Cause, Category, and Command: An Introduction to Kant’s 1st and 2nd Critiques

Taught by Adam C. Jones (Acid Horizon Research Commons)

“Thoughts without content are empty; intuitions without concepts are blind.”

Despite being known primarily for his three Critiques, through which he carried out his so-called “Copernican Revolution” in philosophy, Immanuel Kant began this project relatively late in his career, at the age of 57. Prior to this turning point, Kant had built a substantial body of work in natural philosophy and speculative metaphysics.

Kant famously claimed to have been awakened from his “dogmatic slumbers” by the radical empiricism of David Hume. Hume’s skepticism cast doubt on the prevailing assumptions of scientific orthodoxy, most notably the idea that causality reflects a necessary connection given in experience rather than a habit formed through repeated observation.

Beginning with Hume’s challenge, this seminar charts the development of Kant’s critical project from the Critique of Pure Reason to the Critique of Practical Reason. We will follow Kant’s transcendental re-inscription of causality into the conditions of possible experience and examine how this concept is later extended into the domain of freedom and moral action. In doing so, Kant grants causal power not only to nature as it appears in experience, but also to the will, understood as capable of moral intervention within the world.

Course Objectives

Students will:

• analyse Hume’s scepticism regarding causality and his empiricist method, coming to an understanding of Kant’s need to refute it with the theory of transcendental idealism.

• develop their analysis of the key notions of Kant’s theory of the transcendental conditions of experience (the faculties and their determinations) and the limitations that they impose on speculative inferences and the application of abstract ideas in the generation of philosophical knowledge.

• further this understanding through an engagement with Kant’s notions of the regulative, rather than the constitutive, use of reason and his notion of the primacy of the practical.

• develop an approach to the problematic of the second Critique as a response to the first by means of the concept of causality, not as sceptically reformulated by Hume, but as an element of the transcendental logic of the understanding, applied under the auspices of the limits set forth by the first Critique and its regulative, practical focus when it comes to the development of philosophical principles.

Instructor Bio

Adam C. Jones is a co-host of the Acid Horizon podcast. His work engages Stirner, German Idealism, and contemporary continental thought.

Course Schedule

All sessions on Sundays at 10:00 AM EST / 3:00 PM GMT via Zoom

Session 1: Sunday, February 15th — The Empiricist Challenge: How Are Synthetic A Priori Judgments Possible?

Session 2: Sunday, February 22nd — An Introduction to Transcendental Logic

Session 3: Sunday, March 1st — The Subject and the Ends of Knowledge

Session 4: Sunday, March 8th — The Cause of Freedom

Students will receive permanent access to all recorded lectures, assigned readings, and supplementary discussion materials.