Kantian argument, conceptual capacities, and invulnerability

Barry Stroud

pp. 231-251

in: Paolo Parrini (ed), Kant and contemporary epistemology, Berlin, Springer, 1994

Abstract

Kant's transcendental philosophy was to be an exhaustive investigation of the necessary conditions of the possibility of thought and experience in general. And it was to proceed aprioricompletely independently of observation and empirical theory. Reason alone was to discover its own scope and limits; the conditions of its possible employment were to be "deduced" from thought and experience as they actually are. Any such enterprise could be expected to — and in that master's hands obviously did — yield lasting illumination of the enormous richness of interconnections among our various ways of thinking of ourselves and the world. Kant showed how and why in order to think certain kinds of thoughts, or to possess a certain kind of mental capacity, we must possess and exercise certain others, and then still others in turn. Human thought was thereby revealed as incredibly more complicated and much more of a piece than any atomistic picture of discrete impressions and ideas coming and going in the mind could possibly convey.

Cited authors

Kant Immanuel