Good morning friends,
I hope enjoyed the brief stop we made yesterday to visit our old friend Rene Descartes.
Today we’ll be catching a flight from Descartes in France to Immanuel Kant in Germany.
Unlike Descartes who joined the army, traveled the world, studied physics, and started philosophizing in his early twenties, Immanuel Kant wouldn’t pick up the mantle until well into his fifties.
His reason for joining the game so late? He read a philosophical piece by another philosopher—David Hume—about epistemology that made him so internally disturbed he had to spend the rest of his life seeking resolution.
Kant’s experience reminds me of the physicists Erwin Shrodinger. One day, upon accidentally stumbling across the mathematical reality of quantum gravity, he threw away his paper and decided to devote his life to biology! The mathematical discovery that the universe is somehow many places at the same time scared him enough to put it away forever.
Kant on the other hand, in feeling unresolved was more like a bull in a ring and charged into the uncertainty head on. His guiding question: how do we know what we know?
We’re all grateful that he was so restless as he left he behind such incredible, foundational, and extremely helpful concepts for future thinkers as we continue to study knowledge and consciousness.
Both Hume and Kant lived through the European Enlightenment which saw a major shift from defensive, survivalist, often superstitious thought patters into objective, verifiable, and scientific observation.
Hume was a loud voice in his time challenging the notion that human ideas are credible simply because they are accepted widely, people die for them, or people believe in them passionately.
Without being armed with tons of knowledge from outside Europe or in sociology, Hume wanted to prove that there was no way we all just “knew” something like objective right from wrong, for example. And he was frustrated by the dogmatic conviction that many people carried that we were simply endowed with certain knowledge.
And Kant was fascinated.
He picks up Hume’s work by grounding his epistemology in judgements.
Let’s loosely define judgements as the framework, or window, that people build for themselves to see the world. Kant wants to know more about this “window”—is it innate, how does it get there, why do we have it?
Ultimately, much of Kant’s study on judgements will have to do with experience.
He believes that these judgements have an epistemological component and a semantic component.
To put it another way, he believes that a judgement is either a priori or a posteriori, and either analytic or synthetic. (That clears things up, right?)
Essentially, a priori knowledge is that which we can gain without experience, we can simply think of it—5+5=10 for example. A Posteriori on the other hand, is knowledge we must gain through experience and be able to determine if it is true or false— “my son was born in March,” for example.
Furthermore, he parses out judgements as being either
analytic—a thought is analytic if its “denial yields a contradiction”1—or
synthetic—a thought is synthetic if does more than analyze a concept.
It would be really easy to get lost in these definitions, but let’s use this basic framework to understand the fundamental change that Kant caused in the way future philosophers would think.
These divisions would aggregate to create Continental Philosophy on one hand which focused on speculation, metaphysics, and possibilities of things largely outside our ability to experience and verify.
It likewise produced Analytic Philosophy on the other which would continue to build the rational ways in which science and the scientific method would discover its knowledge.
In short, this split that Kant makes produces two major forms of epistemology:
knowledge we gain by talking and thinking, and
knowledge we gain by experiment, experience, and verification.
The vast majority of all academic and professional knowledge in the modern world today is a direct descendant of this Analytic Philosophical framework.
Kant is essentially interested in understanding, based off of this framework, how we come to know things about mathematics, natural science, metaphysics, and morality. Because each of these topics are spaces in which we are capable of understanding without direct experience.
The vast majority of Kant’s work is exploring this question, and we’ll dive deeper into that sometime in the future!
For now, have a great rest of the day, keep thinking, and take a moment of gratitude for that incredible brain of yours.
Matt