Notes for A Priori, A Posteriori, and Synthetic A Priori Reading

You need beliefs in order to make sense of what you perceive.

How many of our beliefs can we base on reasoning rather than on evidence from perception?

Beliefs

A priori (prior to the evidence):  knowledge we can have in advance of any evidence

(note: all analytic beliefs are apriori)

e.g. “all bachelors are unmarried”

e.g. “all sisters are female”

e.g. “a moose cannot fit in my pocket”

• They are apriori because knowing how to speak a language makes in unnecessary to consider evidence for them

As long as you understand the language and have definitions then it is not necessary to have evidence and it would be hard to double the belief as long as you understand what the words mean.

A posteriori (consider: post / posterior): knowledge that can be gained only after seeing the evidence

Kant (1724-1804): Synthetic a priori

• Without some prior fixed beliefs we could not even begin to describe what we believe.
• These beliefs are synthetic (i.e. manufactured).  They are true not because of the way the world works, but because of the way our minds work.

1. propositions of arithmetic and geometry
2. belief that events have causes
3. there are laws of nature that we can discover
4. people and physical objects persist through time

• We have to have some beliefs before we consider evidence.  e.g. You can’t interpret what you see through a telescope if you don’t have some prior beliefs about distance in space.

Quine (1960s)

• No fundamental difference between analytic and synthetic beliefs
• No belief is true simply because of the meaning of words
• All beliefs are true or false because of the way the world is and the meaning words have
• Points out that the situation could change so it no longer makes sense to treat some of them as apriori

Web of Belief

• Beliefs are linked in a vast network
• Perceptual beliefs are near the edge and fairly easy to change
• Beliefs near the centre and linked to other beliefs change very slowly as we get new evidence – they are insulated from evidence by the “beliefs” that surround it

Quine vs. Kant

• Quine’s conclusion is that everyone must have some beliefs at the centre of their web of beliefs; these beliefs change with different people
• No belief is safe: it might be reasonable to abandon what we believe

• Kant said there are beliefs that must always be at the centre of the web of beliefs

-          propositions of arithmetic

-          events have causes

-          laws of nature

Both agree that for any person at any time the web will always have a centre.

Both agree that structured patterns of belief allow us to consider evidence, think, and explain the world around us.

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804)

Context

Immanuel Kant is probably the most important philosopher of the past 2,000 years, yet he lived a remarkably boring life. He was born, lived, and died in the provincial Prussian university town of Königsberg (now Kaliningrad in Russia). He was so regular in his habits that locals set their clocks by his afternoon walk. Kant was the first great modern philosopher to be a university man and spent his entire student and professional life at the University of Königsberg.

Kant studied the rationalist metaphysicians, such as Leibniz and Christian Wolff, who were fashionable at the time, as well as mathematics and physics, in particular the physics of Isaac Newton. In his early career, he published mainly in the field of natural science, and he mostly accepted the rationalist metaphysics he had been taught. He became a full professor in 1770, and for the next ten years he published nothing, as he painstakingly worked out his mature philosophy. During this time, he studied the works of David Hume carefully, and he credited Hume with awakening him from the “dogmatic slumber” that had kept him from questioning rationalist metaphysics.

In 1781, Kant published his Critique of Pure Reason, a long and very difficult volume that was met with great interest and criticism. To this day, it remains one of the most discussed and influential works in philosophy. Kant continued to write prolifically throughout the 1780s, publishing almost all of his most important works in that decade: the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics in 1783, the Groundwork for the Metaphysic of Morals in 1785, the Critique of Practical Reason in 1788, and the Critique of Judgment in 1790. Kant continued to think and write well into his old age, and he was at work on a fourth Critique at the time of his death in 1804.

Kant lived near the end of the Enlightenment, a European cultural movement that spanned the eighteenth century. Enlightenment figures such as Voltaire and David Hume sought to replace the traditions and superstitions of religion and monarchy with a worldview that relied primarily on the powers of reason. Kant’s work belongs to this tradition. His three Critiques investigate the scope and powers of reason and emphasize that the proper study of metaphysics is our own rational faculties, not the sort of theological questions that occupied earlier generations.

The Enlightenment drew from, and furthered, the development of the new science that had begun during the Renaissance and inspired the republican revolutions in France and America. Kant was at his most productive around the time of these two great revolutions, but as he spent his entire life in eastern Prussia, he was largely untouched by the world events unfolding around him. Nevertheless, he wrote a number of important essays on political questions, particularly one discussing the possibility of perpetual peace.

Kant is generally credited with effecting a synthesis between the empiricist philosophy that had dominated Great Britain and the rationalist philosophy that had dominated the European continent for the previous 150 years. Although he was trained in the rationalist tradition, Kant was heavily influenced by the empiricist philosophy of David Hume.

The great rationalist philosophers who preceded Kant include René Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Rationalism emphasizes the power of reason to provide answers to metaphysical and other questions unaided by experience. Descartes’ Meditations famously begins with the meditator systematically doubting all sensory experience, then building a rational foundation for knowledge beginning with the observation, “I think, therefore I am.” While rationalist philosophers were deeply interested in the new developments in science of the seventeenth century, they place a far greater emphasis than the empiricists did on the potential of the unaided intellect.

Empiricism, on the other hand, places a greater emphasis on sensory experience. In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, John Locke argues that the human mind is a tabula rasa, or blank slate, at birth and that all our knowledge comes from experience, either directly or by generalizing from experience. George Berkeley and David Hume add further twists to empiricism, but they remain united in their hostility to the sort of rationalist metaphysics that attempts to unravel the nature of God, causation, time, and space by means of rational argument alone.

Hume is particularly important to this story, as it is Hume whom Kant credits with making Kant question some of the fundamental tenets of rationalism. Hume famously argues that our belief in causation is not rationally justified. He begins by distinguishing between two kinds of knowledge: “matters of fact,” the empirical knowledge we derive from sensory experience, and “relations of ideas,” such as mathematical and logical knowledge, which we cannot deny without contradiction. He then asks how we can know that one event will cause another, or more broadly, how we can make any predictions about the future. We might argue that we can make such predictions based on past sensory experience: having experienced the sunrise every morning of our lives, we can predict that it will rise tomorrow morning as well. However, this prediction draws not just on past sensory experience but also on the assumption that future events will bear the same regularity as past events. Hume questions how we can know this “uniformity principle,” which guarantees that past sensory experience is a reliable guide to future sensory experience. He answers that we cannot: this uniformity principle is not a relation of ideas, since we can deny it without contradicting ourselves, and it is not a matter of fact, since it deals with future experience, not past experience.

By questioning our ability to rationally justify causation, Hume throws a great deal of rationalist metaphysics into doubt. Kant was impressed with Hume’s work but not entirely ready to abandon rationalism. The mature philosophy we find in Kant’s Critiques is his attempt to answer Hume’s skepticism. This answer generates what Kant calls a “Copernican revolution” in philosophy: both in morals and in metaphysics, Kant turns his philosophical eye inward, investigating or critiquing the powers of the human intellect itself. Instead of asking what we can know, Kant asks how we can know what we can know.

Kant’s influence has been immense. No philosopher since Kant has remained entirely untouched by his ideas. Even when the reaction to Kant is negative, he is the source of great inspiration. German idealism, which arose in the generation after Kant, draws heavily on Kant’s work even as it rejects some of his central ideas. Similarly, the tradition of analytic philosophy, which has dominated the English-speaking world for the past century, takes its start from Gottlob Frege’s criticisms of Kant.

Themes, Ideas, and Arguments

Philosophy as Critique

Kant’s three major volumes are entitled critiques, and his entire philosophy focuses on applying his critical method to philosophical problems. The correct method in philosophy, according to Kant, is not to speculate on the nature of the world around us but to perform a critique of our mental faculties, investigating what we can know, defining the limits of knowledge, and determining how the mental processes by which we make sense of the world affect what we know. This change in method represents what Kant calls a Copernican revolution in philosophy. Just as Copernicus turned astronomy on its head in the sixteenth century by arguing that the sun, not the earth, is the center of the solar system, Kant turns philosophy on its head by arguing that we will find the answers to our philosophical problems in an examination of our mental faculties rather than in metaphysical speculation about the universe around us. One part of this revolution is the suggestion that the mind is not a passive receptor but that it actively shapes our perception of reality. Another is a general shift, which remains to this day, from metaphysics toward epistemology. That is, the question of what reality actually consists of has become less central than the question of what we can know about reality and how we can know it.

The Philosophy of Transcendental Idealism

Kant’s emphasis on the role our mental faculties play in shaping our experience implies a sharp distinction between phenomena and noumena. Noumena are “things-in-themselves,” the reality that exists independent of our mind, whereas phenomena are appearances, reality as our mind makes sense of it. According to Kant, we can never know with certainty what is “out there.” Since all our knowledge of the external world is filtered through our mental faculties, we can know only the world that our mind presents to us. That is, all our knowledge is only knowledge of phenomena, and we must accept that noumena are fundamentally unknowable. Idealism is the name given to the various strands of philosophy that claim the world is made up primarily of mental ideas, not of physical things. Kant differs from many idealists in that he does not deny the existence of an external reality and does not even think that ideas are more fundamental than things. However, he argues that we can never transcend the limitations and the contextualization provided by our minds, so that the only reality we will ever know is the reality of phenomena.

The Category of the Synthetic A Priori

Kant inherits from Hume the problem of how we can infer necessary and universal truths from experience when all experience is by its nature contingent and particular. We actually experience individual sights and sounds and so on. We cannot “experience” a physical law or a relation of cause and effect. So if we cannot see, smell, or hear causation, how can we infer that some events cause others? Kant phrases this question more generally as the question of how synthetic a priori knowledge is possible. That is, how can we know things that are necessary and universal but not self-evident or definitional? Kant’s ingenious solution is that synthetic a priori knowledge is possible because our mental faculties organize experience according to certain categories so that these categories become necessary and universal features of our experience. For instance, we do not find causation in nature so much as we cannot not find causation in nature. It is a feature of the way our minds make sense of reality that we perceive causes and effects everywhere at work. For Kant, then, the category of the synthetic a priori is the key to explaining how we gain substantive knowledge about the world.

Deontological Ethics

Ethical theorists can be roughly divided into two camps: those who consider an action moral or immoral depending on the motive behind it and those who consider an action moral or immoral depending on the consequences it produces. Kant is firmly in the former camp, making him a deontologist rather than a consequentialist when it comes to ethics. (The word deontology derives from the Greek roots deon, “duty,” and logos, “science.”) Kant argues that we are subject to moral judgment because we are able to deliberate and give reasons for our actions, so moral judgment should be directed at our reasons for acting. While we can and should take some care to ensure that our actions produce good consequences, the consequences of our actions are not themselves subject to our reason, so our reason is not fully responsible for the consequences of the actions it endorses. Reason can only be held responsible for endorsing certain actions, and so it is only the actions, and the motives behind them, that are open to moral judgment.

The Ethics of Autonomy

Every theory of ethics must give an answer to the question “Or else what?” That is, we must be able to explain why good is good and bad is bad. Christians answer the “Or else what?” question with the threat of eternal damnation, while Utilitarians answer that, since happiness is the greatest good, bad actions produce unhappiness, and unhappiness is bad in and of itself. Kant, by contrast, argues that since reason is the source of morality, goodness and badness should be dictated by reason. To act badly, according to Kant, is to violate the maxims laid out by one’s reason, or to formulate maxims that one could not consistently will as universal laws. In other words, immorality is a form of irrationality: badness results from violating the laws of reason. According to Kant, our rationality is what makes us human, so by acting irrationally, and hence immorally, we also compromise our humanity. Kant’s answer to the question “Or else what?” is that we diminish ourselves as rational human beings by acting immorally. Only by behaving rationally do we show ourselves to be autonomous beings, in control of the passions and appetites that might lead us to act against our better judgment.

Critique of Pure Reason and Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics

Summary

Kant published the Critique of Pure Reason in 1781. It is very long and almost unreadable due to its dry prose and complex terminology. Kant tried to ease his readers’ confusion by publishing the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics two years later. While it is hardly a page-turner, the Prolegomena is much briefer than the Critique and much more accessible in style, making it a valuable entry point to Kant’s metaphysics and epistemology.

Kant’s primary aim is to determine the limits and scope of pure reason. That is, he wants to know what reason alone can determine without the help of the senses or any other faculties. Metaphysicians make grand claims about the nature of reality based on pure reason alone, but these claims often conflict with one another. Furthermore, Kant is prompted by Hume’s skepticism to doubt the very possibility of metaphysics.

Kant draws two important distinctions: between a priori and a posteriori knowledge and between analytic and synthetic judgments. A posteriori knowledge is the particular knowledge we gain from experience, and a priori knowledge is the necessary and universal knowledge we have independent of experience, such as our knowledge of mathematics. In an analytic judgment, the concept in the predicate is contained in the concept in the subject, as, for instance, in the judgment, “a bachelor is an unmarried man.” (In this context, predicate refers to whatever is being said about the subject of the sentence—for instance, “is an unmarried man.”) In a synthetic judgment, the predicate concept contains information not contained in the subject concept, and so a synthetic judgment is informative rather than just definitional. Typically, we associate a posteriori knowledge with synthetic judgments and a priori knowledge with analytic judgments. For instance, the judgment “all swans are white” is synthetic because whiteness is not a part of the concept of “swan” (a black swan would still be a swan even though it isn’t white), but it is also a posteriori because we can only find out if all swans are white from experience.

Kant argues that mathematics and the principles of science contain synthetic a priori knowledge. For example, “7 + 5 = 12” is a priori because it is a necessary and universal truth we know independent of experience, and it is synthetic because the concept of “12” is not contained in the concept of “7 + 5.” Kant argues that the same is true for scientific principles such as, “for every action there is an equal an opposite reaction”: because it is universally applicable, it must be a priori knowledge, since a posteriori knowledge only tells us about particular experiences.

The fact that we are capable of synthetic a priori knowledge suggests that pure reason is capable of knowing important truths. However, Kant does not follow rationalist metaphysics in asserting that pure reason has the power to grasp the mysteries of the universe. Instead, he suggests that much of what we consider to be reality is shaped by the perceiving mind. The mind, according to Kant, does not passively receive information provided by the senses. Rather, it actively shapes and makes sense of that information. If all the events in our experience take place in time, that is because our mind arranges sensory experience in a temporal progression, and if we perceive that some events cause other events, that is because our mind makes sense of events in terms of cause and effect. Kant’s argument has a certain parallel to the fact that a person wearing blue-tinted sunglasses sees everything in a bluish light: according to Kant, the mind wears unremovable time-tinted and causation-tinted sunglasses, so that all our experience necessarily takes place in time and obeys the laws of causation.

Time and space, Kant argues, are pure intuitions of our faculty of sensibility, and concepts of physics such as causation and inertia are pure intuitions of our faculty of understanding. Sensory experience only makes sense because our faculty of sensibility processes it, organizing it according to our intuitions of time and space. These intuitions are the source of mathematics: our number sense comes from our intuition of successive moments in time, and geometry comes from our intuition of space. Events that take place in space and time would still be a meaningless jumble if it were not for our faculty of understanding, which organizes experience according to the concepts, like causation, which form the principles of natural science.

If time and space, among other things, are constructs of the mind, we might wonder what is actually “out there,” independent of our minds. Kant answers that we cannot know for certain. Our senses react to stimuli that come from outside the mind, but we only have knowledge of how they appear to us once they have been processed by our faculties of sensibility and understanding. Kant calls the stimuli “things-in-themselves” and says we can have no certain knowledge about their nature. He distinguishes sharply between the world of noumena, which is the world of things-in-themselves, and the world of phenomena, which is the world as it appears to our minds.

After giving what he considers a satisfactory account of how synthetic a priori knowledge makes mathematics and science possible, Kant turns to metaphysics. Metaphysics relies on the faculty of reason, which does not shape our experience in the way that our faculties of sensibility and understanding do, but rather it helps us reason independent of experience. The mistake metaphysicians typically make is to apply reason to things in themselves and try to understand matters beyond reason’s grasp. Such attempts tend to lead reason into contradiction and confusion. Kant redefines the role of metaphysics as a critique of pure reason. That is, the role of reason is to understand itself, to explore the powers and the limits of reason. We are incapable of knowing anything certain about things-in-themselves, but we can develop a clearer sense of what and how we can know by examining intensively the various faculties and activities of the mind.

Analysis

In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant achieves a synthesis between the competing traditions of rationalism and empiricism. From rationalism, he draws the idea that pure reason is capable of significant knowledge but rejects the idea that pure reason can tell us anything about things-in-themselves. From empiricism, he draws the idea that knowledge is essentially knowledge from experience but rejects the idea that we can infer no necessary and universal truths from experience, which is Hume’s conclusion. As a result, he avoids the metaphysical speculations of the rationalists, for which any definite proof seems unattainable but maintains the rationalists’ ambitious agenda, which attempts to give some answer to the sorts of questions that inevitably occur when we think philosophically. By locating the answers to metaphysical questions not in the external world but in a critique of human reason, Kant provides clear boundaries for metaphysical speculation and maintains a sensible, empirical approach to our knowledge of the external world.

Kant achieves what he calls a Copernican revolution in philosophy by turning the focus of philosophy from metaphysical speculation about the nature of reality to a critical examination of the nature of the thinking and perceiving mind. In effect, Kant tells us that reality is a joint creation of external reality and the human mind and that it is only regarding the latter that we can acquire any certain knowledge. Kant challenges the assumption that the mind is a blank slate or a neutral receptor of stimuli from the surrounding world. The mind does not simply receive information, according to Kant; it also gives that information shape. Knowledge, then, is not something that exists in the outside world and is then poured into an open mind like milk into a cup. Rather, knowledge is something created by the mind by filtering sensations through our various mental faculties. Because these faculties determine the shape that all knowledge takes, we can only grasp what knowledge, and hence truth, is in its most general form if we grasp how these faculties inform our experience.

The lynchpin to Kant’s critical philosophy is his category of the synthetic a priori. Although distinctions similar to Kant’s a priori–a posteriori distinction and his synthetic–analytic distinction have been made by thinkers such as Hume and Leibniz, Kant is the first to apply two such distinctions to generate a third category for knowledge. Hume, for instance, does not distinguish between what Kant calls the analytic and the a priori and what he calls the synthetic and the a posteriori, so that, for Hume, all synthetic judgments are necessarily a posteriori. Since only a priori truths have the important qualities of being universal and necessary, all general truths about reality—as opposed to particular observations about unconnected events—must be a priori. If our a priori knowledge is limited to definitional analytic judgments, then Hume is right in concluding that rationally justified knowledge of universal and necessary truths is impossible. Kant’s coup comes in determining that synthetic judgments can also be a priori. He shows that mathematics and scientific principles are neither analytic nor a posteriori, and he provides an explanation for the category of the synthetic a priori by arguing that our mental faculties shape our experience.

Kant differs from his rationalist predecessors by claiming that pure reason can discern the form, but not the content, of reality. Rationalists, such as Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz, speculated about the nature of time, space, causation, God, and the universe, and they believed at least on some level that they could come up with relatively confident answers through the exercise of pure reason. Kant, who was educated in this tradition, argues that his predecessors have not given any clear grounding for their metaphysical speculation, but that is because they assume that time, space, causation, and the like are the content of an external reality that the mind must reach out and grasp. Kant turns this assumption on its head, suggesting that time, space, and causation are not found in experience but are instead the form the mind gives to experience. We can grasp the nature of time, space, and causation not because pure reason has some insight into the nature of reality but because pure reason has some insight into the nature of our own mental faculties.

Kant has earned the great compliment of having detractors who criticize him with great insight and ingenuity. German idealism, which dominated nineteenth-century philosophy, finds its footing by attacking Kant’s conception of things-in-themselves. Idealists such as Hegel argue that there is something deeply suspicious about these mysterious entities, which Kant claims are the source of our sensations while claiming we can have no direct knowledge of them. Idealism jettisons things-in-themselves and the whole noumenal realm, arguing instead that reality consists primarily of mental phenomena. Analytic philosophy, which is one of the leading schools of twentieth-century philosophy, also gets its start through an attack on Kant. The logician Gottlob Frege criticizes Kant for basing the analytic–synthetic distinction on the subject-predicate form of grammar, which is not a necessary feature of the logical structure of language or reality. Frege argues that we should base the analytic–synthetic distinction on whether we justify a given judgment by appealing to its logical form or to empirical investigation and that, according to this distinction, the category of the synthetic a priori becomes unnecessary. Kant is only able to argue that geometry, for instance, relies on synthetic a priori knowledge because he fails to distinguish between pure geometry—the stuff of mathematical axioms and proofs—and empirical geometry—the application of geometrical principles to science. Pure geometry is a priori, but it is also analytic, since it is justified according to logical principles alone. Empirical geometry is synthetic, but it is also a posteriori, since we only learn from experience what sort of geometry applies to the real world.

Critique of Practical Reason and Groundwork for the Metaphysic of Morals

Summary

Groundwork for the Metaphysic of Morals, published in 1785, is Kant’s first major work in ethics. Like the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, the Groundwork is the short and easy-to-read version of what Kant deals with at greater length and complexity in his Critique. The Critique of Practical Reason, published three years later, contains greater detail than the Groundwork and differs from it on some points—in the Critique of Practical Reason, for instance, Kant places greater emphasis on ends and not just on motives—but this summary and analysis will cover only the general points of Kant’s ethics, which both his major works share in common.

Morality applies to all rational beings, and a moral action is defined as one that is determined by reason, not by our sensual impulses. Because an action is moral on account of its being reasoned, the moral worth of an action is determined by its motive, or the reason behind the action, not by its consequences. We can determine the worth of the motive behind any given moral action by asking whether we could turn that motive into a universally applicable maxim. Reason is the same at all times and for all people, so morality too should be universal. Therefore, an action is moral only if it embodies a maxim that we could will to be a universal law.

Kant calls it a “categorical imperative” that we must act in such a way that we could will the maxim according to which we act to be a universal law. He contrasts this with the “hypothetical imperative,” which would demand that we act to achieve certain ends. The maxim of a hypothetical imperative would assert, “do such-and-such if you want to achieve such-and-such result.” There are no ifs in moral action, according to Kant. Morality works according to a categorical imperative because we must act in a given way simply because the motive is admirable, not because we have calculated that we can achieve certain ends as a result.

Once we recognize the universality of moral law, we must also recognize that it applies equally to all people. Acting morally, then, requires that we recognize other people as moral agents and always treat them as ends in themselves, not as means by which we can achieve our own ends. We must also ensure that our actions do not prevent other people from acting in accordance with moral law. Kant envisions an ideal society as a “kingdom of ends,” in which people are at once both the authors and the subjects of the laws they obey.

Morality is based in the concept of freedom, or autonomy. Someone with a free, or autonomous, will does not simply act but is able to reflect and decide whether to act in a given way. This act of deliberation distinguishes an autonomous will from a heteronomous will. In deliberating, we act according to a law we ourselves dictate, not according to the dictates of passion or impulse. We can claim to have an autonomous will even if we act always according to universal moral laws or maxims because we submit to these laws upon rational reflection.

Kant answers the tricky question of free will and determinism—how can we at once assert that we have a free will and that we live in a world that functions according to necessary physical laws?—by drawing on his distinction from the Critique of Pure Reason between the phenomenal world of appearances and the noumenal world of things-in-themselves. Physical laws apply only to appearances, whereas the will is a thing-in-itself about which we have no direct knowledge. Whether the will is actually free we can never know, but we still act in accordance with the idea of freedom.

Analysis

In Kantian ethics, reason is not only the source of morality, it is also the measure of the moral worth of an action. Like some of his predecessors, Kant recognizes that our status as moral beings follows from our status as rational beings. That is, our actions can be considered moral or immoral to the extent that they are reasoned. However, in saying that rational decisions are open to moral judgment, we have not determined the grounds on which we should judge them. Many of the ethical theorists who preceded Kant attempt to ground moral judgment in the law of God or of a sovereign monarch. Kant recognizes that grounding morality in an externally imposed law compromises the autonomy of the will: in such a case, we act under a feeling of compulsion to a will that is not our own, and so we are not entirely accountable for our actions. We act autonomously only if we act in accordance with a law dictated by our own reason. While earlier philosophers recognize that rationality is the source of morality, Kant is the first to argue that reason also provides the standard by which we make moral evaluations.

Kant’s ethics is the most influential expression of an approach to ethics known as deontology, which is often contrasted with consequentialism. The distinctive feature of deontology is that it approves or disapproves of actions in and of themselves. For instance, according to Kant, lying is always wrong because we cannot will it as a universal maxim that lying is okay. The consequentialist view, by contrast, argues that moral value lies not in our actions but in their consequences. The utilitarianism of John Stuart Mill is one of the most influential forms of consequentialist ethics. Mill argues that we should always aim at ensuring the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people and that, for instance, telling a lie in particular consequences is good if telling that lie produces good consequences. The consequentialist view has the intuitive appeal that we presumably determine that actions are good or not depending on the effect they actually have. However, a Kantian would argue against this view, pointing out that we have full control only over our motives, not the consequences of our actions, so our autonomous will can only approve or disapprove of motives. An ethics that focuses on consequences, then, is not based in the autonomy of the will.

Kantian ethics rely on a universalist conception of reason and morality that is characteristic of the Enlightenment. Kant is quite clear that his ethics apply equally to all people. We can only consider an action moral if we could will that it apply as a universal law to everyone, and we should aspire to a “kingdom of ends,” in which everyone is both author and subject to the moral laws dictated by reason. This conception of morality was first questioned by Hegel, who argued that morality varies depending on cultural and historical circumstances, and moral relativism has become a foundation stone of the postmodern worldview. A postmodernist critique of Kant would suggest that Kant is insufficiently sensitive to the great variety of individual experience and that it is paternalistic, if not arrogant, to assume that one can apply one’s own moral standards to peoples and cultures of which one has no understanding. A Kantian would reply that Kantian ethics are based in a shared humanity that applies to all people. Certainly, we adopt different practical identities, such that we might hold different values depending on whether we identify, say, as a Canadian, a postal worker, or a jazz aficionado. However, Kantian ethics are based not on these particular practical identities but on our shared identity as rational beings, which we cannot revoke without revoking our humanity.

Critique of Judgment

Summary

The Critique of Judgment, often called the Third Critique, does not have as clear a focus as the first two critiques. In broad outline, Kant sets about examining our faculty of judgment, which leads him down a number of divergent paths. While the Critique of Judgment deals with matters related to science and teleology, it is most remembered for what Kant has to say about aesthetics.

Kant calls aesthetic judgments “judgments of taste” and remarks that, though they are based in an individual’s subjective feelings, they also claim universal validity. Our feelings about beauty differ from our feelings about pleasure and moral goodness in that they are disinterested. We seek to possess pleasurable objects, and we seek to promote moral goodness, but we simply appreciate beauty without feeling driven to find some use for it. Judgments of taste are universal because they are disinterested: our individual wants and needs do not come into play when appreciating beauty, so our aesthetic response applies universally. Aesthetic pleasure comes from the free play between the imagination and understanding when perceiving an object.

Kant distinguishes the beautiful from the sublime. While the appeal of beautiful objects is immediately apparent, the sublime holds an air of mystery and ineffability. While a Greek statue or a pretty flower is beautiful, the movement of storm clouds or a massive building is sublime: they are, in a sense, too great to get our heads around. Kant argues that our sense of the sublime is connected with our faculty of reason, which has ideas of absolute totality and absolute freedom. While storm clouds or a massive building might stretch our minds, they are nothing compared with reason’s ideas of absolute totality and freedom. Apprehending sublime objects puts us in touch with these ideas of reason, so that sublimity resides not in sublime objects but in reason itself.

In a second part of the book, Kant wrestles with the concept of teleology, the idea that something has an end, or purpose. Teleology falls somewhere between science and theology, and Kant argues that the concept is useful in scientific work even though we would be wrong to assume that teleological principles are actually at work in nature.

Analysis

While much of what Kant writes about aesthetics might strike us now as a bit dated, his work is historically very significant. Kant’s Third Critique is one of the early works in the field of aesthetics and one of the most important treatises on the subject ever written. Aesthetics differs from literary criticism and art criticism, which have existed for millennia, in that it attempts to explain not only why things are or are not beautiful but also the concept of beauty and how the perception of beauty arises in us. Kant takes on the considerable task of making room for the concepts of the beautiful and the sublime in the complex account of the mind he gives in his first two Critiques. Unfortunately for Kant, the success of this project can be understood only in the context of his complex and abstruse philosophical system, while its failures are immediately apparent. The close relationship between art and politics, which became clear in the twentieth century, casts doubt on Kant’s assertion that our response to art is disinterested, and his claim that our sense of beauty is universal makes less sense in a world in which we are exposed to the diversity of artistic products of different cultures. Although his work continues to influence work in aesthetics, Kant falls victim to the same problem that touches everyone who tries to make general claims about art: the very concept of art has great historical fluidity so that we can never nail down for all time exactly what it is.

Kant’s account of beauty as based in subjective feeling as well as his struggles with teleology stem from his desire to refute all metaphysical proofs of God. Kant is by no means an atheist, and he makes forceful arguments for why we ought to believe in God. However, God is the ultimate thing-in-itself, and so, according to Kant’s epistemology, the nature and even the existence of God are fundamentally unknowable. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant provides refutations for all the main “proofs” of God’s existence, one of which is the Argument from Design. According to this argument, the patterns and formal perfection in nature suggest the presence of an intelligent designer. Kant argues that our judgment of beauty is a subjective feeling, even though it possesses universal validity, in part because arguing that beauty is objective would play into the hands of those who make the Argument from Design. If beauty were an objective property of certain objects in nature, the question would naturally arise of how these objects were bestowed with beauty. This question would provide a toehold for the Argument from Design, an outcome that Kant is determined to avoid.

Questions on Beliefs -- Answers

1. Which of the following are a priori beliefs, and which of the following are a posteriori?

* Vancouver is smaller than Montreal.

Ø  a posteriori: evidence required (observation; map; pop. figures)

* Four orcas and two humpbacks swimming together are six animals.

Ø  a priori: 4 + 2 = 6 can be reasoned; we know orcas & humpbacks are animals

* Ottawa is between Montreal and Vancouver.

Ø  a posteriori: evidence required (observation through travelling; a map)

* If Vancouver is west of Ottawa, and Montreal is east of Ottawa, then Montreal is east of Vancouver.

Ø  a priori: reason alone sufficient as long as we can agree the terms are consistent

* Vancouver, Ottawa and Montreal are in Canada.

Ø  a posteriori: evidence required through experience

2. Kant came up with (what he thought) were some fixed beliefs common to all people. List three of them and come up with one of your own.

Ø  Arithmetical and geometric propositions

Ø  Belief that all events have a cause

Ø  People and objects persist through time

5. Which of the four statements below is/are a re-statement of Kant's views, and which is/are a re-statement of Quine?

1.      There are beliefs which at any time are at the centre of belief of any person. 

Ø  KANT (beliefs are constant across time)

2.  Given a person and a time, there must be beliefs which are not only at the          centre of that person's beliefs but of any other person's too.

Ø  KANT (beliefs are constant across people)

3. Given a person and a time, there must be beliefs which are at the centre of that person's web of belief at that time.

Ø  KANT and QUINE (Quine, however, would say the beliefs vary by time; Kant would argue that these beliefs are constant)

4. There are beliefs which are at the centre of any person's web of belief at a given             time, and given a different time or a different person there are beliefs which   are       at the centre of the web for that person and that time too.

Ø  QUINE

Interview in Ministry

Bro. Mark Ormond S.M.

Balaswamy

Date: 12/11/2010

Interview on Ministry

Always there is a possibility of choosing wrong person for a right job through an interview. I feel that in any interview one must need to know proper questions those need to be asked for any job. If not, I feel that the interviewer choosing the wrong person for a right job.

Here, I would like to give you an impressive questionnaire that I would be probably going to ask the interviewee for a job in the Sumanahalli Centre in Bangalore where we treat leprosy patients and the Aids patients primarily.

In the beginning, when the interviewee comes, I would ask him to have his respective seat in the room, then to relax for a moment. With this kind of background I would like to start the interview. I would expect the interviewee to answer all the questions asked in the interview with his sincere effort for the job.

As we are the organization which is called as N.G.O (Non Governmental Organization), it is my duty to explain a little information about our organization and its aims and works for the betterment of the society. Since it is not a government organization, in the beginning itself, I would be glad to inform him about the main aspects of our organization like that of scale of payment which could be little or more lesser than the government pay scale.

I also would tell the interviewee if at all there is a need to do extra service hours in the job, he/she needs to be willingly accepted the situation according to its necessity as it is the social organization helping the Aids and Leprosy patients in the society. These are the main aspects which as an interviewer, I would like to begin by talking with the interviewee.

In this centre of Summanahalli, there is always a need for lot of commitment in all the areas of work. This commitment I want from the interviewee. First and foremost, I feel that interviewee should have a courageous heart to deal with the patients in the campus gently rather than treating them as patients. Interviewee needs to have studied M.S.W (Master of Social Work) which is a study closely related with the social work. I also would expect some kind of nursing course that an interviewee may have done before applying for this job as a special coordinator of this organization.

In case, if there are no proper people in time of emergency, one should know how to treat the wounds of the Leprosy patient or health condition of the Aids patient. It is always a necessary concern for this job that one needs to have learnt how to attend the wounds of the patients. I feel, nursing course would give certain criteria of how to deal with the medical situation of the patients in times of emergency.

Besides, these qualities, I also would ask him/her married status. I feel, it is necessary to know the interviewee background before offering him/her a job in our organization. It is always very helpful if a person is not married. It is because once the person is married, it is always danger for these kinds of jobs as they would feel not to move more closely to the patients it may be because of the force of family or of any self interests. I understand that if a person is married, he would be filled with many responsibilities and problems within the family and even from outside of the family. Like this situation is not suitable for the job of coordinator in our organization. We expect that a person needs to dedicate his whole self that is to say his total interests in doing the job perfectly during the work time rather than just thinking and planning programs for the family.

I also ask him/her to submit their doctor certificate before applying for the job. It is very important for the job to be free from all the sicknesses. In our organization, the job of a coordinator demands an active participation when one is in duty. So, I think the doctor certificate would help us to know the physical conditions of the interviewee before getting into the interview. As a coordinator, I would expect the interviewee, to have capacity to organize social awareness programs in all the areas of human life. One needs to be creative in thinking and planning in organizing different kinds of programs within the centre for the patients and also the awareness programs in all the corners of the society. I expect the interviewee to have these skills of organizing these events in the schools and the colleges besides in our campus.

As a chairman of this centre of Summanahalli, I would expect the interviewee to relate with the other staff more gently so that as a coordinator he could keep the atmosphere of the campus more peaceful. For this purpose, I would look qualities of patience, humility and respect towards other individuals. I do not expect a person who is short tempered, aggressive to come to this work as a coordinator.

I also would look for a person who would be willing to stay in our centre and do his/her job all the time. I mean to say that like these kinds of jobs we provide accommodation facilities for the coordinator. The primary thought is that when he stays in our centre, he would be expected to attend the needs of the patients even in the times of emergency.

Thus, as an interviewer, it is my utmost responsibility to make sure I pick up right person for the post of coordinator in our centre. I feel that some of the expectations of mine which are addressed above are more useful to pick a right person to this post of coordinator. In all the ways of life, conducting an interview is a tough task, it is because the post for a job always determines either the growth of the particular organization or it may cause the destruction of a particular organization. If we choose a wrong person for a post I expect in my organization the damage of the care centre would be much more than just not having anyone for that particular post in my organization. So, the interviewee must a choice of good opinion and honestly making a sincere effort in taking the level of the organization to a new level or to the new heights in the society.