e that purpose. But the laws of physics and biology are not an illusion. So the category of causality must be something more than merely a psychological category.
[b] Explain Kant's argument in the Second Analogy, and how that argument can be construed as an answer to Hume.
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Everything that happens presupposes something which it follows in accordance with a rule.
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Or
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All alterations occur in accordance with the law of the connection of cause and effect.
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These two formulations of a causal necessity in observation of alterations in nature and a slight difference which some claim they represent will not be the subject of my attention here. I will rather focus on the proof and how it shows the necessity and the nature of Kant's causality opposed to Hume's concept of merely arbitrary one.
First Kant reminds that " All change (succession) of appearances is only alteration; for the arising or perishing of substance are not alterations of it, since the concept of alteration presupposes one and the same subject as existing with two opposed determinations, and thus as persisting "(B233).
Then, like Hume, he describes the observation of the process of alteration and grants: "I am ... only conscious that my imagination places one state before and the other after, not that one state precedes the other in the object; or, in other words, through the mere perception the objective relation of the appearances that are succeeding one another remains undetermined ".
Then he attempts to show what it means to be determined the actual determination of this cognition:
"Now in order for this to be cognized as determined, the relation between the two states must be thought in such a way that it is thereby necessarily determined which of them must be placed before and which after rather than vice versa. The concept, however, which caries a necessity of synthetic unity with it can only be a pure concept of understanding, which does not lie in the perception, and that is here the concept of the relation of cause and effect , the former of which determines the latter in time, as its consequence, and not as something that could merely precede in the imagination (or not even be perceived at all) ". (Remember, Hume said about two billiard balls, "I don't perceive the cause betwixt them "?) Therefore it is only because we subject the sequence of the appearances and thus all alterations to the law of causality that experience itself ... is possible; consequently they themselves, as objects of experience, are possible only in accordance with this law "(B234).
Further Kant expands on the subject and gives two contrasting examples of perception with and without causal determination. His perception of the ship's position downstream invariably follows the perception of its position upstream, and it is impossible that in apprehension of this appearance for the ship to be perceived otherwise. The necessity is present in this case of causal apperception. In the case of observing the house he is not obliged to observe parts of it in a certain predetermined order, because there is no causality involved here. Could Hume's theory account for such a difference?
I believe that Kant succeeded in his criticism of Hume's theory, which was also successfully criticized by Thomas Reid in his Common Sense philosophy.
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10. Explain Kant's "Copernican Revolution" in Metaphysics. Make clear what the problems were that led Kant to think such a "revolution" was required, and how Kant's new "Transcendental" metaphysics was supposed to solve those problems.
p> There were two major problems in metaphysics for Kant: the possibility of knowledge (Synthetic and a priori ) that transcends the bounds of experience and the problem of antinomies. Kant deals with both problems by reversing the usual way of viewing cognition and instead of thinking of our knowledge as conforming to a realm of objects, we think of objects as conforming to our way of knowing. Kant thinks that our knowledge is limited to phenomena, while noumena are thinkable but not actually knowable. The possibility of synthetic a priori knowledge of objects is explicable, because such objects must necessarily conform to the conditions under which they can become objects for us. The contradiction of antinomies arises from considering the spatio-temporal world as it were as it were the world of things-in-themselves. On Kant's account, when we reject that consideration, it can be seen that the phenomenal world is neither finite nor infinite and causal determinism (in nature) is reconcilable ...
