Philosophy Bites Back by Edmonds David & Warburton Nigel

Author:Edmonds, David & Warburton, Nigel [Edmonds, David]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2012-11-22T00:00:00+00:00

15

A.W. MOORE ON

Immanuel Kant’s Metaphysics

David Edmonds: As the citizens of Königsberg in the late eighteenth century watched the professor of logic and metaphysics go for his regular daily walk at precisely the same time each day, they must have wondered what he was thinking about. Well, one of Immanuel Kant’s preoccupations was whether we could work out things about the world without experience—without, as it were, leaving the armchair—and substantial truths, not just what Kant called analytic truths, in other words, not just truths of definition like ‘all bachelors are unmarried men’. This apparently arcane issue is at the heart of Kant’s investigation of the limits of human knowledge in his Critique of Pure Reason. Professor A. W. Moore dispenses a wealth of knowledge from his armchair in St Hugh’s College, Oxford.

Nigel Warburton: We’re going to try to explain Kant’s metaphysics today! Could you start by addressing the question, ‘What is metaphysics?’

A.W. Moore: Metaphysics can be usefully characterized as the most general attempt to make sense of things, the attempt to understand what the basic structure of reality is like.

NW: So, it’s at the heart of philosophy—a drive to understand our relationship to our experience and to the world.

AWM: Absolutely, it’s the core part of philosophy. Other branches of philosophy all depend on metaphysics in various ways. You could say that it’s the part of philosophy that holds the rest of the discipline together.

NW: Immanuel Kant is most famous for his Critique of Pure Reason, and that’s the work we’re focusing on today. It’s an incredibly complex, difficult book, but it has a central theme: could you summarize that theme?

AWM: Yes, it’s an extraordinarily complicated book, and it’s difficult to summarize. Kant is fundamentally concerned with metaphysics in two senses. First of all, he’s trying to do metaphysics in this book. He’s trying to tell us something about the broad structure of reality, trying to make sense of things at the highest level of generality. But also, he’s very interested in stepping up a level and raising questions about metaphysics, about its nature, its scope, and its limits—because one of the things that he was struck by when he looked at the work of his predecessors, stretching back over centuries, was that there hadn’t been much in the way of consensus, not only about metaphysical issues themselves, but about how much was even possible within metaphysics.

His immediate predecessors had notably disagreed about what was possible within metaphysics. If we accept the standard cartoon sketch whereby his immediate predecessors divided into Rationalists and Empiricists, then we can say that, according to the Rationalists, it was possible by a pure exercise of reason to arrive at substantive conclusions about the nature of reality, whereas the Empiricists were altogether more sceptical. The Empiricists thought that reason was much more limited than the Rationalists took it to be and that the only way that we could arrive at substantive conclusions about the nature of reality was to do the sort of thing that we do in the natural sciences, which is to appeal to experience.

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