Q&A: A Question About Your Book
A Question About Your Book
Question
I started reading Two Carts and a Hot-Air Balloon, and I thought maybe the Rabbi could help me understand Kant’s argument: since we perceive the world only in its phenomenal form, we therefore have to rely on synthetic thinking. I couldn’t understand this. David Hume’s idea is that it is not correct to grasp the world through synthetic thinking such as induction and analogy. How does Kant resolve this?
Thank you, and happy holiday.
Answer
This isn’t a question for responsa, and it also isn’t well defined. Kant does not connect the phenomenon-noumenon distinction to synthetic thinking. In general, the concept of synthetic thinking is mine, not his.
Discussion on Answer
How does that solve the problem? How does a person form a rule (induction) about phenomena? In the raven example, how does he conclude that every future appearance of a raven in his thought will be black? One could say that induction is really just an analysis and description of my current mental state, but that already sounds like a reduction of philosophy to psychology, similar to Ron Aharoni’s proposal.
Motti, Kant resolves Hume by arguing that although it is true that causality and so on cannot be observed empirically, at the same time there is in any case no access to reality itself as such (noumena), and a person grasps only the appearances as they appear in his consciousness (phenomena). Therefore, Kant resolves it by saying that induction holds within the world of phenomena, which in any case is all one ever observes.