[Lecture Two] Modern Philosophy: Kant to the Present
by Dr. Leonard Peikoff
Total Time: 2 hours, 38 minutes
Course summary: Presented as two complementary twelve-lecture courses—Founders of Western Philosophy: Thales to Hume and Modern Philosophy: Kant to the Present—The History of Philosophy covers the whole of western philosophy from its discovery in Ancient Greece to the twentieth century, including Objectivism. Dr. Peikoff argues that philosophy is the means by which we can understand any human culture and, more broadly, the history and changing course of a civilization. Read more »
In this lecture: Dr. Peikoff explores the thought of Immanuel Kant and his attempt to save philosophy from the skepticism of David Hume. He describes the Copernican Revolution implemented by Kant in proposing the innate structures of the human mind that shape all knowledge, and thereby cut us off from reality. Peikoff explains Kant’s main argument and its crucial distinctions between analytic and synthetic truths.
Study Guide
This material is designed to help you digest the lecture content. You can also download below a PDF study guide for the entire course.
| Describe the two philosophic approaches to the question of whether reason can know reality in philosophy prior to Immanuel Kant. |
| Explain the distinction between necessary and contingent and how it relates to analytic and synthetic. |
| Why did Kant attempt to provide a solution to the question of a priori synthetic truths? |
| Explain the steps in Kant’s argument for innate structures of the human mind. |
| Why does Kant’s claim of defending objectivity result in subjectivism? |
| Explain how Kant attempts to prove the argument for a priori synthesis in the mind. |
| Why are space and time so important to Kant’s argument? |
| What is the Copernican Revolution at the heart of Kant’s account? |
Q&A Guide
Below is a list of questions from the audience taken from this lecture, along with (approximate) time stamps.
| 1:44:58 | Can you suggest any reading on Kant? Can you recommend a good history of philosophy? |
| 1:47:50 | Could you repeat Kant’s definition of objectivity? |
| 1:48:52 | By what means does Kant know that the mind’s syntheses are necessary? How would he answer the objection that the mind’s basic synthesizing activity might suddenly change? How does Kant establish necessity by his categories? How can he be sure that the mind won’t have different categories or even exist tomorrow? |
| 1:54:06 | Do the mind and its categories exist in the noumenal or the phenomenal world? |
| 1:56:36 | Kant began by acknowledging that we can at least know contingent facts of reality. How did he wind up believing that nothing can be known? |
| 1:58:20 | Why did Hume grant the validity of the concept of necessity in the realm of the relationships of ideas? |
| 2:00:18 | If Kant wishes to offer logical arguments in support of his critical philosophy, how can he discuss the existence of the noumenal world and support the assertion that it necessarily gives the raw material of our experience in the phenomenal world when such concepts as existence and necessity apply only to the phenomenal world and not to the relationship between the phenomenal world and the noumenal world? If the noumenal world is unknowable, how come Kant knows about it? |
| 2:05:58 | If Kant accepts the notion that the noumenal world exists independently of the content or a priori structure of consciousness, is this not an acceptance of the primacy of existence? |
| 2:07:08 | Wouldn’t analytical a posteriori truths have accomplished the same thing for Kant as synthetic a priori ones? |
| 2:08:49 | How does Kant reconcile the fact that individual humans’ processes of synthesizing — if these processes are universally structured — bring them to different conclusions about reality with his concept of objectivity? |
| 2:11:59 | Would Kant say that the experience of the same things-in-themselves are processed in the same way, or would he say that the synthetic mechanism arbitrarily processes any experience? |
| 2:14:03 | You said Kant still believed in God but that he had substituted collective human consciousness for God’s. So did Kant say “Man’s mind said ‘Let there be God,’ so there was”? |
| 2:15:28 | Did Aristotle have positive evidence to the effect that man’s mind at birth is tabula rasa or did he merely infer this to be true because no one could demonstrate the contrary? |
| 2:18:23 | If it were impossible to demonstrate in the light of anyone’s knowledge that the mind at birth is other than a blank sheet, would that alone be enough to justify the statement that man is born tabula rasa? |
| 2:19:25 | What schools of empiricism considered conceptualization valid and would therefore be able to claim that space can be observed? |
| 2:25:22 | What is Kant’s concept of identity? Is this one of his categories? |
| 2:31:09 | In the terms of his own theory, how can Kant propose his views as knowledge of what is? He claims that, because the mind itself contributes order to experience, it can never know what is the case independently of experience. Is he not making an exception of his own theory and claiming it as knowledge of what is the case? |
| 2:35:14 | Would Kant define synthesis as the mental, direct manipulation of raw sensory data? |