Abstract
Kant, in various parts of his treatment of causality, refers to determinism or the principle of sufficient reason as an inescapable principle. In fact, in the Second Analogy we find the elements to reconstruct a purely phenomenal determinism as a logical and tautological truth. I endeavour in this article to gather these elements into an organic theory of phenomenal causality and then show, in the third section, with a specific argument which I call the “paradox of phenomenal observation”, that this phenomenal determinism is the only rational approach to causality because any logico-reductivistic approach, such as the Humean one, would destroy the temporal order and so the very possibility to talk of a causal relation. I also believe that, all things said, Kant did not achieve a much greater comprehension of the problem than Hume did, in his theory of causality, for he did not free a phenomenal approach from the impasse of reductivism as his reflections on “simultaneous causation” and “vanishing quantities” indeed show, and this I will argue in Sect. 4 of this article.
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Notes
Reichenbach (1938, p. 356).
“In the [field of] appearance there is no difference of the real that is the smallest, just as in the magnitude of times there is no time that is the smallest.” Kant (1956, p. 231).
Kant (1956, p. 231).
Hume (1910, Sects. VI, VIII and X).
Kant (1956, p. 221).
See footnote 3.
See footnote 3.
Kant (1956, p. 125).
Hume (1910, Sect. IV, part I).
Kant (1956, B247).
Kant (1956, p. 223).
This a priori, a sort of innate idea is not the unlikely stuff that Locke believed it to be, but it will acquire a key role in cognitive science and in evolutionary psychology.
See footnote 11.
Hume (1910, Sect. VII, part II).
Ibid., part I.
Kant (1956, p. 230).
See footnote 14.
See Zubiri’s interpretation of causality as functionality: a primordial apprehension of reality that is prior to the level of logos or reason where Hume places our understanding of causal relations. Fowler (1999).
See Papa-Grimaldi (1998).
Kant (1956, pp. 227–228).
Ibid., p. 228).
Papa-Grimaldi (1996a).
Guyer talks of confusion where Kant introduces the problem of simultaneous causation, a confusion which he explains as rising from Kant simply losing sight of a given temporal order. We are going to see exactly what Kant’s “confusion” consists of, and that it is not so easily amendable as Guyer thinks. Guyer (1987, p. 262).
See footnote 21.
However, for historical purposes we can learn from his Master’s dissertation A Succinct Outline of Some Meditations on Fire exactly how he envisaged this phenomenon.
Papa-Grimaldi (1998, ch. 3).
See footnote 20.
Berkeley (1734, p. 1).
See Kant (1956, p. 125, Sect. I).
Guyer (1987, p. 262).
See footnote 21.
See my discussion of the “Theories of everything” in Papa-Grimaldi (1998).
References
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Guyer P (1987) Kant and the claims of knowledge. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, p 262
Hume D (1910) An enquiry concerning human understanding (Harvard Classics)
Kant I (1956) Immanuel Kant’s critique of pure reason tr. N. K. Smith. Macmillan & Co. Ltd., London
Papa-Grimaldi A (1996a) The paradox of phenomenal observation. J Br Soc Phenomenol, 27(3):294–312
Papa-Grimaldi A (1996b) Why mathematical solutions to Zeno’s paradoxes miss the point. Rev Metaphys 50:299–314
Papa-Grimaldi A (1998) Time and reality. Ashgate Publishing, Aldershot, Chap 3
Papa-Grimaldi A (2007) The presumption of movement. Axiomathes 17:137–154
Reichenbach H (1938) Experience and prediction. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, p 356
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Papa-Grimaldi, A. Temporal Relations vs. Logical Reduction: A Phenomenal Theory of Causality. Axiomathes 18, 339–358 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10516-008-9037-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10516-008-9037-0