Date/Time
Date(s) - 06/04/2025
12:30 pm - 2:00 pm
Location
The Rose Battersea
At our meeting on 6 April 2025 Heward Wilkinson will ask the question ‘Does Strawson overturn Kant’s Defence of Causality in the Second Analogy of Experience?’. See below for his notes on the subject
Kant Rediscovered
In 1966 Peter Strawson (later Sir Peter) and Jonathan Bennett both published books on Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. I am concerned here with Strawson’s epoch making book, and its impact on myself, but this is a reminder that there was a recrudescence of Kantian studies at this time, which for the first time included members of the Analytical Philosophy movement from Oxford and Cambridge.
Individuals
Strawson in 1959 had published Individuals: an Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics which was the first time an established Analytic Philosopher had entertained once again the idea of a form of centrality of Metaphysics (which had been supposedly ‘discredited’ by, in common, both logical empiricism and linguistic philosophy). Authoritatively, with the authority which he increasingly commanded, Strawson wrote (Individuals, p. 10):
“…there is a a massive central core of human thinking which has no history – or none recorded in histories of thought; there are categories and concepts which, in their most fundamental character, change not at all. Obviously these are not the specialities of the most refined thinking. They are the commonplaces of the least refined thinking; and are yet the indispensable core of the conceptual equipment of the most sophisticated human beings. It is with these, their interconnexions, and the structure that they form, that a descriptive metaphysics will be primarily concerned.”
Strawson enshrined Aristotle and Kant as the foremost pioneers of descriptive metaphysics and (Individuals, p.11) those who most repay rethinking in contemporary terms.
The Bounds of Sense
And in 1966 his magisterial book upon Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, named, after an early provisional title of Kant’s book, The Bounds of Sense, was published. I was extremely fortunate that, after a prelude in adolescence pursuing philosophy in a literary and religious context, particularly assisted by John Keats, Samuel Johnson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, J.M. Murry, F.R. Leavis, and Soren Kierkegaard, an older friend and colleague studying philosophy was opening doors to my bringing modern Analytic philosophy into connection with that wider conception of philosophy, at just the time Strawson’s masterpiece came out! Donald MacKinnon, my professor of theology, told me that, just as Dr. Leavis succeeded in distilling, in order to reveal, the core and paradigmatic elements in a work of literature, so this was what Strawson had managed profoundly to do with the Critique of Pure Reason. Assisted by Strawson’s account, I wrestled with Kant’s extraordinary work and found myself haunted by its magisterial depths of generality.
The Anglo vs German quarrel over Imagination
I also found there was a quarrel between the Anglo and German conceptions of Kant, in Strawson and Heidegger’s Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, as to whether the whole dimension of imagination underpinning Kant’s apparent transcendental idealism is a problem or an asset. The validity of imagination in Kant was confirmed by thinkers as diffferent as Freud:
https://hewardwilkinson.co.uk/sites/default/files/Freud-Hegel-and-Dialectics2.pdf
and Wilfrid Sellars:
https://www.ditext.com/sellars/ikte.html
Is Kant actually a Transcendental Realist
And Heidegger, despite profoundly enshrining Kant’s doctrine of imagination as the ‘third realm’ between Intuition and Concept, insisted that Kant is an ontologist, not an epistemologist, and implies that, in fact, Kant is a Transcendental Realist not a Transcendental Idealist. Could there be something in this? When studying under Professor Ninian Smart at Lancaster University I wrote my MA dissertation on Kant’s Doctrine of Time. But I knew that, in ways I could not yet envisage, Hume’s claim that there cannot be an a priori justification of our faith in the reality of causality still awaited me.
Hume and Strawson: Causality is not A Priori
And in this argument, Strawson took the side of Hume:
“In the second Analogy Kant expresses in a number of ways the thought that the order of perceptions of these objective states of affairs the succession of one upon the other of whichj constitutes an objective change is….a necessary order. The order of perceptions is characterised not only as a necessary, but as a determined order, an order to which our apprehension is bound down, or which we are compelled to observe……. But from this point the argument proceeds by a non sequitur of numbing grossness……. But – and here comes the step – to conceive [the] order of perceptions as necessary is equivalent to to conceiving the transition or change from A to B as itself necessary, as falling, that is to say, under a rule or law of causal determination; it is equivalent to conceiving the event of change or transition as preceded by some condition such that an event of that type invariably and necessarily follows upon a condition of that type………. It is a very curious contortion indeed whereby a conceptual necessity based on the fact of a change is equated with the causal necessity of that very change.”
GE Moore validates Kant on A Priori Causality
I have now come to the conclusion, assisted by arguments of G.E. Moore in his paper Hume’s Theory Examined, that this matter of the a priori justification of causality is not entirely settled by the arguments of Hume and Strawson (and of course the vast majority of Anglo philosophers), and that Kant’s arguments in the Second Analogy are Realist, and point in another direction not envisaged or taken seriously by Strawson, and this is what I shall be arguing.
We meet in The Rose Battersea, 74-76 Battersea Bridge Road, London SW11 3AG but Heward Wilkinson is not London based and will present his talk on Zoom. For details see SLPC Zoom Meeting
We always welcome new speakers. If you would like to give a talk on a philosopher or a philosophical topic please contact Adrian Carter at southlondonphilosophy@gmail.com