Kant’s Transcendental Argument ; The Notion of Causality| Discussion

1. What is Hume’s argument against our ordinary view of causation/causality?

The notion of causality originates from the everyday observation of human activities during which the impact on one object leads to certain changes in another one. However, the numerous discussions on determinism have not resulted in the formation of a unified approach to the understanding of “cause” and “effect” terms, but only give rise to many interpretations. In particular, Hume tried to prove that causality as a necessary value for the objective generation of effect by certain cause cannot be detected through experience, where such phenomena as “force”, “coercion” or “necessity” are not observed (Moore and Bruder 128-129). Basically, human perception of causality is represented in nature through the regular sequence of similar events. In this way, the analytical regularity theory rising to Hume claims that event P is the cause of event C only in case a) both events P and C take place; b) event P takes place before event C; and c) a P-like event is always followed a C-like event.

At the same time, this theory is based on no less questionable terms of time and equation, and thus, according to Hume, our notion of causality goes far beyond our experience. This happens because every judgment about an individual situation of causality has a common nature (applied to all similar situations), but it is based on induction solely, which cannot be considered a form of a necessarily true conclusion able to justify the principle of universality (every phenomenon has a cause) and uniformity (the same causes constantly produce the same effects) (Moore and Bruder 128-129). And since the concept of causality cannot be grounded ontologically and logically, it only admits the psychological justification of why certain causal judgments are considered as true. As Hume marks (Moore and Bruder 138), the expectation of the usual sequence of events is just a feature of the human mind transferred to all natural laws, whereas the source of both knowledge and consciousness can only be found outside the human body, in its interaction with the world and other people.

2. What is Kant’s Transcendental Argument?

According to Kant, transcendental is all knowledge engaged not so much with objects as our way of cognizing them, since this knowledge should be possible a priori (Moore and Bruder 130). Thus, the transcendental approach method involves the switching of philosophical research to studying the human capacity of knowing, while positing that human knowledge contains a priori components. Here, Kant opposes the human way of knowing (discursive intellect) to the divine pattern (intuitive mind), which further implies that the obligatory first stage of knowledge is sensuality through which we perceive the external (transcendent) world as it is. The transcendental method thus can be defined as the ideal method of understanding things that is seeking to identify the conditions for the thinkability of certain empirical data. Formally, the structure of the transcendental argument is presented as (Moore and Bruder 132):

1. E (where E is some experimental fact);

2. P is a necessary condition for E (where P is a non-experienced (a priori) hypothesis);

3. Consequently, P.

In this way, Kant views metaphysics as a set of premises P for a set of physical data E, or, in other words, transcendental conditions for the given phenomena of consciousness, whereas the detection and investigation of the latter is namely the task of transcendental metaphysics. In particular, in his transcendental metaphysica generalis, Kant has significantly rethought Aristotelian categories referring space and time to a priori forms of senses, and offering to interpret rational categories not as properties (or predicates) of things, but as the characteristics of judgments about things. Thus, for instance, Kantian categories of quality and quantity characterize not an object itself, but are argued to by the parameters of logical judgment (Moore and Bruder 131-32; 139).

In this way, Kant’s transcendental argument treats categories and hypotheses as formal predicates, which are the characteristics of our logic-transcendental descriptions of the surrounding reality, similarly to how space and time are the formal characteristics of our way to observe objects. In whole, while David Hume argues that causes should be assumed from non-causal observations, Kant claims that the observers possess inborn assumptions about causes.

Works Cited:

Moore, Brooke Noel, and Kenneth Bruder. Philosophy: The Power of Ideas, 9th ed. McGraw-Hill Education, 2013. Print.

The terms offer and acceptance. (2016, May 17). Retrieved from

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"The terms offer and acceptance." freeessays.club, 17 May 2016.

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freeessays.club (2016) The terms offer and acceptance [Online].
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[Accessed: March 29, 2024]

"The terms offer and acceptance." freeessays.club, 17 May 2016

[Accessed: March 29, 2024]

"The terms offer and acceptance." freeessays.club, 17 May 2016

[Accessed: March 29, 2024]

"The terms offer and acceptance." freeessays.club, 17 May 2016

[Accessed: March 29, 2024]

"The terms offer and acceptance." freeessays.club, 17 May 2016

[Accessed: March 29, 2024]
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