James R. Royse	PHIL 770 KANT Fall 2005, Thursday 7:00-9:45 PM, HUM 374

TEXT: Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, translated and edited by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

PLEASE NOTE: You must have this edition. We may from time to time look at other translations (especially that of Norman Kemp Smith), but the Guyer and Wood translation has many improvements over other translations, and we will take it as our standard in class.

BACKGROUND FOR THE COURSE: In his "General Introduction" to volume 1 of the edition of Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature by T. H. Green and T. H. Grose, Green provides a masterly survey and criticism of the empiricism of Locke and Hume. (Green himself was an objective idealist.) Along the way, he makes the following remark on Kant (p. 3):

Kant, reading Hume with the eyes of Leibnitz and Leibnitz with the eyes of Hume, was able to a great extent to rid himself of the presuppositions of both . . .

   This is a provocative and insightful way to approach Kant. To appreciate, or even to begin to understand, what Kant is up to, we need to be able to follow his reading, and so we need to know at least something of what he read in Hume and Leibniz. Of the two, Hume is the more important; indeed, Kant says that Hume awoke him from his "dogmatic slumber," and gives Hume the high praise of proceeding "quite consistently" from his premises (B127), mistaken though those premises were (in Kant's view).
   Essential background, accordingly, is Hume's An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. (This is what Kant knew of Hume; more or less the same ground is covered in Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Book 1.) Also essential is some knowledge of the tradition represented by Leibniz. The best background would probably be Leibniz's New Essays Concerning Human Understanding. (This work is a reply to Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. But Leibniz left it unpublished since Locke had died and was thus unable to respond.) The New Essays were published in 1765, shortly before Kant began working on the first Critique. In fact, Kant often has in mind the thought of Wolff, a follower of Leibniz. And indeed many of the relevant ideas found in the New Essays are common to Descartes and Spinoza as well, and can be lumped together as "rationalism." So, instead of (or along with) the New Essays, a good knowledge of Descartes or Spinoza would be useful. However, Kant's theory of space and time is best understood in the light of Leibniz's views, although (unfortunately) Leibniz's views on space and time are not systematically presented anywhere. For those views, I would recommend the Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence, which is generally a valuable resource for the contemporary controversies about space and time.
   Of course, a good overview of the history of modern philosophy (say the period from Bacon to Hegel) would be extremely useful. Let me emphasize that this course is not a beginning course in philosophy or in modern philosophy or even in Kant. (But it is not expected that anyone concerned will have a thorough knowledge of everything written from Bacon to Hegel.) For Kant in particular I would recommend as a minimum preparation studying the article on Kant in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and at least reading the chapters on Kant in Copleston's History of Philosophy or in some more or less comparable historical work.

Here are a couple of quotations of interest:

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), par. 193, pp. 205-6:

      Kant's joke.-- Kant wanted to prove, in a way that would dumfound
      the common man, that the common man was right: that was the secret
      joke of this soul. He wrote against the scholars in support of popular
      prejudice, but for scholars and not for the people.



Robert Paul Wolff, "Hume's Theory of Mental Activity," Philosophical Review 69 (1960) 289:

      To put the point in a sentence, Hume began the Treatise with the assumption
      that empirical knowledge could be explained by reference to the contents of the
      mind alone, and then made the profound discovery that it was the activity of the
      mind, rather than the nature of its contents, which accounted for all the puzzling
      features of empirical knowledge. This insight, which was so brilliantly exploited
      by Kant, and has become today a focus of attention through the studies of
      disposition terms and language habits, was used by Hume to clarify the nature of
      causal inference and to explain the origin of our concepts of material objects.

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