Kant's Summary Of The Critique Of Pure Reason

In the second analogy of The Critique of Pure Reason, Kant attempts to prove that all alternations or changes in a state, also mentioned as an occurrence, must necessarily follow the law of cause and effect. The proof of Kant’s analogy discusses aspects such as the necessity of time to distinguish events as well as the causes of the event, and an argument against skeptics of causality in the perceived world. In perception, among different appearances, we are able to notice that certain appearances ‘succeed’ or follow one another. This creates a relation between the two appearances in time, which is facilitated by our imagination (Kant, 304). This relation is referred to by Kant as “objective relation”, as the imagination only shows that one state was perceived before and another state after, but does not show

Hume’s views on causation stem from his own form of the distinctions between knowledge and belief, called “relations of ideas and matters of fact” (Morris, 2001). Relations of ideas are a priori and their truth can be determined simply by reason and does not depend on the existence of any particular thing. The example that is provided is: “The interior angles of a Euclidean triangle sum to 180 degrees” (2001). Simply by virtue of being a triangle, it is true that the interior angles must be 180 degrees, and does not require that a triangle exist naturally. On the other hand, matters of facts depend on the manner of the existent world. For matters of facts, their contraries are possible and to deny them is not to create a contradiction. The example of: “Miami is north of Boston” is false, but not a contradiction because it is seemingly possible that a city or town named “Miami” could exist north of a town or city called “Boston”, but currently does not, and we understand the statement and what it is saying