Causation; Knowledge, Theory of; Philosophy, German; Reason
Judgements of experience, as such, are always synthetical. For it would
be absurd to think of grounding an analytical judgement on experience,
because in forming such a judgement I need not go out of the sphere of
my conceptions, and therefore recourse to the testimony of experience
is quite unnecessary. That “bodies are extended” is not an empirical
judgement, but a proposition which stands firm à priori. For before
addressing myself to experience, I already have in my conception all
the requisite conditions for the judgement, and I have only to extract
the predicate from the conception, according to the principle of
contradiction, and thereby at the same time become conscious of the
necessity of the judgement, a necessity which I could never learn from
experience. On the other hand, though at first I do not at all include
the predicate of weight in my conception of body in general, that
conception still indicates an object of experience, a part of the
totality of experience, to which I can still add other parts; and this
I do when I recognize by observation that bodies are heavy. I can
cognize beforehand by analysis the conception of body through the
characteristics of extension, impenetrability, shape, etc., all which
are cogitated in this conception. But now I extend my knowledge, and
looking back on experience from which I had derived this conception of
body, I find weight at all times connected with the above
characteristics, and therefore I synthetically add to my conceptions
this as a predicate, and say, “All bodies are heavy.” Thus it is
experience upon which rests the possibility of the synthesis of the
predicate of weight with the conception of body, because both
conceptions, although the one is not contained in the other, still
belong to one another (only contingently, however), as parts of a
whole, namely, of experience, which is itself a synthesis of
intuitions.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account