Immanuel Kant's Response To David Hume

David Hume was one of the most influential philosophers of his time and continues to be mentioned and studies to this day. Almost equally as impressive was the response that philosopher Immanuel Kant had to his Inquiry of Human Understanding. Kant attempted to respond to Hume’s ideas and in this essay, I will identify the Hume’s beliefs behind the concepts such as cause, and effect and I will later defend Kant’s response to Hume. He raises points that leave his reader with a deeper understanding of his concept and explicitly outlines his beliefs on the concepts that Hume covers in his Human Inquiry.

One of the main concepts that Hume is known for is his idea of causality and the problem of induction. Hume believed that we can cannot prove …show more content…
Kant, to a certain extent, agrees with Hume in that cause and effect of you cannot have a sensory experience of two things that are linked together, is to say that the link between the two cannot be physically experienced. Kant also agrees with Hume on the aspect that they both believe that the mind automatically makes connections between experiences leading one to believe that one thing causes another even though they may be unrelated and unconnected. But Kant also added concepts to his work that we did not see in Hume’s writing such as his distinctions between the phenomenal and noumenal world as well as transcendental deduction and his beliefs on how our perception alter our world and free …show more content…
To Kant, the “world in itself” was the noumenal world and the world as you experience it is the phenomenal world. Kant believed that we see the world around us we organize the world using the concepts of time and space and cause and effect and because of this we cannot see the world without this way of organization. He concludes that the noumenal world is unknowable by us and the phenomenal world is the world as we see it by formatting it and imposing our experiences on it but also the way that we think about it. He believed that we could have thoughts of the things that we see and experience. Space and time are a form of our intuition and they are necessary for us to organize the world because we will also impose properties on objects and experiences such as where they are located or how we saw them and their physical properties such as color. He believed that we had to think of the world this way because that's the structure that our thoughts tend to have; we think of the world as substances that have properties. He also points out that we tend to think of the world in “if…. then” type of judgments and that from here our belief in causation happens; we organize the world in cause and effect