Kant's 'Critique of Pure Reason' I (313-1-20)
Instructors
Axel Mueller
847/491-2558
Kresge 3-345
Meeting Info
Harris Hall L28: Mon, Wed 3:30PM - 4:50PM
Overview of class
This course provides a thorough reading of the conception of empirical knowledge laid out in the first part of Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason" (the Analytic). The seminar will also relate Kant's arguments to issues in more recent philosophical debates. E.g.: Kant qualified his philosophy as "transcendental idealism and empirical realism". According to Kant, it evades the choice between saying that we must have an unconceptualized access to reality in order to have factual knowledge (so that it is hard to say how we as concept-using knowers can know reality at all) on the one hand, and saying that the reality our factual knowledge represents is determined by our concepts (so that it is hard to say in what way reality is a mind-independent constraint on belief). Kant suggests that this is a non-issue if there is only one universal set of concepts constitutive of all (genuinely fact-enabling) human experience. But the course of scientific progress since reveals this as a big (and unfulfilled) IF: in light of the diversity of experience and of the sciences, it is not easy to insist that there is only one set of forms of all possible objects of experience, one set of categories to form judgments, one set of principles to form natural laws. But the impasse confronted in Kant's epistemological analysis persists --for each of the variegated forms. Can Kant's conception of experience and empirical knowledge still help us understand how we can claim to know mind-independent reality? Another example: Much of contemporary philosophy of mind centers on the question of the relation between mind and reality. Kant criticized all such attempts at founding factual knowledge on self-knowledge (which lead into "paralogisms") or knowledge of unconceptualised reality in itself (which lead to "antinomies"). His arguments compel realizing that both (reality as such and a directly present foundational 'inner' self) can't be objects of knowledge at all (=are non-objects). Does this dissolve the problems of mind and reality or rather make them cognitively insolvable?
Learning Objectives
Students will become familiar with one of the classic texts of the Western philosophical tradition. They will acquire conceptual, theoretical, epistemological abilities to analyze complex dependencies between basic commonsense assumptions about factual knowledge and their internal tensions. In doing so, the students' analytic, critical, but also their literary and imaginative capacities will be relied on but also expanded into previously uncharted terrain. Finally, it is hoped that students learn that and how insights in a historical text of a given tradition can matter to extremely contemporary issues (e.g. the distinction between real news and constructed pseudo-facts).
Evaluation Method
Participation in class and written work;
Writing requirements:
o Undergraduates: One midterm (+5p.) and one final paper (+10p.);
o Graduates: one final research paper (+15p.)
Class Materials (Required)
Immanuel Kant: Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Werner S Pluhar, Indianapolis: Hackett 1996. ISBN: 978-0872202573
Enrollment Requirements
Enrollment Requirements: Registration restricted to Undergraduate students only
Associated Classes
DIS - Locy Hall 213: Tues 1:00PM - 1:50PM
DIS - University Library 3370: Fri 12:00PM - 12:50PM