Kant's Prolegomena to Any Future MetaphysicsKant, Immanuel
PhilosophyPhilosophy
Kant's Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics
Kant, Immanuel
Knowledge, Theory of -- Early works to 1800; Metaphysics -- Early works to 1800
Before, therefore, a judgment of perception can become a judgment of
experience, it is requisite that the perception should be subsumed
under some such a concept of the understanding; for instance, air
ranks under the concept of causes, which determines our judgment about
it in regard to its expansion as hypothetical.{13} Thereby the expansion
of the air is represented not as merely belonging to the perception of
the air in my present state or in several states of mine, or in the
state of perception of others, but as belonging to it necessarily. The
judgment, "the air is elastic," becomes universally valid, and a
judgment of experience, only by certain judgments preceding it, which
subsume the intuition of air under the concept of cause and effect:
and they thereby determine the perceptions not merely as regards one
another in me, but relatively to the form of judging in general, which
is here hypothetical, and in this way they render the empirical
judgment universally valid.
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{13} As an easier example, we may take the following: "When the sun
shines on the stone, it grows warm." This judgment, however often I
and others may have perceived it, is a mere judgment of perception,
and contains no necessity; perceptions are only usually conjoined in
this manner. But if I say, "The sun warms the stone," I add to the
perception a concept of the understanding, viz., that of cause, which
connects with the concept of sunshine that of heat as a necessary
consequence, and the synthetical judgment becomes of necessity
universally valid, viz., objective, and is converted from a perception
into experience.
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If all our synthetical judgments are analysed so far as they are
objectively valid, it will be found that they never consist of mere
intuitions connected only (as is commonly believed) by comparison into
a judgment; but that they would be impossible were not a pure concept
of the understanding superadded to the concepts abstracted from
intuition, under which concept these latter are subsumed, and in this
manner only combined into an objectively valid judgment. Even the
judgments of pure mathematics in their simplest axioms are not exempt
from this condition. The principle, "a straight line is the shortest
between two points," presupposes that the line is subsumed under the
concept of quantity, which certainly is no mere intuition, but has its
seat in the understanding alone, and serves to determine the intuition
(of the line) with regard to the judgments which may be made about it,
relatively to their quantity, that is, to plurality (as judicia
plurativa).{14} For under them it is understood that in a given
intuition there is contained a plurality of homogenous parts.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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