Dogmatism Vs Transcendentalism

Caro Clark

March 11, 201 6

Group I. Question 1.

Kant defines the term transcendental as, “all knowledge which is occupied not so much with objects as with the mode of our knowledge of objects in so far as this mode of knowledge is to be possible a priori.” (A12) Transcendental philosophy is not concerned with the nature of objects but only the understanding’s a priori knowledge, which passes judgment on the nature of things. Kant’s transcendental philosophy begins with his transcendental aesthetic, in which he demonstrates that all knowledge arising from the senses are possible only through the pure forms of intuition, space and time. These two forms of intuition allow synthetic a priori statements to be not only possible, but also necessary

They are on opposite ends of the spectrum of what can be known; the former overstepping the bounds of possible knowledge and the latter limiting the bounds of possible knowledge far too much. Dogmatists made claims that one could have a priori knowledge of things such as the existence of the soul after death, the existence of a Supreme Being, freedom, and morality based on concepts and confirmed in experience. They wrongly applied the concept of substance in asserting that the soul continued existence after death. From complexity of nature, they assumed the necessity of a higher being or prime mover. Dogmatism is not distinct from transcendental philosophy only for its misuse and misapplication of reason. Unlike Kant’s transcendentalism, it held that world, considered as independent of the human mind, could be known as a thing in itself. Skepticism rose to prominence in response to Hume’s theory of causation and assault on the possibility of all a priori knowledge. Skeptics believe that we cannot truly know anything. Whether the world exists independent of the human mind or is merely a construction of it is not of large importance to skeptics because we are unable to have knowledge of it either way. Transcendental philosophy provides a medium between these two extremes by claiming that we can have meaningful knowledge of the world but only as it appears to us, not as a thing in itself. It

Pure logic must contain only principles a priori and include nothing drawn from experience or of a psychological nature; whereas general logic doss include empirical principles, but only in regards to forms of thought, not their content. As Kant displayed in the transcendental aesthetic, there are pure intuitions and empirical intuitions (304-305, S 22). Mathematical propositions are pure intuitions, as they are not gleaned from experience and have strict universality. However, formal logic does not take into consideration the distinction between those intuitions that are pure and those that are empirical. It logic does not distinguish between pure and empirical forms of thought. Although pure logic is concerned with a priori knowledge, it includes a priori knowledge that is not transcendental. Transcendental refers only to the a priori possibility of knowledge or its a priori employment (A 56). Transcendental logic is necessary in Kant’s philosophy because unlike pure or general logic, it deals with the laws of understanding and reason as they relate a priori to objects (B 82). In this way, knowledge can be extended and the laws of understanding can be employed to objects of thought, allowing the truth or objectivity of the content to be known. As logic can be divided into two kinds, pure logic and applied logic, Kant’s transcendental logic also contains two divisions.