Send Me To Sleep | Kant (Voice Only)
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What were the two main philosophical camps before Kant’s era?
Hello, it's your host Andrew here. If you're enjoying Send Me To Sleep so far and you'd like to help support the show, the best way to do that is Send Me To Sleep Premium. Over there you'll get ad-free episodes as well as access to all of our bonus episodes. You can find a link to a seven-day free trial in the description notes. Thanks so much for listening and here's just a few ads before the show begins. So, in the time just before Immanuel Kant, European philosophers were divided broadly into two camps of thinking, I suppose. There was rationalism and empiricism. Rationalism would state that the facts of life, the facts of the universe, could be rationalized in some way. That there was no knowledge that couldn't in some way be worked out via some kind of internal logic that made sense.
And then empiricism would say that all things, in fact, all knowledge, that is to say, could only be discovered through the analysis of the world. So observing the world around us, measuring it, as it were, and taking conclusions from these measurements that we've taken. And David Hume, a Scottish philosopher at the time, pushed this into a slightly unnerving position, pushed empiricism, should I say, into an unnerving position, because what he then went on to say, or to observe, moreover, is that though we seem to claim that cause and effect is this reoccurring thing that happens uh in the world um cause and effect is the is the way in which things happen in the universe we never actually get to witness firsthand causation itself
which sounds like quite a strange thing, but when you really think about what Hume is trying to say there, you can understand that there is some truth in it. We see separate events happening, but there is no causation to point at. There is a, for example, billiard ball on a table that gets knocked forward and we watch the ball run forward.
How does Hume’s critique of causation challenge empirical science?
And we watch that ball hit into a second ball. And then we watch that second ball roll forward. And stitching those events together in our mind, we observe or we claim that there has been some cause and effect there, that there has been some kind of causation, that the first ball caused the second ball to move. But in actuality, all we're doing is taking separate instances and using our brain, which collects memories, to piece together those separate instances into an idea of what we have perceived reality to be. But the causation, as it were, only really exists in our mind. At any one time, there was never any causation to witness. It's not like it's a solid thing, not as solid as, say, the ball itself that knocked into the other one.
The causation, it would seem, appears very much to be a mental construct when viewed in this way. And this was something that Kant found very disturbing. He wrote at one point that this revelation of Hume's awoke him from his dogmatic slumber because he was before this a fervent believer in the causation of the universe, that causation was in fact a real thing. And he was disturbed so much by this because of the implications of this kind of revelation. Specifically, the implications relating to science. Because, of course, science is based in empiricism and awe. of its findings are based on measurements of cause and effect we see one thing happening that seems to cause another and so we will say that this thing that is happening through causation is a truth of the universe but if hume is correct and it is indeed true
that there really is no causation present in the universe and this is a mental structure, then certain things we have determined to be true because we have observed them are actually just things we rely upon based on expectation. Certainly, we have seen these things happen in a repeatable fashion, of course, because that is a large part of science. If you are to conduct an experiment, you wouldn't just do it once, you would do it many times, and of course... It would be reviewed by peers to see if they could also incur the same results, see if that same causal chain of events occurs, so that you can become a little bit more certain that this is a true thing.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What were the two main philosophical camps before Kant’s era?
0:00–3:01
2
How does Hume’s critique of causation challenge empirical science?
3:01–7:28
3
Why did Kant find Hume’s revelation about cause‑and‑effect disturbing?
7:28–11:28
4
What is Kant’s “Copernican Revolution” for the mind‑world relationship?
11:28–15:51
5
How does Kant distinguish between phenomena and noumena?
15:51–20:04
6
What moral principle does Kant’s categorical imperative propose?
20:04–24:55
7
How does Kant’s view of antinomies affect our understanding of the universe’s beginning?
24:55–30:13
8
What practical example illustrates Kant’s universal moral reasoning?
30:13–32:48