements require observation to verify whether or not they are true. They do, however, tell us something new, not implicit in the statement. So in some sense, synthetic statements are a lot more useful to us than analytic statements.

“All bachelors are rich” – this statement we know is not true. We know it because we can observe that there are poor bachelors. However, it is possible that the statement could be true if we observed that it was the case – perhaps in the future all bachelors will be rich and the statement will be true. So a synthetic statement is telling us something about the world.

But Kant disagreed with Hume; he said that there are synthetic statements that don’t require observation. Analytic statements are an exercise in pure reason, meaning they are “a priori” (founded through deduction). All empirical knowledge is synthetic, but for Kant not all synthetic statements are empirical. There are synthetic “a priori” statements.

Maths is a perfect example of this: 1+1=2

We know this, we don’t need observation or experimentation to know this is true. However, 1+1 is NOT true by definition. There is nothing implicitly contained in the idea of 2 that leads to 1+1

Synthetic a priori statements take the best of both types: they are always true, regardless of circumstances (1+1 will always equal 2 no matter what) and they still give us new information without empirical observation. Another example of this would be space and time¹.

So it is only logical that we would use these statements, which are obtained through reason, to solve philosophical problems. Pure reason tells us nothing new; pure empiricism is not universal; we need a mixture of both – reason processes our experiences into truth.

Word Count:497

¹http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-spacetime/

• Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Pure Reason, translated by Paul Guyer and Allen Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.