Kant and German idealism

Philosophy · Modern philosophy. The idea in plain words, the rules to remember, the mistake to avoid and a worked example, written and checked by Mega Lecture.

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The idea

Kant tried to settle the quarrel between rationalists and empiricists. Knowledge begins with experience, but the mind supplies its form: space and time, and the categories of the understanding such as cause and substance. This is his 'Copernican revolution': objects must conform to our way of knowing. So we know phenomena, things as they appear, and never noumena, things in themselves.

Hegel rejected the unknowable thing in itself. For him reality is Absolute Spirit (Geist) unfolding rationally through a dialectic in which oppositions are overcome at a higher level. Schopenhauer took the opposite road: the thing in itself is a blind, striving will, and so life is largely suffering.

Rules to remember

Kant: Critique of Pure Reason (1781)
Analytic judgement: the predicate is contained in the subject ('All bodies are extended'). Synthetic: the predicate adds something ('All bodies are heavy')
A priori: known independently of experience, necessary and universal. A posteriori: known from experience
Synthetic a priori judgements, for Kant: mathematics (7 + 5 = 12) and principles such as 'every event has a cause'
There are twelve categories; sensibility gives intuitions, understanding gives concepts, and knowledge needs both
Hegel: Phenomenology of Spirit; thesis, antithesis, synthesis is the usual textbook summary; history is the progress of the consciousness of freedom
Schopenhauer: The World as Will and Representation; pessimism

Common mistake

Thinking that 'a priori' means 'analytic'. Kant's main claim is that some judgements are both synthetic (informative) and a priori (necessary).

Worked example

Classify the judgement 'The shortest distance between two points is a straight line' in Kant's scheme.

Is it analytic? The concept 'straight' is about a quality of the line and does not contain the idea of 'shortest', which is about quantity. So the predicate adds something: synthetic.
Is it known from experience? No. We hold it to be necessary and universal without measuring lines, so it is a priori.
Kant explains this by saying geometry rests on space, which is a form of our own intuition.

Answer: Synthetic a priori, one of Kant's own examples from geometry.

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