The Beach of Skepticism: Kant and Hume on the Practice of Philosophy and the Proper Bounds of Skepticism (original) (raw)

Sensibilism, Psychologism, and Kant's Debt to Hume

Kantian Review, 2011

Hume's account of causation is often regarded a challenge Kant must overcome if the Critical philosophy is to be successful. But from Kant's time to the present, Hume's denial of our ability to cognize supersensible objects, a denial that relies heavily on his account of causation, has also been regarded as a forerunner to Kant's critique of metaphysics. After identifying reasons for rejecting Wayne Waxman's recent account of Kant's debt to Hume, I present my own, more modest account of this debt, an account that seeks to unite the two very different pictures of Kant's relationship to Hume sketched above.

Hume's two views of modern scepticism

History of European Ideas, 2006

Hume's position in the history of philosophical scepticism can hardly be questioned. But the nature of his own philosophical scepticism is a matter of contention in both the historical and philosophical literatures. In this essay, I argue that a philosophical reconstruction of Hume's scepticism needs to pay attention to the way in which Hume and his contemporaries understood the place of sceptical thinking in the history of modern philosophy. When looked at in this context, Hume's philosophy of knowledge and the understanding is self-evidently sceptical. It is so, because it develops both a critical and a positive view of what a sceptical attitude implies. From a critical perspective, Hume aims to show that human reason is incapable of being its own foundation. From a more positive perspective, Hume sketches a phenomenology of the understanding by developing a probabilistic and self-referential view of philosophical knowledge, one which is not different from common knowledge and which relies on the workings of human nature and the imagination to make sense of the world and of our actions.

Kant and Skepticism, by Michael N. Forster

European Journal of Philosophy, 2010

This monograph's interpretive thesis is that Kant crafted a 'reformed metaphysics' intended to withstand two kinds of skepticism; its evaluative thesis is that this project ultimately failed to achieve its purpose. Forster distinguishes among three types of skepticism: 'veil of perception' skepticism, Humean skepticism, and Pyrrhonian skepticism. He opens by arguing, contra influential Anglophone readings of Kant, that veil of perception skepticism was only a peripheral concern of Kant's, touched upon in some pre-critical writings and confined in the First Critique to the Fourth Paralogism and the Refutation of Idealism-episodes which Forster also regards as 'among the weakest parts of the Critique' (p. 12). 1 Rather, what really motivated Kant's Critical Philosophy was, first, a crise pyrrhonienne, expressed in his Notice concerning the structure of Lectures in the Winter Semester 1765-1766 and in his Dreams of a Spirit Seer (1766), and later recounted in a 1789 letter to Garve, in which Kant realized that the quest for knowledge of a supersensible reality was doomed by 'equipollence problems' (showing that equally strong arguments can be given for contrary views), including but not limited to the canonical four antinomies; second, his encounter with Hume's empiricist treatment of causality, via the German translation of Beattie's Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth (which expounds Hume's views), reported by Kant in the famous Prolegomena 'reminder' passage. Forster argues that this encounter awoke Kant from a 'metaphysical snooze,' manifest in his Inaugural Dissertation of 1770, in which he had introduced the sensibility/understanding and the phenomena/noumena distinctions as well as his doctrine of the ideality of space and time, but nevertheless relapsed into 'the sweet [''dogmatic''] slumber of supersensuous metaphysics' (p. 23). This exposure to Hume, combined with Kant's own nascent worry about how a priori concepts can refer, expressed in his famous letter to Herz of February 21, 1772, finally led Kant to the rejection of supersensible metaphysics, as well as to the formulation of the authentic problems of the Critical Philosophy: how can a priori concepts like substance and cause refer, and how can non-analytic principles invoking such concepts be known a priori, even when these concepts

Skepticism in Kant's Groundwork

European Journal of Philosophy, 2014

This paper offers a new interpretation of Kant's relationship with skepticism in the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals. My position differs from commonly held views in the literature in two ways. On the one hand, I argue that Kant's relationship with skepticism is active and systematic (contrary to Hill, Wood, Rawls, Timmermann, and Allison). On the other hand, I argue that the kind of skepticism Kant is interested in does not speak to the philosophical tradition in any straightforward sense (contrary to Forster and Guyer). On my reading, Kant takes up a skeptical method in the Groundwork as a way of exposing certain obstacles in our ordinary and philosophical thinking about morality. The central obstacle he is interested in is practical in character, arising from a natural tendency we have to rationalize against the moral law. In attempting to resolve this tendency, I argue, the Groundwork turns out to have a profoundly educative task.