The Scottish philosopher David Hume produced a description and analysis of the relation of cause and effect and our use of it in reasoning about matters of fact. Hume’s analysis was able to wake the Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) from his so called dogmatic slumber. From the awakening of Kant comes the questions Why did Hume’s arguments wake Kant from his dogmatic slumber? And what is Kant’s response to Hume’s analysis and how successful is Kant in his response to Hume? In Hume’s 1746 text An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. One important idea of Hume is that while the entire process of how multiple ideas relate to each other through the deductive logic. The effects and causes of these ideas are not discovered by deduction
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which was sleep based on an easy and comfortable state of resting on one's unexamined assump¬tions. As Kant writes in Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics (1783), “He demonstrated irrefutably that it was perfectly impossible for reason to think such a combination a priori and by means of concepts…We cannot at all see why, as consequence of the existence of one thing” (Kant, 662) No matter how complicated and though out a chain of a priori reasoning could be, it is unable to prove a causal connection which in this particular case would be experience. But Kant wants to respond to what he considers Hume’s skepticism. Kant’s response to Hume’s doubt that about experience helping us project the future, involves what Kant calls transcendental idealism. In his argument Kant makes the distinction between what one knows as a priori (prior to experience) knowledge and what they know as a posteriori (on the basis of experience). Any truths that one can know a priori are necessary and strictly universal, Kant tells us, while truths known a posteriori are contingent and therefore can change. (Kant, 668) So how then does Kant respond to Hume claim that there is no causal chain. An important part is that Kant’s response is part of a larger argument for his Transcendental idealism. One part of this larger argument is that there are judgments of experience and of
which was sleep based on an easy and comfortable state of resting on one's unexamined assump¬tions. As Kant writes in Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics (1783), “He demonstrated irrefutably that it was perfectly impossible for reason to think such a combination a priori and by means of concepts…We cannot at all see why, as consequence of the existence of one thing” (Kant, 662) No matter how complicated and though out a chain of a priori reasoning could be, it is unable to prove a causal connection which in this particular case would be experience. But Kant wants to respond to what he considers Hume’s skepticism. Kant’s response to Hume’s doubt that about experience helping us project the future, involves what Kant calls transcendental idealism. In his argument Kant makes the distinction between what one knows as a priori (prior to experience) knowledge and what they know as a posteriori (on the basis of experience). Any truths that one can know a priori are necessary and strictly universal, Kant tells us, while truths known a posteriori are contingent and therefore can change. (Kant, 668) So how then does Kant respond to Hume claim that there is no causal chain. An important part is that Kant’s response is part of a larger argument for his Transcendental idealism. One part of this larger argument is that there are judgments of experience and of