What Can We Really Know? Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason

Send us Fan Mail What can we really know—and where must reason recognise its limits? In the second episode of our Kant series, Samuel Woodall and Jack Thomson explore the Critique of Pure Reason: Hume’s challenge, synthetic a priori knowledge, Kant’s Copernican turn, space and time, phenomena and things in themselves, and the antinomies of reason. We finish by asking how the limits of theoretical knowledge lead towards freedom and moral responsibility. Kant · Episode 2 of 3 Next: freedom, moral duty and the Critique of Practical Reason. CHAPTERS 00:00 Introduction 00:25 Science and the crisis of metaphysics 01:27 Synthetic a priori knowledge and Hume 05:09 Kant’s Copernican turn 06:35 Concepts, intuitions and the soul 10:17 Appearances, things in themselves and antinomies 18:19 The limits of reason and moral freedom 20:07 Next: freedom and moral duty READING Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (1781; revised 1787), especially the second-edition Preface and A51/B75. Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (1783). https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-hume-causality/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-transcendental-idealism/ EDITORIAL CLARIFICATIONS Kant’s appearances are empirically real, rather than false pictures hiding reality. The discussion’s wording at that point is a slip: the distinction concerns objects as experienced and considered independently of our mode of cognition. Hume’s problem of causal necessity is distinct from the is–ought problem in moral reasoning. See the reading links above. Explore Beyond the Text: https://beyondthetext.co.uk Essays: https://theintellectualhistorian.com Reading and discussion: https://thehistoryofideasclub.co.uk Support the show