The Philosophy of Immanuel Kant: An Introduction (w/ Dr. Bob Hanna)

Join us for an in-depth discussion with Dr. Robert Hanna on Immanuel Kant's philosophy, covering transcendental idealism, the transcendental deduction, and free will. We explore key concepts from Critique of Pure Reason, including synthetic a priori knowledge, causality, and the limits of human understanding, as well as the distinction between noumenal and phenomenal reality. Dr. Hanna explains how Kant’s ideas revolutionized metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics, shaping modern philosophy. 

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• 28:24 (Cont.) The Philosophy of Immanuel Kant: An Introduction (w/ Dr. Bob Hanna)

Transcript

Hello, and welcome to this episode on the Philosophy for All podcast. Today, I am joined by Dr. Robert Hanna, who is an independent philosopher, the director of Philosophy Without Borders, and the contemporary Kantian philosophy project. I'm really looking forward to have Dr. Robert Hanna on, because he is a generalist who specializes in Kant, with specific influence This is an interest in philosophy of mind and knowledge, but also focuses on more practical philosophy as well, like social ethical philosophy. We're so grateful to have you on to talk about Kant because Kant is just one of these really wonderful and important thinkers. Dr. Hannah, how are you? I'm fine. Thank you. And thank you very much, Joshua, for inviting me. I should say just by way of a quick prefatory comment or a caveat that Kant's philosophy has been multiply and massively interpreted since the end of the eighteenth century and the whole libraries could be filled with, you know, texts on Kant's interpretation. And so the interpretation that I present is only one of these many. Now, of course, I happen to think it's the best interpretation, but that's my opinion and probably not shared by a great many others. So, yeah, so that that could be backgrounded against what I have to say. And there are particular parts of Kant's philosophy that remain. You'd think that Kantians would all agree on the basics, but they don't. And so there are parts of it that are deeply controversial. And I'll take stands on those controversial parts, which other choice points, which other philosophers, other Kantian philosophers might not take. Hmm. That's very fascinating. I think that is going to be a very helpful preface when we go into this discussion, especially because we're going to be covering quite a lot of hopefully views of this video would be able to from reading or watching this video, be able to help their further inquiry into current studies. and research and you talk about the influence of Kant. And this is one of the reasons why I was so excited to have you on is because of the influence that Kant has on modern philosophy. I was wondering what were some of the movements and debates that Kant was perhaps situated in and what was he kind of responding to? Well, Kant, as you know, is an eighteenth century philosopher. He was born in seventeen twenty four and died in eighteen oh four. So his life and his career spanned the extent of the eighteenth century. And I think it's true to say that during the latter part of Kant's lifetime, especially from seventeen eighty one, which was the publication of the critique of first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason through to the end of his life in eighteen oh four. He was the leading philosopher in Europe, and he, I think, permanently changed European philosophers and Anglo European philosophers views on various matters and influenced the tradition after Kant, which we now call post-Kantian philosophy, positively and negatively. And whether you agree with Kant or sort of agree with Kant, or you're a neo-Kantian, or you're an Orthodox Kantian, or you're a serious anti-Kantian, you're responding to the set of problems and you're working within the problem space that Kant set up. Now, the general problem space is, so in the eighteenth century, as you know, there was a gradual decline of religious authority. And there was, you know, the emergence of the new mechanistic science, and also a gradual decline of despotic authoritarian regimes and a gradual movement towards liberalism. And Kant was that Kant's philosophy and Kant himself, as you know, as a thinker, was in interaction with all those trends. Now the from the standpoint of the know canonical history of philosophy kant is positioned in any intro course you have about history of modern philosophy kant is positioned after at the end of the classical rationalist tradition descartes spinoza leibniz christian wolf if you're interested in the german side of it and classical empiricism locke berkeley and hume in particular and then he's he's always presented as criticizing the rationalists, criticizing the empiricists, and then providing a new conception of philosophy which fuses, as it were, the truth of rationalism and the truth of empiricism, but rejects the elements that he regarded as not standing rational scrutiny. In particular, what he thought was that the rationalist tradition which held that all cognition, knowledge, and truth is wholly determined independently of human sensory experience by the power of pure reason leads to a kind of reduction of knowledge, cognition, knowledge, and truth, such that it's focused on knowledge that's entirely apart from the world. And then so the question arises, well, and it all has to be necessarily true. So how could you ever account for, so, you know, here's a contingent claim. This is my critique of pure reason coffee cup. It might not have been here. It's just a contingent fact that it happens to be here now. But that's not a necessary truth. It didn't flow, as it were, from the very concept of a coffee cup. It didn't flow from God's mind or certainly doesn't seem to. And even if we did postulate a God, a divine being who could know and then create in accordance with his or her knowledge, we would have no insight, just because we're sensory, finite, embodied beings, we would have no insight into the nature of that being. And so the project of classical rationalism places us in a skeptical position. On the other hand, equally but oppositely, the empiricist tradition, which says there are nothing but these appearances, our knowledge and cognition and truth are never independent of experience, And so we can't account for what appear to be necessary truths in, say, logic, mathematics, philosophy, and even the natural sciences, as Kant believed. And there also is a tendency towards a reduction of all our evidence for claims to the standpoint of a single subject bombarded, passively bombarded by sensations caused by some object that we can't get access to. And so there's a tendency towards individual relativism. And even if you had a community of people who each of whom were individual and offered belief claims based on their sensory experience, there would tend to be a relativism of that community just because a community says that something is the case. It doesn't follow that it's the case. And even they couldn't, as a community, couldn't break out of the sensory appearances towards this mysterious object or set of objects or being that would be causing us to have these experiences. And so Kant said, it's true that there is necessary truth in a priori knowledge. It's true that there is contingent truth and a posteriori knowledge. And so that can be taken away from rationalism, but the way that the rationalists and the empiricists went about trying to establish their claims fail. And so what we need is some sort of fusion of the classical rationalists and the classical purists. That's definitely a very brilliant summary of, I guess, where Kant's first critique fits into this landscape of philosophy. How does Kant, I suppose, respond to these and how does he intend his first critique to, I guess, present a robust response to this debate? Yes. So he's working with a set of distinctions that were implicit in the tradition before him but had not been formulated in just the way that he formulates them. And this is the point at which typically undergraduates eyes glaze over and they become very bored by the whole subject matter, but it's useful to have the distinctions out. So there's a distinction between analytic propositions, which are true, as it were logically true in a broad sense of logic, which includes conceptual content and definitional content. They're true by virtue of definitional or conceptual content alone. And so the classic example is assuming we have a standard concept of a bachelor, that all bachelors are males or that all cats are animals. If they weren't animals, they couldn't be cats. If they weren't males, they couldn't be bachelors. And so it's trivial and they're empty. They're just spelling out the content of the concept versus synthetic propositions, which are not necessarily true whose denial is logically consistent and which are in some sense about the world. Kant also distinguishes between, and therefore they're empirical and contingent to some extent, or at least worldly. Then there's the other distinction between a priori and a posteriori, a priori independently of experience, where the experience independence needs to be spelled out in a way that doesn't make it, you know, impossible in the way that classical rationalists seem to think. And a posteriori, which means, you know, beginning an experience and possibly derived from experience. Now, that means that necessarily all analytic propositions, which are just true by their internally true by virtue of their conceptual content, their meaning are a priori. They're just known by reflection on the contents of or rather the contents of our beliefs. So there cannot be analytic a posteriori propositions. Synthetic a posteriori propositions are easy enough to see. So again, to come back to this cup, this is a cup, this is Bob Hanna's cup. That could have been true, could have been false. It's not necessary. It's not by virtue of the very notion of a cup that that's the case. And it's verified and justified, our beliefs in it are justified by sensory experience. Then there's the controversial class, the contested class of synthetic a priori propositions, namely propositions which are worldly, but also known or knowable independently of experience. And Kant's idea, Kant's claim, controversial claim, is that substantive fully meaningful philosophical propositions, particularly in metaphysics, but this is also true in practical philosophy and ethics, are true as synthetic a priori. They're not logically true, but they're true because they're somehow about the nature of the world and about the nature of us in a specific way that restricts them to a domain of possible worlds, not all logically possible worlds, but a special domain of possible worlds where the human standpoint is front and center. So you might say there are necessary truths about our nature in relation to the world we experience. So those synthetic necessary truths aren't about things as they might be altogether independently of our experience, altogether independently of the space and time that frame our experiences. If they were, They would be what Kant calls things in themselves, things whose nature is lonely. They could be cut off from everything else and in particular cut off from us and still exist. On the other hand, what we're aware of are appearances or phenomena, namely things that are what they are only in relation, actual and possible relation to us. And so what he thinks is that proper metaphysics, proper philosophy should be a reflection of on the conditions under which, expressible as synthetic a priori propositions, the conditions under which our experience is possible, our everyday, you know, synthetic a posteriori propositions are possible, the conditions under which, in particular, synthetic a priori propositions are possible. And then Kat highlights that as the theme of the first critique, although it sounds very scholastic if just presented that way. How could you write a whole eight hundred page book about how a certain kind of proposition is possible. But unpacking it, it's the idea of the very possibility of a metaphysics that doesn't fall under the skepticism of classical rationalism and doesn't fall into the skepticism of classical empiricism. And and then he also wants to explain how analytic a priori propositions are possible in such a way that they're not merely empty. Now, his his solution know to the problem is uh so looking back to the classical rationalists and the classical empiricists they both postulated that the mind was not fundamentally spontaneous and creative but rather passive you know recipient and then would operate only once it had been triggered by something outside itself in the case of the rationalists triggered by some abstract objects, perhaps living in platonic heaven or delivered to them directly by God, or in the case of the empiricists, passive in relation to sensory images and so on, and the collection and the piling up over time of these sensory images. And what Kant postulates is that all of our world as it's presented to us in phenomenal space and time necessarily conforms to the capacities we have for representing it and for understanding or perceiving that world. And then if that's the case, so that's the hypothesis. If that's the case, then we can reflect on those capacities, ask ourselves what the innate specification of those capacities are, and then it would have to be the case that the world contains those structures in conformity with the way our minds are set up. And so those two features are there, which is it's the phenomenal world or the apparent world that we're talking about. That's the real world. It's as real as it gets. And then the conformity of that world to us and our capacities makes it possible for us to reflect on the capacities, their contributions to the way we cognize and know the world. and then postulate synthetic a priori propositions that tell us about various aspects of the world independently of experience, but not so independently of experience that they're not already, you know, pre-connected as it were. The world is as it were pre-formatted for creatures like us. And then we're investigating the pre-formatting. And if we ask, how did the formatting get that way? There's no, It's just a primitive fact about it. So that's just the hypothesis that he's exploring. And then he hopes to be able to give a non-skeptical account of truth, a non-skeptical account of knowledge on the basis of that. And then the test, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Does it solve various philosophical problems? Yes. Then we can infer that it's a good or perhaps even the best explanation of the phenomena. and then go forward in philosophy and make progress in philosophy in that way. That's a really brilliant introduction into Kant's thought and what he is trying to do with his project. Now, one of the things that I think fits into that discussion, if we were to nail some aspects down a bit more, is a lot of people talk about Kant's first critique and his, I suppose, Copernican revolution in philosophy. Can you tell us a bit about how, I suppose, the framework that you've just discussed fits into that Copernican revolution. Yeah. Yeah. So the Copernican revolution is, so, um, you know, Copernicus switched from a helios, a rather, uh, geocentric standpoint to a heliocentric standpoint. And I think the crucial thing there is that it's a gestalt shift in the way we look at the world. I mean, there's a sort of disanalogy with Copernicus in the sense that Kant is saying that we should shift from, uh, either classical rationalist or empiricist standpoint to a transcendental idealist standpoint, which puts us front and center. But it's, again, a gestalt shift. And in any case, the gestalt shift in this sense is instead of assuming that our minds passively respond and conform to the way things outside it are, whether noumenal things or merely phenomenal things, we postulate instead that the world conforms to us. And so it's that, you know, that the Copernican revolution consists principally in what I'm calling the conformity thesis, together with the idealism thesis, which is that our knowledge and cognition are always and only of appearances or phenomena, never things in themselves or numerous. And perhaps can you talk a bit more about that picture of transcendental idealism and the distinction that he's making between the things in themselves and the phenomena? Yeah, so this is one of the most controversial parts, as you know, of Kant's philosophy and of Kantian philosophy more generally. And that is, so Kant says there is a distinction between objects conceived independently of any relation to human beings. sensory experience, and then objects that are only within human sensory experience and dependent. And that's, and you know, to that extent on it, the question is whether things in themselves actually exist. We can't know their nature, right? The only things we can know the natures of are things as they're presented to us in appearances and then our own minds. But the question is, do things in themselves really exist outside of us and cause, have mysterious causal powers of various kinds, things in themselves which might include God, as Kant says, the freedom of the will, immortality of the human soul, the existence of souls. Can they really be known and exist independently of us? And my take is we should be completely agnostic about that. In other words, we don't know enough about them. We can describe them in a minimal, you know, But we can't give them full flesh of, you know, the full flesh of empirical meaningfulness. And so we can't prove, you know, we can't know what their nature is and we can't prove that they exist or do not exist. And therefore we should remain fully agnostic. The result of the agnostic, I call that radical agnosticism. We know a priori that we can't know the nature of things in themselves or prove their existence one way or the other. or non-existence. Therefore, we should focus our metaphysics and focus our philosophical thinking on the things that we really can know, namely appearances, outer appearances, or inner appearances, the operations of our minds, and do philosophy, go forward in philosophy, using those as our starting points and as our checkpoints for evidence and so on. So on the other hand, People often think of Kant as a kind of indirect realist, postulates that noumena exist or things in themselves, that they cause us, even though we don't know how. But it seems to me that that leads to skepticism, since how could we know whether they exist or not if we don't even know enough about them to be able to, is this a thing in itself lurking around in my study? Couldn't say one way or the other. So we ought to, this is what I call methodological eliminativism about things in themselves is that we should just leave them out of account and focus on the things we actually can focus on. If that's done, then it makes it possible to say this is the real world, the manifestly real. So it doesn't degrade the world of appearances to say that they belong within human experiences, human experience. And so an appearance is you know, a veridical concept for me. I mean, there are illusions, but you can, you know, if you say it appears that there's a coffee cup in, you know, Bob Hannah's study, that's true. I mean, or, you know, if a detective says, oh, it appears that, you know, the butler is really the murderer. That means the butler really is the murderer or someone appears at the door. They really do appear at the door. So there is a sense of appearance, which means, you know, as the phenomenologist later said, showing itself. From what it is, you know, that's what it is. That's its essence is to show itself in that way. And so we can be empirical, what Kant calls empirical realists, even at the same time as we're transcendental idealists. So it's not that we're caught in a subjective veiled net. Rather, here's the world. Here we are. Here are the appearances. Some of them mislead us and some of them don't. need to in science we're looking for the ones that don't mislead us um and truth is the correspondence of our representations to the way the world you know manifestly appears our mana is manifestly real and so we can go forward with a realistic view but it's also idealist in the um sense of the conformity thesis so it's yeah and it's uh if it's the case that um the manifestly real world does conform to the nature of our minds, then we can never our minds can never be wholly unrelated, a certain kind of global skepticism, whereby, you know, things could show themselves the way that they do. And yet, the world might be wholly different from the way it shows itself cannot happen, because the way things show themselves to us has to be pre formatted for us. And so You know, this is a fully non skeptical. position. So you raised an interesting aspect of causation in some sense and causation seems to be quite an interesting aspect of Kant about whether it does exist and whether it doesn't exist and if so if it does exist how exactly how are we meant to fit that into this I suppose transcendental framework. Can you perhaps tell us a bit firstly about what causation is to Kant and secondly the implications that has either on the causation that things in themselves have on an appearances or just causation as a whole. Yeah. So causation for Kant in general is analyzed in terms of sufficiency. So if X or something is sufficient for Y, then it's in some broad sense a sufficient reason for Y, then it's a cause of the cause of Y. And in that sense, if there were things in themselves and they were responsible, for our experiences or responsible for our free will, then they would be causes. But the manner in which their causation occurs would be completely mysterious. And so, as I say, I think we should be agnostic about such causation. On the other hand, there are kinds of causation, kinds of sufficiency in space and time. And in particular, if I... move my hand in a certain way and then something else follows it then it's succession in time where an earlier event um is sufficient for a later event and it's under spatio-temporal constraints and also according to the you know laws of nature as we've empirically discovered them so I couldn't right now jump to the moon or there are all sorts of things I cannot do I'm constrained by uh natural laws and so we can hold that you know all of the causal activities in our environment and also causal activities having to do with forming intentions and then moving our bodies in certain way there are certain ways they're all constrained by the by natural laws in the case of free choice they're you know they're consistent with those laws but they're not determined by them In the case of external causation, they're consistent with those laws and, to some extent, determined by them in their unfolding. Kant wants to say that causation is really in the world. How do we know it's in the world? Well, it's because we have a concept of causation which applies, a general concept of causation which applies, which Kant calls, based on sufficient reason, the concept of sufficient reason, which Kant calls the... the category of causation. And it's in the world because we take the world to be that way necessarily. And the apparent world conforms to it, necessarily conforms to us. And so, you know, Hume said skeptically, well, if something just follows something else in time, there are sensations following another. There's no necessary, it's the connection between events that's crucial. And Kant says, That connection is something we bring to our experiences, both in the case of external causation and in the case of free will and mental causation. And it's there because we're so set up that the world could not be represented otherwise. That's very interesting. And it seems to tie into at least some of my reading about a priori categories in what can be labeled or has been labeled transcendental deduction. And there's a lot of these terms in Kant that people reading Kant might find somewhat confusing. Perhaps you could tell us a bit more about this, what these a priori categories are and how they fit into the process of transcendental deduction. Yes. So a transcendental deduction in general is a proof, not a deductive proof, but some form of logical demonstration that an a priori representation, that is to say a non-empirical representation, has real application, that is to say application to the world of sensory experiences. Now, this applies not only to a priori concepts like causation, substance, and so on, and there are categories of quantity, quality, relation, and modality, so modal concepts, it applies not only to those which Kant thinks, he thinks all those concepts are derivable from the different kinds of logical propositions that there could be, given logic as he understood it. There are also a prior representations, Kant thinks, of time and space, which are implicit in our sensory experiences. And so, but Kant thinks of those as represented by a different capacity than the a priori concepts. So the a priori concepts derived from logic and our logical thinking capacity, the a priori forms of intuition or pure intuitions derived from our sensibility. So sensibility is, you know, our embodiment, the conditions of our embodiment, sensory activity, but also desires, and also the imagination. And we discovered that in having sensory experiences, they're occurring over time and with a certain direction into a certain arrow in time. We discover that they're occurring in space and that our bodies and our experiences are embedded in a subjectively centered space so that this is the difference between right and left. And that concepts in and of themselves as abstract and descriptive do not capture spatio temporal structure. So in coming to experience, um, we can say, uh, so here we are having experiences, the pure form of intuition, which is time directly applies to our experiences, the pure form of intuition, which is the representation of space, um, directly applies to our experiences. And so that's kind of thinks is sufficient for a transcendental deduction. of the representations of space and time. Now, what about, what about those other more abstract and metaphysical concepts like substance and causation and so on? Kant thinks that they can't, you can't just, as it were, you know, as Hume pointed out, you can't just look into experience and see or, you know, find, recognize causal connection or recognize that something persists over time, you need to derive that indirectly, not directly from our experience, like our representations of space and time, but indirectly from our capacity to judge about the way the world is and have true propositions. And so Kant says, it's a necessary condition of this cups being what it is that has certain causal powers, that has a certain persistence, you know, existence in space and persistence over time. And that the fact that we bring those to experience and to our judgments of experience validates, objectively validates the claim that there are those categories and therefore performs a transcendental deduction of them. But it but unlike the as I say, the transcendental deduction of space representations of space and time, it's an indirect argument And Kant also thinks he projects a very strenuous high bar sort of conclusion, which is that necessarily every object of the senses has, you know, the categories implicit in them. And so there's a, and he has a worry. And so, you know, in the first, in the first edition of the first critique, he offers a certain version of the transcendental deduction of the categories. you know, the pure concepts. And then he fussed about that for another six years. And then in the seventeen eighty seven or B edition, he offered another version of it. And even when he had done that, he was less than fully confident that he. That he actually carried out a sound transcendental deduction of the categories, although we never did worry about the transcendental deduction of the representations of space and time. So it's an open, of all the books published on Kant, a great many of them, a large proportion of them are different interpretations. You'd think that one argument wouldn't allow for such interpretation. It's only about twenty pages in each edition. But Kant scholars endlessly debate the correct interpretation of the deduction of the categories. Almost everyone assumes that it's a sound argument, although I'm quite interested in the thought that it's in fact an unsound argument, and then what that might mean for us. Perhaps you could tell us about some of the implications if it was an unsound argument. Would that fundamentally undermine Kant's project, or do you think it's one of these kind of side projects in Kant's work which doesn't really have that much of a damning effect on his work? Well, I think it has a crucial effect, but I think we need to be more refined about what I'll call the scope of the transcendental deduction. So the original way that Kant frames the argument is necessarily for every actual and possible object of the senses, the categories apply. You know, they're a necessary condition of that kind of sensory activity. But suppose it's the case, as Kant in fact holds, that we can have what he calls intuitions, that is to say, sensory awareness of things that don't have concepts applied. So there you are, you've been sitting in your chair, you've been positioning your body in space and time, but not until this moment, reflecting on what it is to hold your hands in certain ways or, or, you know, monitor the, you know, the movement of air around you, and or notice smells or hear sounds in the background and so on. All of those are non-conceptual, intuitional experiences. And Kant also thinks that the way we represent space and time is fundamentally different from the way we represent concepts. He thinks of space and time as represented to us as infinite given structures, whereas every concept must have finite content so that we can, you know, expound its descriptive elements, and, you know, note its analytic entailments, and so on. So concepts and intuitions for Kant are categorically distinct, although he also postulates that they come together for the possibility of experience. So, you know, knowledge begins in experience, there are categorical forms of experience, so it's not all derived from experience. And then we create judgments which combine elements of the experiential, intuitional parts of our experience and the conceptual non-sensory parts of our experience into judgments of experience like, you know, again, this is Bob's cup. What that means is that I think it's true that for all and only the objects that we're aware of through propositional thinking, the categories apply. But it's not the case that, you know, for all the possible objects of the senses, the categories apply, we can't show that, because those are non conceptualized elements of our experiences, the existence of the non conceptual realm can be shown by what's sometimes called the babes and beasts argument, which is, babies don't have conceptual capacities, or at least they're not, you know, they have, they may have the capacities, but they're not online yet, non human non rational animals. You know, they're aware of their world, and they're operating with desires and, you know, doing things in the world, they're conscious, they're even to some extent, in a minimal way, self conscious, but they don't have conceptual capacities, they're not doing logic, they're not doing science, and yet, you know, they operate, yet they have intuition. So intuitions without concepts, although they're, as Kant says, blind, the blindness there is a blindness of conceptual penetration. So you can have sensory experience, non-conceptual experience without conceptual penetration, or you can bring them together. And I think that the transcendental deduction just needs to be restricted to the domain of judged states of affairs that we represent. In a way, that's exciting because Kant thinks that when we apply the causal category to our experience, it turns out to be rather like the Newtonian conception of a deterministic world governed by laws of nature. And so he's inclined to say that the world of objects of experience is deterministic. At the same time, if there are aspects of our experience which are non-conceptual, they wouldn't have to be deterministic. And so I think that, in fact, the domain of freedom insofar as it's sensory is available through the non-conceptual side of our cognition and not through the conceptual side. Wherever the conceptual side is, there we will find determinism and science. And so that allows us to find a place for free will in the world of experience, namely through non-conceptual activity, including desires and intentions to move our bodies and so on. So here I am. I think I've been moving my body freely, not particularly self-consciously until just that moment, but freely and spontaneously. Not governed by representations of fully structured states of affairs that conform to the judgments or the capacity for judging those states of affairs. Would you say that freedom defined in that sense is more of like a libertarian form of freedom or is Kant's kind of definition of freedom perhaps somewhat more like a human which is acting accordance to the will or actually accordance to one's desires? I think it's libertarian in the sense that, not that it comes from outside of space and time and breaks apart the causal domain. I think it's libertarian in the sense that we are the ultimate sources of freedom. certain kinds of activity. Even if there are antecedent events, they underdetermine, or this is if you're free, they underdetermine the movements and choices that we make. And so I think it's perfectly consistent, as I mentioned before, I think it's perfectly consistent with the existence of laws of nature that nothing I can do now violates a law of nature. On the other hand, it's not, I think there are all sorts of things I can do that are within the framework of laws of nature, but not entailed by them. So nothing, I think, entails that when I move my hands like this, that was going to happen as built into the Big Bang, or just movements of various kinds, choices, or the words that I'm going to utter next. These are choices I make in accordance with laws of nature, but not determined by laws of nature. And so the distinction between consistent with as opposed to entailed by laws, I think is extremely important. And so we can then find, you know, a place for free will in the consistent but not entailed by, you know, under that rubric. Yes, and free will does play an interesting role in Kant, especially when it comes to his moral thoughts as one of the postulates of practical reason. And one of the other postulates of practical reason is, of course, God. And I suppose it's perhaps, as we've talked a bit about his methodology, it could be an interesting segue into his statement of denying knowledge to make room for faith. And in this sense, How does, and you've talked about how he's writing in this decline of religion as well, this is the context in which he's writing. How does he engage with natural theology and the arguments for the existence of God? Yes, so I think what, so one front and center, I think, is what I was calling radical agnosticism, which is, so here we are, finite, limited, fallible beings. We know our cognitive awareness only extends just so far, and knowing our own limits is crucial. At the same time, then, we can know that, you know, know a priori that we cannot know God's nature if God existed, or know, you know, noumenal free will's nature if it existed, or know the immortal soul's nature if it existed. And so we're then required, against the backdrop of that agnosticism, to deny both that we know that God exists and that we know that God does not exist. So atheism is as ruled out by radical agnosticism as theism is. So then here we are in this agnostic position of denying an arrogant knowledge of things in themselves in order to restrict our cognition to those things that you know, we really do have access to, whether they be through the understanding and concepts or through the sensibility and intuitions. And so I think what Kemp thinks is that classical conceptions of God, freedom, and immortality need to be restricted. We can still recover a sense of them, though, as guiding our experience. So as ideals, you know, the postulates of pure practical reason postulate this notion of an ideal experience of a being that can sense the characters and the goodness and badness of actions, mete out punishment, proportion happiness to virtue, of a notion of free will, which allows us to act for the sake of the highest moral principles without being somehow so abstract that we can't get access to it. And, you know, a vision of a world in which, that is to say a world after death, in which those who really are virtuous people will live well and be happy. And those who are not and have not been virtuous people are appropriately punished in a court, you know, proportionally to their sins and so on. And that these guide us without actually being shown to exist or not exist. And so they're ideals of pure reason. But they all have application to the world of everyday experience, the actual impossible world of everyday experience. And it turns natural theology into a certain kind of moral theory, you know, very universalistic, principled moral theory. And so Kant thinks that these are supports for the moral theory that we find innately specified within us, just as in the way that we found a priori representations of space and time and of, you know, pure concepts specified within us. So too, we have a morality specified within us, and we can reflect on its nature and find, you know, how we ought to be acting as opposed to how we actually are acting. And If we ought to act a certain way, then if free will exists, then we can act that way. So, you know, as Kant says, odd entails Kant. Mm-hmm. And I suppose that idea of ought entails, does that in some sense tie into the principles in, I think, his work of religion within the boundaries of mere reason, where he talks about almost Christ as this role to demonstrate that a perfect life can be lived in some sense. Is that a form in which religion also plays a role within this framework? Yes. And so Kant says that religion as a purely dogmatic, rationalistic enterprise or anti-rationalistic enterprise should be rejected. However, we can go, and he focuses exclusively on Christianity. He might well have, if he knew more about other religions, he could have used those as well. But in any case, focusing on Christianity, he takes the moral lessons provided by Christianity as guides. And so I think what he thinks is that his moral theory, Kantian ethics, in accordance with what he calls the categorical imperative fundamental moral principle, captures all the relevant content, all the fully meaningful content of a Christian morality without being committed to dogmatic claims or indeed political claims of various kinds that, you know, are not should not be or are not morally admissible. So I think he and he got into trouble for that, you know, so that at the time, pietist authorities in Germany, in Konigsberg, in Prussia. They forbade him, especially later in his career, to lecture at all, lecture or publish about religious matters. And he got around it somewhat by publishing religion within the boundaries of mere reason, actually outside of Konigsberg. But he did not lecture on religious matters in public. And I think it's also the case that, uh, religion within the boundaries is also a very carefully written work that tries very hard to, um, not hide, but there's a sort of esoteric doctrine of politics and morality in it. And then an exoteric, you know, presentation form that sounds very consistent, um, with Christianity. And he did that so as not to, I think, you know, be held liable for, you know, holding beliefs directly contrary to Christian faith and therefore being removed from his professorship or imprisoned or, you know, put under house arrest or whatever. And he managed to avoid that. So he wasn't He wasn't a revolutionary. He wasn't an explicit revolutionary, but he was postulating some or formulating some revolutionary ideas formulated in terms that you had to be quite alert to what he was really arguing in order to find out. But I think looking back on them now, he was postulating some extremely exciting and at the time dangerous ideas. not just ethical views, but political views. That's quite fascinating. And on this line of his ethics, how does his ethics fit into his broader, I guess, transcendental framework? I guess people talk about categorical ethics, and these days a lot of people talk about it in line with meta-ethics or some fundamental, I guess, platonic idea of the good or their certain principles. But at the same time, that would seem to be in contrast with his transcendental... Yeah, and that would make... Yes, sorry. If that were true, that would make his view a rationalistic, a classical rationalistic ethics, or possibly even an ethics of divine commands. But I think my way of interpreting Kant's ethics is that it's it's in precise parallel with the way he formulates his theoretical philosophy, which is that we have non empirical moral principles built into our capacities for desiring and acting, just as we have non-empirical theoretical principles built into our capacities for sensing and thinking and judging. On the ethical side, the idea is that these principles, because they're a priori and because they're universal, they're not restricted to what individuals might want or desire what, you know, communities, larger communities of individuals might want or desire just to give them pleasure or to make them happy. They're not about happiness per se, although there is a doctrine of happiness in Kant. So it's not, so Kant is not a, he's offering a conception of ethics, which is non-egoistic, non-utilitarian, bless you, non- non-virtue ethicist and non-divine command because they're, you know, principles that we can get access to through ourselves. So it's our own constructive capacities, our own active constructive capacities that make ethics possible. And then you might ask, well, what's the fundamental concept of Kant's ethics? And of course, those who interpret Kant's ethics differ on this, but I think that the primary formulation of the categorical imperative is not that you need to universalize particular action intentions to find whether everyone could do it, although consistency in acting and consistency in policies, action policies, is important. But I think it's subsidiary to the recognition of what Kant calls Dignity or Virta. And so dignity or Virta is this absolute unconditional and non-instrumental value that each one of us has as a being with the rational capacities and sensory capacities that we have. And what it means, the formulation of the categorical imperative that I prefer or think is fundamental is the formulation which talks about humanity as an end in itself and our obligation to respect that, uh, dignity, um, and our, you know, value is ends in themselves, ends in ourselves, um, and never treat ourselves or others as mere things or mere means to other purposes that we might have. And so it seems to me that the key, the core of the categorical imperative is we ought to always to treat ourselves and others with sufficient respect for our absolute worth, namely our dignity, and then, in accordance with that, you have to use consistent principles, you have to be able to act freely, the so-called autonomy formulation. We all belong to a universal community of actual and possible persons with dignity, and when we issue ethical commands for ourselves, we expect that others will you know conform to them and when we issue ethical commands for others we assume that we ourselves must follow under those commands and so I think that the other three formulations of the categorical imperative universal law um autonomy formulation and the realm of ends in uh formulation all flow from the dignity uh formulation so I think of kant's ethics as fundamentally a dignitarian ethics. That's quite fascinating. And the fact that it is in some sense a priori, I suppose, or reflected upon in that sense, does that tie into his idea of, I guess, radical evil and the idea that it doesn't really exist because if people just knew themselves well enough or reflected on these a priori categories well enough, then they just would not fall into the boundaries of evil. Is that a way to look at it or do you think that? Well, I think Kant thinks that we're actually, yeah, so radical evil, we're capable of doing the wrong thing and we're capable of choosing. So if we, when we did the wrong thing, if we were determined to do so and didn't have free will to do it or not to do it, then we wouldn't, not reasonably, we couldn't be responsible for it. And so at times in his early ethical writings, particularly on the groundwork of the metaphysics of morals, and elsewhere, it looks as though what he's saying is that when you're acting freely, you're necessarily acting for the sake of the categorical imperative. It would seem to follow from that if you weren't acting for the sake of the categorical imperative, you wouldn't be acting freely, but then that would make you not responsible for it. So the recognition of radical evil in the religion book brings forward the fact that even when we act you know, very badly. We're also acting freely. And so freedom allows us to go, you know, act for the sake of the categorical imperative or act against the categorical imperative, either through just ignorance about whether our action really is inconsistent is consistent with it. Or I think even allows for the possibility of what Augustine calls the perversity of the will, which is to recognize the bad and act directly for the sake of the of the bad, you know, not a fully satanic, but, you know, at least sort of near satanic or almost quasi satanic way. And so I think that he thinks that evil is possible. Can we undergo a change of, you know, if you're living in a very bad way and acting immorally, can you change your life? Can you have a revolution of the heart or a revolution of the will? Things that we can, But that doesn't mean that you're going to be always acting perfectly because we're finite beings and we're not perfect. But you could then set your life on a path by choosing to do so and orienting your outlook on the world to do so in such a way that you're on the whole virtuous, trying to do the right thing, even if you then ultimately fail to some extent, but at least that choosing and doing the right thing is really possible and actual. That's very helpful. And perhaps now we've talked a bit about his ethics, his religion, and his philosophy. Let's take a bit of a step back and turn to his influence on philosophy as a whole. And this question perhaps would have two sides. First of all, perhaps we could talk about this post-Kantian movement and how, I guess more specifically, Hegel and German idealism comes out of Kant. And then later we could talk a bit more about how Kant influences us today. But starting off with historically how has time been interpreted by philosophy yeah so in the um immediate aftermath of kant's writing so the late eighteenth century and or into the early nineteenth century uh um a cadre of young philosophers um particular fichte and schelling and then later hegel were as part of that hegel uh took on board kant's idea and particularly the later kant's idea of a transcendental self that was a kind of mega individual that governed not only everyday experiences, but you know, every actual impossible experience in a trans individual way. And this was then the beginning of absolute idealism and projects which wanted to hold that the world as a whole is really the output, the outpourings. It's sort of Neoplatonic, an emanationist outpouring from the self. So very strong, subjectively oriented views, but not individual subjects, rather a sort of godlike self or ego governing the activities of nature, governing the activities of society, and that not only that, that it had a teleological aim such that it would develop itself more over time, and so more towards a progress of some kind, towards better political systems, towards more knowledge, and that the ultimate goal of not just philosophy and not just the way our minds operate, but the world itself, would be to attain absolute knowledge and an absolute awareness and a kind of divine grasp of the unfolding of the world and of ourselves. Now, that movement, the absolute idealism movement, then gave rise to a pushback movement from within the Kantian tradition called neo-Kantianism, and their battle cry was back to Kant. And the idea there was to restrict the notion of the subject to individual and non-world-based perspectives, and in particular to focus on sciences, whether the natural sciences or the social sciences, and ask what the role of human cognition and the capacities for human cognition and first principles of human cognition were in those sciences. So that got underway in the mid-nineteenth century, tended to restrict the absolute idealist claims. There was also pressure from Kierkegaard and Nietzsche and others who wanted to assert the role of an individual, whether for rational or irrational activities, for morally good or morally neutral or morally bad activities against assert the applicability of those against this absolute idealist optimism. And so that would bring us to the end of the nineteenth century, at which point there was a turn against idealism altogether, whether existential idealism or neo-Kantian forms of idealism or absolute idealism. And that was the emergence of the analytic, what later became called the analytic tradition, particularly in the writings of early Bertrand Russell, later writings or rather mature writings of Gottlob Frege, early writings of G.E. Moore, um and others influenced by them and their interests were specifically scientific that is to say either the formal sciences or the natural sciences and they were particularly interested in the idea that mathematics could be reduced you know systematically reduced to logic and that logic was the fundamental science and so logic became front and center in a way that it hadn't been either in the, you know, the absolute idealist tradition, or in the neocontinent tradition, and also logic as independent of the mind. And so those who wanted to assert an internal or integral connection, an inherent connection between logic and minds were called psychologists. And they were very bad. And so whether they were empirical psychologists or psychologists of a sort of Hegelian kind, they were excluded then as this tradition developed from philosophy departments and pushed into psychology departments or pushed into religion departments or other kinds of faculties within the university. And then philosophy became a highly formalized reflection on the nature logic and then related to that on the nature of language in relation to logic and that um and the project of uh reducing math to logic logicism guided uh you know the first part of the um analytic tradition which would bring us up to about nineteen fifty just after the second world war uh then some things happened in the uh analytic tradition which we could also talk about, but the point is that there was then a movement from classical analytic philosophy, neoclassical analytic philosophy, and giving up of some of those original aims. But again, they were still all within the broad, and they tended to reject Kantian thinking altogether, both in the classical and the, you know, the neoclassical or post-classical tradition. And so that was, in fact, in some ways, that had a strong positive view, a hypostatization of the sciences, scientism links both classical and post classical analytic philosophy and a rejection of idealism. And in the end, that's about all that you can say are truly shared in the first and the second half, the analytic tradition. And that carries us up through the end of the twentieth century and into the twenty first century. And here we are now, I think, really at the end of the analytic tradition and asking ourselves where, you know, so there's this post Kantian tradition, Kantian whether by, you know, acceptance of Kant, partial acceptance of Kant or rejection of Kant, where should we be going in the future? And so I've suggested a view I call Kantian futurism, which is that we ought to recover or we shouldn't hide our Kantian origins from ourselves, whether no matter which tradition we belong to or align ourselves with, but we should, as it were, rethink Kantian ideas, as it were, slice out or reject those. Be critical, not just orthodox Kantians, and accept those ideas which we take to be valid, justifiable, and move forward using those And so that the future, I think the future of philosophy in Anglo-American philosophy or Anglo-European philosophy, which now is worldwide, you know, through the Internet and so on. And it's hard to imagine, you know, obviously there are Eastern philosophies and other kinds of philosophy, but none of them is worldwide in the way that Anglo-European culture is. And just, you know, move forward within a broadly Kantian framework. That's a really wonderful summary of Kant's influences and how Kant can be used in this modern world. I suppose a question about Kantian futurism is why Kant? I suppose as we're drawing towards the end of this interview, someone might say, well, why should we go back to Kant? Why shouldn't we go back further to the scholastics? Or maybe push the question as Heidegger does all the way back to Plato and say, we must re-ask the question of being. Why do you think Kant is so unique? Well, I think it's not so much a choice as a fact about the post-Kantian tradition. So we, you know, we can't be other than we have been. And what we have been is Kantian, whether positively or negatively. And so I think that I can't see how, except by working our way through Kantian ideas, reworking Kantian ideas, we could go forward. Now, again, there is at least the possibility that some holy non-Kantian tradition or set of traditions might, as it were, you know, stride the world like a colossus and, you know, take over philosophy. But I think given the way that, you know, the history of the world has developed up to now, given the roles of capitalism, given the roles of neoliberalism, the sort of the dominance of the world by digital technology and so on, I can't see how at this point a wholly new conception of ourselves and of the tradition which brought us here would be possible. That being so, I could be wrong about that obviously, but that being so, then it seems that our only hope is to rework the Kantian origins, rework the Kantian ideas and try to move forward, you know, making creative use of them, and try to move forward that way. So a creative, broadly Kantian philosophy, as I said, it seems to me is not just the best way to go, but really the only way we have given where we are situated, where we are within the tradition. And, you know, so you mentioned Heidegger and back to Plato and so on. Well, Heidegger, you know, is someone who was within the phenomenological tradition. And so that, you know, and he was trained by neocontians. Thinking about Plato, you know, it's complicated, of course, but Plato could be put within a broadly classical rationalist tradition, immortality of the soul, knowledge of abstract forms, and would then be subject to similar criticisms. Of course, the Socratic part of it is different. It's more about coming to know ourselves and particularly being guided by practical considerations. And in that sense, Kant and Socrates, I think, are very close to one another, at least in spirit, if not in... Of course, we don't know Socrates really only through Plato, but the Socratic urge and the Socratic set of principles, it seems to me, jive very nicely with Kantian ideas. And so you might say, so the future of philosophy is broadly Kantian and Socratic to link to our origins. And then, you know, then having grasped all that reworked the material, we could move forward. I mean, it's, you know, it's appropriate. So if someone just says, Oh, everything's a mess, you know, different kinds of philosophy, everything is, you know, pluralized, and there are just people pulling Analytic philosophers dominate professional philosophy. What can we do except conform? If we want jobs in philosophy, conform to it. This offers an alternative to that in the broadly Kantian program. Well, thank you very much for this overview of the influence and impact of Kant. And I think that it's very important that we think about the influence of Kant and hopefully by watching this video. And if you've made it to this part, thank you very much. But I hope. This video has given you a clear understanding of Kant and that this would help you in your own studies of Kant. But if someone wants to get into Kant, Kant has written a lot of works. He's written a lot of short essays and read a lot of books. Someone who's now watched this video says, I want to tackle Kant now. I want to go back to our roots in Kant. How should someone read Kant? What order should someone read Kant? Well, that's a hard question. My own, and I think many people who come to Kantian philosophy approach it in this way. And that is, so you start with two quote-unquote popular books, which Kant wrote about theoretical philosophy and ethics, namely Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics in Theoretical Philosophy, a relatively short book, Theoretical Philosophy, and Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, a relatively short work, and which means that they're taught because Kant's other works are very long. and also Kant's, I would say, would start with those, and also Kant's essay, What is Enlightenment?, to get a sense of his political philosophy and a sense of his role in the Enlightenment tradition, but not stop there, that is to say, with those two books, in part because I remember my own experience with the Prolegomena Teni Future Metaphysics is, having read it, I thought, philosophy is too hard for me. I can't do this. I don't understand. I'm reading page after page, and I don't understand what's going on. And at that point, someone suggested to me, well, why don't you tackle the really hard count books, the really big hard count books, and try to get, you know, forward that way. And I did. And I read the Critique of Pure Reason carefully all the way through. And in fact, it, you know, many a book, you know, wouldn't have been so long if it hadn't been so short. And correspondingly, you know, the Critique of Pure Reason made it possible for me to really get a good sense of what Kant's theoretical philosophy was and in the case of foundations of the metaphysics of groundwork of the metaphysics of morals going to the second critique the critique of practical reason really helped so uh and expanded my view again and so what I would say is start with the prolegomena and the groundwork and what is enlightenment then don't give up if you're you know unhappy or feel frustrated don't give up but then go to the critique of pure reason then and to the uh critique of a practical reason. And then when you feel you have that on hand, have a look at the third critique, the critique of the power of judgment, which is about aesthetics. So if you've had interest in those areas, aesthetics and teleology, if you have a philosophy of biology. So if you have an interest in philosophy of science, philosophy of biology, those are there. And the quick label on the third critique is it's an attempt to solve some of the dichotomies or to alleviate some of the dichotomies say between freedom and determinism that you find in the first and second critiques and it really does advance the view, it has a very interesting view about the nature of organicism for instance in relation to mechanistic conceptions of the world and so it's I think directly relevant to contemporary science. And then if you've managed to do all that, then definitely have and you have, say, interest in philosophy of religion, then definitely have a look at religion within the boundaries of mere reason. And then finally, after that, I think, go to Kant's book, the metaphysics of morals, which has a doctrine of virtue, and the doctrine of right, which is a political theory, and place the political theory in the context of his philosophy of religion. I think that's the right way to go. A lot of people interested in politics go, they read What is Enlightenment? And then they go straight to his political philosophy, which is a kind of neo-Hobbesian, classical liberal approach, restriction of absolute power, focus on our ability to pursue our own ends, for self-interested mainly purposes, what he calls external freedom. But it seems to me it doesn't quite give the right take on his real view about ethics. And so I think it has to be contrasted with his view that we ought to act for the sake of the categorical imperative, come what may, non-instrumentally, Um, not for self-interest, not for the interest of society. Um, you know, not because God, some God has told us that we ought to, but rather for its own sake. That's a very good order. And I think that clarifies it. I remember when I first got into Kant, I started off with a religion within the bounds of mere reason, and it was actually quite an interesting way into Kant, but that was quite indeed quite funny. And I think. I think your order would have helped me understand actually what people talk about Kant, when people raise Kant indeed. Now, someone might have watched this video and say, I want to read some good commentaries on Kant. Can you also tell us a bit about the secondary? Yes. Well, so I mentioned earlier that there's a world filled, as it were, with commentaries on Kant of all different persuasions and kinds, different interpretations. And I sent you independently a list of the, I think, most well-known commentaries on Kant, which anyone who's reading or listening, I mean, listening or watching, could find posted on your website. As far as the ones that I found most useful, I would say that the classical Norman Kemp Smith commentary is very good for detailed explication of the first critique. You know, sort of paragraph by paragraph, section by section. It's very good. Correspondingly, I like the H.J. Paton commentary on the second critique. And now it's not quite as detailed as the Kemp Smith, but still very good. And I like Hans Kassirer's, H.W. Kassirer's commentary on the third critique, Critique of Power of Judgment. very much too, and it's again more detailed, more like the Kemp-Smith. If you want an overview of all the critiques and of Kant's critical philosophy generally, I'd like, and there are many introductions to Kant's philosophy, short introductions, I like Paul Geyer's general introduction to Kant's philosophy, and so would recommend that. And so you might, you know, there you are struggling with the uh prolegomena or the groundwork or the first critique you might then go to and read alongside it guyer's general introduction then on particular passages or texts have a look at the kemp smith or the peyton or the or the cassir and go forward that way but you know as I say that that list that I sent you um provides you know a huge variety of options for um content interpretation Wonderful. Yes. As Dr. Hannah has so kindly shared with us the list and also his own lecture notes on the first critique, I will put them up on my website, which you can see on the screen right now. It's www.josh-hannah.com. If you go check that out, it will be on the blog post, which would come out as this video comes out as well. So once again, thank you so much for coming onto this channel. It was such a privilege to talk to you and learn more about Kant. Kant is one of the most influential thinkers of all time, and he has been really influential, very complex in time at times. But I hope this video would introduce you to some of his key concepts, but more importantly, promote and suggest that you should go read Kant yourself. thank you so much for coming onto the channel once again stay safe everyone and I'll see you soon in the next video thank you joshua I enjoyed it very much wonderful