Kant Answer Hume On Causality

Samantha Budow
PH 310, Final Q4
May 7, 2014

How did Kant answer Hume on causality?

To understand Kant’s account on causality, it is important to first understand that this account came into being as a response to Hume’s skepticism, and therefore important to also understand Hume’s account. While Hume thinks that causation comes from repeated experiences of events happening together or following one another, Kant believes that causation is just a function of our minds’ organization of experiences rather than from the actual experiences themselves.

Hume states that in nature we observe correlated events that are both regular and irregular. For instance, we assume that the sun will rise tomorrow because it has continued to do so time and time again and we assume that thunder will be accompanied by lightning for the same reason. We never observe the causation between a new day and the sun rising or between thunder and lightning, however. We are simply observing two events that correlate in a regular manner. Hume’s skepticism therefore comes from the belief that since we do not observe causal links, we can never truly be sure about what causes anything else. He then goes so far as to say that if this is the case, it must be a fact that nothing causes anything else. In Hume’s theory, there is not only no objective causation, but no objective principle of cause and effect on the whole.

Kant answers Hume by explaining that “everything that happens, that is, begins to be, presupposes something upon which it follows by rule," (1965 ed., p. 218). Kant considers this universal principle of causality as a synthetic a priori truth. According to Kant, what he considers to be ‘irreversible sequences’ indicate the causal order. For instance,...

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... proof than analytic a priori claims or synthetic a posteriori claims. A synthetic a priori claim adds to what is analytically contained in a concept without appealing to experience. Kant explains the possibility of a priori judgements by appealing to the mind’s role in shaping experience. According to him, by applying categories to intuition, we put what is in our minds into our experiences. The categories shape the experience and we can know that that aspect of experience is a priori since it belongs to us. “We can cognize of things a priori only what we ourselves have put into them.”

The question of synthetic a priori propositions is important because, as Kant argues, all important metaphysical knowledge is synthetic a priori. If it is not possible to determine the truth of synthetic a priori judgments, then metaphysics in itself is not possible to understand.