Transcendental Arguments (3 of 10) – Kant In Context

[00:00] This portion of our seminar, I’m going to call Kant in Context. And essentially, I just want to give you some history so you might appreciate what transcendental argumentation is all about and what Van Til is hooking into. Clearly, Van Til was not a Kantian. In fact, he, in a sense, spent his scholarly career refuting Kant and post-Kantian ways of thinking, especially as they came to expression in Neo-Orthodoxy and other theological aberrations. Nevertheless, Kant’s project, the kind of thing Kant was doing, becomes the heart of Van Til’s way of defending the faith. So I think it would be valuable for us to have an appreciation for the historical setting and what Kant himself said. Also give us some background for what Mike Butler is going to be doing with us tomorrow morning when we begin looking at contemporary transcendental argumentation and what the situation there is.

[00:56] So to put Kant in context, we’re going to talk about his precursors, continental rationalism, as that was seen in the philosophies of Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz. The school of thought is called continental because these three men were on the continent of Europe, makes sense, and they were all rationalists because they agreed on some things that I’ll give you in a minute that define the rationalist approach. but it isn’t as though they had the continental rationalist club and this association got together every once in a while and issued their journal or what have you but they’re all in retrospect lumped together and then british empiricism what makes this nice is we not only have a difference in point of view but we also have a difference in geography so we can remember it and three philosophers here, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. Locke being English, Berkeley Irish, and Hume Scottish.

[01:59] I think they must have gotten together and divided that up and said, okay, now in England, we’re going to have this point of view in Ireland. Now, this is again retrospective, but it is very convenient so we can remember these. You have the rationalist approach, the empiricist approach, and then Kant comes along and offers us the transcendental approach or critical philosophy. And it’s critical because he looks for the foundations of both rationalism and empiricism. He looks for the transcendentals that make it possible for us to reason both logically and empirically.

[02:33] Both rationalism and empiricism accepted the autonomous point of reference that is found in Rene Descartes’ intellectual method. Descartes said, now, what if I try to doubt everything that I can? Is there any way that I can come up with something that is beyond doubt? Can I answer the radical skeptic with any kind of indubitable? Is there anything that’s beyond doubt?

[03:01] And he said, well, my existence is beyond doubt. Such a humble guy, this Rene Descartes. Here’s the one thing in the universe, I’ll tell you for sure, me. I think, therefore I am. Which, as some critics later said, he could as well have said, I stink, therefore I am. Because, after all, he has the I in the premise, and that’s what he’s trying to conclude. So, not much of an argument here. He was taking for granted his own existence when he argued for it. The point is that Descartes assumed man’s intellectual self-sufficiency.

[03:38] man can be his own starting point there are a lot of things that are questionable about life about things outside my mind about the world the one thing that’s not questionable is me i exist i’m the point of reference everything finally is going to have to pass that standard it’s going to have to conform to what i know about me okay so what i’m saying now is that the empiricist and the rationalist, and for that matter Kant too, they all assume the centrality of man. Now earlier when we did our light once over on different kinds of proofs, what did we say happens to them all?

[04:16] They reduced to what? Subjectivism and skepticism. Now why do you think that is? Because man is put at the center. Since everything pivots around man, his thinking, his authority, since he’s the point of reference, it shouldn’t surprise us that when you start criticizing, it reduces down to man himself, his point of view. And since that isn’t absolute and beyond doubt, it reduces to skepticism.

[04:42] All right, so these are autonomous schools of thought. First of all, continental rationalism. The rationalists all agreed on two things. First, there are self-evident truths from which we can deduce substantial conclusions about reality. There are some truths that are so self-evident that from them we can deduce the nature of reality, and secondly, that we should search for certainty in our knowledge where mathematics is the ideal of knowledge. The rationalist wanted certainty, and it had to be certainty along the model of geometry or math. Well, we’ve already criticized, I mean, I’m going to say more about them, but we’ve already criticized this, haven’t we?

[05:23] If these are self-evident truths, why did Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz arrive at radically different conclusions about reality? One was a dualist, one was a monist, one was an atomist or a pluralist. Kind of strange that these are self-evident truths, isn’t it? The rationalist had a supreme confidence in the intellect’s ability to solve all human problems. And to know reality, reality understood as something fundamentally rational. Now, because reality is rational, you can understand that education for them became the key to enlightenment. If you want to solve man’s problems, men need to be educated.

[06:04] Now, we may not be continental rationalists in our culture today, but are we rationalists in that sense? Do we still naively think that education will solve man’s problems? Yeah. And why not? If reality is fundamentally rational and man’s mind can be counted on with clear and distinct ideas to deduce the nature of reality, Sure. Supreme confidence in the intellect’s ability.

[06:27] A reliable method of reasoning begins, as I’ve already said many times, with clear and distinct ideas. Well, if the indubitability of these ideas is their clearness and distinctness to me, notice that indubitability is tied to an internal and subjectivistic reference point. It’s something in me, not outside of me, and it’s something subjective. For Descartes, whenever we encounter a property, so I’m looking at an apple and I encounter its redness. Whenever we encounter a property, there’s an unperceived substance present.

[07:05] If any object of thought is multi-property, it has many properties, then there must be a substance that quote-unquote holds the properties together. Yes, apples just aren’t red, are they? They wouldn’t be very satisfying if they’re just red. They’re also spherical. Well, roughly spherical. They’re also what? Crisp, sweet, tart, whatever. Well, why aren’t all these things just loose and disjointed?

[07:34] Well, because the apple is a substance that has the properties red, sphericality, crispness, sweetness, what have you. So for Descartes, whenever we encounter a property, there must be an unperceived substance present. The key here is that the substance is unperceived. Has anybody ever seen the substantiality of an apple? Have you ever seen what binds the redness, crispness, sphericality? No, of course not. So in order to think clearly, I must assume that there’s a substance, but I don’t see a substance. I only see the properties of the alleged substance. According to Descartes, there are two different kinds of substance, mind, and body substance. Some substances are not extended in space, like souls or minds. Others, like apples and giraffes, are extended in space. Now, Spinoza also wants to deduce the nature of reality from clear and distinct ideas. By definition, Spinoza says, a substance which must be independent of other things. You know why it’s independent? It’s because the substance is what unites the properties makes one apple different from another apple right you don’t just have redness diffused through the world sphericality diffused through the world you have sphere red crisp silver all together in this one independent substance but Spinoza says if by definition a substance is independent then there can only be one substance there can only be one independent thing. If there are two things, then they’re conditioned by each other. Rationalists don’t get a lot of good press in America. But when you think about it, that’s a pretty brilliant argument. I mean, he says, look, conceptually, you’re committed to be, if independence is a mark of substance, then there can only be one. Ultimately, there’s only one substance, and therefore, all is one. And what we call everything, the substance of reality, is nature. He says, or if you have a religious bent you can call it god that’s just kind of different vocabulary for the same thing and therefore for him physics and psychology are deductive sciences they are not sciences where you go out and observe empirically and learn about the world but you you can deduce the nature of the world knowing that it’s one substance and you have clear and distinct ideas about your experience.

[10:02] Leibniz uses Spinoza’s starting point that a substance is independent and he draws the opposite conclusion. Since substance is independent, then there must be a plurality of independent things that don’t have any relationship to one another. That’s what makes them independent. Let me put it to you this way. For Spinoza, the independence of substance is gained by everything depending on it.

[10:28] for Leibniz the independence of substance is gained by nothing interacting with anything and so he said reality is made up of a number of windowless monads they’re windowless because you can’t see and have any interaction with anything else it’s a monad would you say then that maybe when I was there was focusing in on the one likely focusing in on the many yes I would yeah that’s exactly right But they begin with common premises and they end up with radically different conclusions about reality.

[11:03] Now, you will appreciate this, even if you don’t like these guys so far and they confuse you. Both of them were eventually dismissed as dream philosophers who had gained coherence and experience in an artificial way. By their artificial conceptions of unity or independent pluralities, they had coherence, but it was all a dream philosophy sort of thing. You could easily understand then why the British empiricists wanted to get away from all the abstruse speculations of the continental philosophers. They both are also emphasizing the one and many. In a sense, they both have a rational team, and yet you press on it and it becomes irrational. In one sense, you can say that one without a mistake, but one size in the many way. Every set, they both have a one and a many aspect. Our philosophy to do.

[12:11] What was their answer for bringing it together? Well, in the case of Spinoza, there’s nothing to bring together. It’s all the same thing. You want me to understand that, don’t you? Well, not a lot. I mean, if you do, that would be better. But I don’t have a real thirst to make people understand Spinoza because I’m not sure I altogether understand him.

[12:35] But what he would tell you is you don’t have to worry about uniting mind and body, concept and percept, because they’re just different ways of talking about the same thing. For him, the discussion of psychology, the discussion of physics are just like English and German talking about the same thing. You talk in different language, but you’re talking about the same thing because all is one, there’s one basic substance. For Leibniz, he gets unity among all of his windowless monads by having a grand monad. That’s what he calls God, the big monad, the grand monad.

[13:12] and god organizes all the monads so they don’t run into each other you know they work together you think i’m kidding you you think i’m making this up it’s called the doctrine of pre-established harmony the grand monad has pre-established the harmony of all monads mike am i lying about this i’m telling you i wouldn’t do that for you this was what Leibniz said well what’s that monad knowledge yeah that’s right that’s why people dismiss this as a dream philosophy it’s just silliness you know you know what they are very sympathetic not to the over general way he did this but given what he had read you can understand why david hume said gather all the books on metaphysics and consign them to the flame he did he was a librarian by the way hume said get all those books written by those nuts over there in europe and burn them because it’s ridiculous us okay now we all you know why we laugh at that by the way we all have a certain conception of what it is to think correctly and we find this silly the european mindset at that time was really you know they thought that was very respectable stuff but the british and then eventually the american tradition doesn’t warm up to that kind of speculation i’m sure that i’ve used this example with people before that are here but it always gets the point across and so i’m going to repeat If you want to understand the difference between European philosophy, British philosophy, and then American philosophy, imagine that you have an elephant on a barge just a little bit offshore, and the question is, how do you get the elephant to shore? Three different approaches. The European philosopher will say, well, is the elephant real? The British philosopher will say, how much does the elephant weigh? And the American philosopher will say, how much will you pay me?

[15:04] and that’s wildly over general but the point is european philosophy tend to be much more abstract british philosophy is tied to a more scientific approach and realistically american philosophy is oriented toward pragmatism get it done what will you pay me so we don’t like well descartes probably the most popular of the continental rationalists but Spinoza and Leibniz don’t have a lot of followers in the 60s they had a few but in the 60s were a lot of weird things going on with psychedelic music and drugs too so you know let’s move on to that wasn’t meant to be ad hominem it was meant to be explanatory british empiricism the empiricists all said there are no innate ideas they said only particulars exist that’s the second thing and thirdly we should seek common sense in observation and practicality. Our intellectual method should seek to be commonsensical, being based on observation and seeking practicality. There are no innate ideas. Do we know that empirically? Uh-oh. Empiricism says everything we know, we know on the basis of sensation. But there are no sensations that will justify there are no innate ideas is empiricism presuppositionalist and neutral then no empiricism is a dogma as quine put it not on this particular point related but uh empiricism is prejudice it begins with a philosophical assumption and then after that there’s no more philosophical assumptions thank you there are no more sophisticated empiricism i’m not kidding there aren’t well i well i am right there are no more sophisticated empiricists there still are naive empiricists they’re all in the evangelical church though i’m not kidding you i’m not saying that to be mean the only people i know that defend naive empiricists are evangelical evidentialists some of you are philosophy majors and graduate am i am i putting anybody on i don’t know anybody that defends a kind of pure empiricism anymore there are people who defend empirical methods as the model of rationality But the idea that there are no innate ideas, people account for innate ideas differently, conventionalist, linguistic, conventionalist behavior, or so forth.

[17:30] But you couldn’t know anything if there wasn’t cognitive background that you bring to your experience. All observations are theory dependent. And that’s the reigning view in epistemology today. Secondly, empiricism says only particulars exist. Well, if only particulars exist, notice there can be no unity among the particulars, because unity itself is not a particular. There can’t be kinds of things, because a kind of thing, let’s say ductness or appleness, a kind of thing is not particular, it’s universal.

[18:07] And if there are no connecting principles between things, then we can’t even say that an apple is an apple because to say that something is an apple is to assume substance that the properties are united somehow are indexed together as an apple but you don’t see the indexing of properties you don’t see them united in any conceptual way or even by way of natural laws not only is there no substance if only particulars exist there can be no causality because you can have a particular event and another particular event but you can’t ever say there’s a necessary connection between those two events so you can’t ever say anything is causally related John Locke the first of the british empiricists that i put up on the board for you said that the substance that we think about that individuates things and unites properties.

[19:08] Substance, he said, is a substratum for qualities. It’s something that underlies the qualities, like a pin cushion underlies the pins that are in it. Properties are like pins that are in the substance, the pin cushion. But when pushed, Locke said, openly said, substance is, and I quote, I know not what, that’s hyphenated. He wasn’t saying, I don’t know what substance is. He was saying that. But the point is, substance is a mysterious metaphysical thing. It’s a I know not what. But he felt that he had to have that.

[19:42] Now, in passing about Locke, no innate ideas, but when it came to political theory, this is what Locke is known for by most American school children, right, or high school children anyway. What did Locke teach? The doctrine of, well, private property as an inalienable right. There are no innate ideas, but there are inalienable rights. Well, if you want a homework assignment, go home tonight and see if you can bring those two together in your worldview. An inalienable right, how can it be inalienable if it’s not innate, you know? So it’s pretty tough to get all this together.

[20:19] Well, I want to move on, though. Locke saw substance as I know not what. Berkeley argued that to be is to be perceived, and therefore there are no abstract ideas, he said. nothing exists in abstraction. Everything that exists is concrete and it must be perceived to exist. However, matter is an unperceived abstract idea. Has anybody ever perceived matter? Now, don’t tell me you’ve perceived things that are material. That isn’t what we’re asking. The property of materiality may be there concretely in some things, but the idea of matter is abstract. Material substance is unperceived and therefore doesn’t exist. And so according to him, there is no material reality.

[21:14] Well, what about materiality? I said there’s no material reality. What about that property of materiality? Like that, you know, Johnson once thought that he refuted Berkeley by kicking a stone. I mean, that’s laughable because if you understand the argument, he didn’t deny that we have sensations. But thought and think about it. The stone doesn’t have sensations, does it? Why doesn’t the stone have sensations? Because it doesn’t have a mind. Sensations are interpretations. Okay? And so in order to have a sensation, a sensation must be in a mind. So even sensations of materiality are mind-dependent. There is no material reality. All reality is mental reality.

[21:59] and that’s why you have this odd combination in Berkeley of a man who is an empiricist but an idealist he takes empirical presuppositions and pushes them to idealistic conclusions about the nature of reality well Hume comes along and he says well I can do you an even greater favor you’ve gotten rid of Descartes material substance if we’re going to be really honest empiricists we have to get rid of mental substance too and earlier we talked about this there’s nothing that gives unity to my perceptions i’m nothing but a bundle of perceptions and even that’s cheating to say that for hume in order for something to exist it has to be traced to a sensation that’s the empirical approach no innate ideas are going to help us here and we never have any sensations of connecting principles between our experiences we don’t have any psychological connecting principles and therefore there’s no me there’s no continuing personal identity and we don’t have any perception of physical connecting principles and therefore there’s no causation in the world. There’s just one random event followed by another random event. Every experience is a separate isolated unit of consciousness. There’s no necessity in the world of thought or experience, sensation, and there’s no necessity in the world that is outside the mind and so there’s no basis for a knowledge of the external world of enduring objects no basis for a knowledge of causality among objects nor is there a continuing self that could know the causation between objects now what would you call this view if you wanted to just choose a term out of the history of philosophy how about skepticism boy that’s radical how did Hume deal with the skepticism yeah well actually he said when he gets working on these problems and they really get him down he stops and he plays backgammon with his friends i’m so glad that he said that he must have thought he was being real smarty you know to say that sort of thing but that is such an honest admission that’s our culture my friends when you get tired of the philosophical problems monday through friday you know at the sc philosophy hall you go home and party that’s what you do you go to football games and watch movies and think about your kids and then you go back on monday and you start all over again it’s two different worlds and they cannot be brought together hume admitted that we do think causally but he said there’s no rational basis for it that’s why he’s a skeptic why didn’t you stop stop what why wouldn’t you rather go home and party and go to football games and stuff i just think to me it would be so obvious to him that he what he’s doing contradicts what contradicts in a world where there’s no connections between things?

[24:57] Now I’m not putting you on I’m trying to help you see what Hume would be able to say and what unbelievers say when you challenge unbelieving philosophers today about these things and you get them all balled up intellectually they’re essentially going to take they’re going to cop out on you like that you’re going to say well why don’t you live you’re using Christian presuppositions why don’t you live consistently to hear philosophy. And their answer is, there’s no consistency anyway, so why worry about it?

[25:24] I do what pleases me. And it pleases me to continue living, you know, to enjoy a little bit of Jack Daniels and, you know, the party lifestyle or whatever, and then to make a living telling students you can’t make any sense out of anything. I’m overgeneralizing, but not terribly. Our assumption is people are going to live in terms of their philosophy. Their assumption is we have no moral obligations at all. Not even a moral obligation to live in terms of our philosophy. And I mean, this is a perverse kind of consistency, but do you see the consistency of the unbeliever?

[26:01] I want to tie this in with Van Til. Van Til says, if you’re going to play the explanation giving game, you have to be a Christian. And you want an explanation for why you believe one thing and you do another. And basically what he’s going to say is, there is no explanation.

[26:18] When you mentioned your character, when I went to school, they taught the easy, I don’t know why, agility, expense data. If you have a hot bowl of water, cold bowl of water, you keep your hands in both. Then put it in the third common ball and it just feels hot, the one feels full of the other. You didn’t bring up, when you quit for a week, you didn’t bring up the other liability. Would you have more time? Yes. I mean, you have to kind of order. you think the most devastating criticism is down to the, and I would say that is a little below midway. That’s not the most telling criticism.

[26:55] But it, well, but you see, the answer to that is you need an objective way of measuring, quote-unquote, not a subjective way of measuring. And that’s why we use, that’s why we have thermometers, exactly. I mean, there’s other problems about, what’s that? How do I come back to it? How do I come back to it? Okay, yeah, we get an objective measure.

[27:16] In other words, what they’re trying to answer is that, oh, yes, there is an independent objective standard for cessation. Is that what they’re trying to do, I guess? Yes. Oh, you know, they obviously use a thermometer. Yeah, they are. But again, no sophisticated philosopher uses that argument. You know why? I mean, think about it, Bill. If I’m going to be a radical, I mean, it’s fun being a radical skeptic. Now, I’m going to say, what’s the connection between the measurement on the thermometer and this hand and this hand? Obviously, what you have here is three different measurements, and there’s no connection between them. Yeah, exactly. See, they’re assuming that if we can depersonalize it, that makes it objective. But now, what’s the relationship between the impersonal and the personal measuring devices? Okay.

[28:07] the problem in epistemology is the problem of perspectival variation okay you’re out on the lake and you’re you know you have your oars you’re you’re rowing on the lake and you look in the water at the oar what do you see you see a bent oar don’t you because of the refraction of light in the water but then you say wow what happened to that oar and you put your hand in the water and you skim down the oar and you say no i feel straight so you look at it and it’s broken not broken but bent you touch it and it feels straight and you say oh okay well that solves it that solves it only if you arbitrarily exalt tactile sense over visual sense right yeah exactly so there are problems with empiricism but i think these are more like mosquito bites over against the hammer blows of what hume was doing here okay so now to appreciate kant you can see that the age of reason. Why would philosophers call it such a thing? The age of reason ended in subjectivism and skepticism, didn’t it? Whether you’re a rationalist or an empiricist, and that led to a collapse of confidence in man’s intellectual ability and the objectivity of knowledge, particularly the objectivity of knowledge of a real orderly world. Neither the rationalist nor the empiricists were able to find a reliable method of knowing. And it turns out that there’s huge disagreements over this instrument called reason and what reason is supposed to be.

[29:41] You know, it’s one thing for the unbelieving world to say, we exalt reason. In the French Revolution, you remember, the goddess of reason was exalted. But if you were an analytical philosopher, you’d say, what are you talking about when you speak of reason? You’re talking about reason as Spinoza understood it, Leibniz, Barclay, Locke, Hume, who? What is reason in the age of reason? Well, it’s a zillion different things. And Kant was scandalized by that. He said the age of reading classed to what? Skepticism.

[30:14] No, subjectivism and skepticism. Does that sound like a familiar tag team? Yeah, right. You said earlier, talking about continental rationalism, that reality equals rationality, reality is rational. Yes, and now we have rational men disagreeing with each other about reality. But really, the particular rationalists determine what reality is. So it’s subjective, which reduces the skepticism. And why do they keep having this problem? Because their fundamental assumption is the autonomy of man. They began with man as the reference point and the final authority.

[30:52] In the history, well, in the way philosophy is taught in secular, well, even in Christian schools, but the way philosophy is taught, it’s as though, well, to do philosophy, you have to assume that. I mean, that’s just, you’re not doing philosophy if you don’t do that. So when we suggest, well, maybe you ought to begin with the theological presupposition, with God, who is the creator of man, rather than with man who then goes out to discover God. But if you suggest that today, you’ll be told, I think, almost invariably, But you’ll be told you’re not doing philosophy, you’re doing theology. And we all know how disreputable theology is. Well, I don’t wince too much when they say, yeah, the only thing is my theology can save your philosophy. So maybe we ought to talk a bit more.

[31:37] Okay, Kant, finally. Kant was scandalized by the situation in philosophy. You have these rationalists and you have these empiricists and they both reduced to subjectivism and skepticism. In particular, he wrote that he was awakened from his dogmatic slumbers by Hume, and Kant was led to alter the view of reason that he had previously held. That’s why the title of his book, his best-known book, most important book, I think, is A Critique of Pure Reason. Kant’s philosophy is sometimes called critical philosophy. He wrote The Critique of Pure Reason in 1781, which is a very obscure and prolix book, but is still considered his masterpiece. The Critique of Practical Reason in 1788, and then The Critique of Judgment in 1790. And so when you write enough books that have the title Critique in it, you get to call your philosophy Critical Philosophy.

[32:40] Kant was awakened from his dogmatic slumbers came to a new view of reason such a new view of reason that he said it amounted to a Copernican revolution in philosophy a Copernican revolution you all know what the Copernican revolution is someone fill me in quick Rich what Geocentric Geocentric yeah And so the geocentric view, which had been promoted by, well, but before him, Ptolemy, had dominated until Copernicus, making use of the telescope and other instruments, said we really have to reorient the way we look at things.

[33:29] It’s not that the earth is stationary, let’s say passive, and everything is active around it. It’s that the earth is active and is actually going around the stationary object, the sun. Likewise, Kant said Locke was wrong to think the mind is passive. The mind is active. In order to make sense out of our thoughts, the mind has got to make them sensible. Not only sensible, but intelligible.

[33:57] and how does the mind make them sensible it always attributes to those sensations coming in time and space predicates the mind actively imposes order on the chaos of the world that we encounter of course I’m assuming it’s a world out there basically Kant said there are things in themselves and we know nothing about them we don’t know the way things are as they really are in and of themselves. We only know them as we experience them. But as we experience them, we impose temporal and spatial characteristics. We impose order on our sensations. Not only do we make our sensations sensible, part of time and space, but we also make them intelligible because we have to categorize them. Our sensations have to be formed as things that are understood causally, substantially, numerically, and so forth. So Kant goes through in the critique an argument for all these different categories in terms of which we must think. Hume had gotten rid of causation and inductive reasoning, saying we don’t ever observe it. If our minds are passive and we only know what impinges on our minds, causation’s never impinged on our mind because nothing necessary, well, to put simply, nothing necessary can be particular and we only sense particular things. So we can’t ever have a sensation of causation or of substance. Kant said, oh, and Hume’s final word is, that’s just the habit of the mind. Kant says, I can save science. I can save causation. I can save substance. Oh, how’s that? Kant says, it’s a habit of the mind. Don’t you get it? I mean, I’m not being cutesy here. That’s an old philosopher’s joke.

[35:46] Basically, Kant took Hume’s despairing conclusion and made it the answer to Hume’s skepticism. Hume said, the only reason we draw causal connections is because we’re in the habit of doing it. It’s a mental habit because he can’t account for habits, given his view of man and so forth. But Kant takes that and says, well, the mind itself imposes actively causal categories in everything.

[36:13] And that’s why if you talk about God, if God’s going to be intelligible to us, we have to ask, where does God come from? Now, Kant also had a portion of his critique that he reserved for the categories of God, world, and self. And on these, he said, though we have to think in terms of these other categories of substance and cause, we can’t draw conclusions from them. They are only limiting notions. The only God that could be intelligible to us would have to be a God that has a cause, but we know better than to say that. God can’t have a cause. So that’s just a way of thinking by which we limit all of our causal reasoning, and then we stop and we call that God. But we don’t really intelligently or intelligibly know God.

[37:02] For Kant, God was part of the noumenal realm. God exists as a thing in itself, and we can’t know God. We can only know God as he would appear to us, and God would have to appear to us in categories amenable to our way of thinking. Our way of thinking is causal, therefore God can’t appear to us in a miraculous way, because for us to think rationally about anything is to reject miracles. Now, this is all very wicked stuff, but it’s also extremely entertaining and clever. What’s it rest on?

[37:39] rest on the assumption that we don’t know the objective world. We only know the internal phenomenal world, the world as it’s experienced by us. And since that world is itself formed, made intelligible by the activity of the mind, then naturally what we think is necessary and what we think in terms of the categories is necessary. Necessary by what? Psychological habit. So Kant said, against rationalism, there are no innate ideas. According to him, nothing can be known rationally apart from experience. So he’s against the rationalist, he favors the empiricist on this one. There are no innate ideas. The mind doesn’t have ideas in it inherently. But against empiricism, the mind is not a tabula rasa. The mind is not passive, it is rather a constructive, active agent, so that what we know is to be attributed not just to the world outside us, but it’s to be attributed to the activity of the mind in constructing a world that is intelligible to us. And so to use the famous line for which Kant is known, concepts without percepts are empty, percepts without concepts are blind. If you only have perceptions and they are not made intelligible by the concepts, they’re blind. But if you only have concepts like causation, substance, whatever, without perceptions, then they’ll be empty. Kant claimed to save science and to make room for faith in this philosophy. How did he save science? Well, he resurrected the causal principle, the principle of unity between perceptions as a substance and so forth.

[39:30] That’s a strange way of saving science, though, because he saves science by claiming that the objects of knowledge must conform to the knowing process. The objects of knowledge don’t believe in conspiracies. I mean, so essentially Kant saves science by subjectivizing it. Science becomes a necessity of our subjective thinking process. I quote Kant again, the understanding is itself the lawgiver of nature. The understanding itself is the lawgiver of nature. So do we find natural laws? Sure we do, but that’s because the understanding imposes those laws. Kant was, accordingly, a metaphysical agnostic.

[40:16] He didn’t know reality, and yet he held to the certainty of the knowing process, and he did so by subjectivizing it now what did we say earlier when philosophies are reduced to subjectivism yeah essentially Kant for all of his transcendent thought for what he was attempting to do Kant himself succumbs to skepticism as well if nothing else Kant doesn’t ever get beyond what’s called the egocentric predicament because if Kant is right about how his mind must think in a certain way, Kant doesn’t show us that all minds must think in that way. He thought he did, but he didn’t. Much more, he did not show that if all minds must think this way, that the objects outside the mind must be like that. Kant called his position transcendental idealism. And the reason he used that language is that he said a transcendental is what is presupposed by experience in order for it to be experienced, or I think it’s easier to say it’s what’s presupposed for an experience to be intelligible. Experience is automatically intelligible for Kant because experience is formed by the mind, okay? So outside of Kantian thinking, we would say an experience, let’s say some kind of input to our senses, is intelligible on certain presuppositions, and those presuppositions are the transcendentals. Transcendental analysis thus asks, what are the preconditions for the intelligibility of human experience? Or under what conditions is it possible to make sense of the world, or to experience, rationally to experience the world?

[42:05] Why don’t we just stop our Christian apologetical search with Kant then? I mean, he was so smart to get onto this transcendental approach. Why aren’t we satisfied with Kant’s transcendental analysis? Well, I’ve already indicated to you that Kant’s transcendental analysis is subjective. It doesn’t really give us any metaphysical information. Kant’s transcendental analysis is psychological and assumes without any warrant the universal psychological operations of men. How did he think he proved that? How did he think he proved what? Well, interpreters will differ with you as to how Kant would answer that. Basically, Kant said, you’re not talking about thinking if they don’t do what I’m telling you.

[42:59] Now, well, okay. But now, is that a linguistic convention? Is that what he was getting at? Or was he trying to objectify psychological processes without any metaphysical bridge? I mean, it’s questionable, you know, how Kant would have gotten out of the dilemma. But Kant himself thought that in the nature of the case, that’s what thinking is. I mean, he thought he was analyzing thinking per se. It’s a critique of pure reason. And so if you’re going to talk about reason, you’re talking about what I’m talking about. I know that’s frustrating. Part of being able to get a PhD in philosophy is to endure a lot of frustration.

[43:39] it comes down to this how do you interpret that reply is Kant saying we’re not using terms in the same way so we don’t have the same conceptual scheme is he a cultural relativist well probably not but on the other hand he didn’t want to be he wasn’t trying to make some kind of empirical psychological observation for which he didn’t have sufficient evidence any Kantians any Kant scholars out there want to offer anything better Mike?

[44:09] Do you get to that point? No. Well, you were saying causations are happening in the mind. And Kant’s coming later, though, that’s a little sign. But I’ll say that’s happening in the mind. But the fact that everyone seems to have the same habit of mind, does he feel a need to explain that? Now, I think that’s one of his unexamined assumptions. And so although this is supposed to be a critique, when you come clean down to your underwear intellectually, Kant left some things unexamined.

[44:38] I did say, I’m trying to justify it with sentimental arguments, pointing out these concepts are necessarily different for our experience and our way to view the world. And from that, I mean, I changed, and plus it in his whole discussion, there’s no other way of conceiving of the world. I can’t conceive of the world without condemnation. I mean, that’s intertwined with the argument that you have to view the world through the prison for condemnation. You have to view the world through the prison for condemnation. It’s just, we can’t make, we can’t make the world conceptual scheme intelligible without those types of things.

[45:12] So to him, I mean, it’s just like Dr. Bahnsen, that’s what thinking is, that to not have that type of stuff in your conceptual scheme, does not have, he didn’t use conceptual scheme language, does not have those things in your conceptual scheme, does not have one at all. And not to have one at all is not to be able to think.

[45:30] According to Kant, reality could not be understood by a single, unified, common set of principles. To understand nature, you have to use causal principles. Now, I have not talked about this next thing, but I’m just putting it out there for you. But to understand morality and human personality, you have to use principles of freedom.

[45:52] And so according to him, even on his own approach, there are two wonders, the starry heavens above and the moral law within and you can’t bring them together that’s poetic language but what he says the way you understand the physical cosmos will not help you understand the moral law and the way you understand the moral law freedom will not help you understand the physical cosmos physical cosmos is governed by causation determinism okay but morality presupposes freedom indeterminism and Kant admitted that and left it out there so does he have a unified worldview no he doesn’t have one at all so i don’t think his transcendental arguments save science as he thought because they really succumb to subjectivism and he doesn’t save philosophy in general because he doesn’t have a common principle by which you can account for things or give explanation there’s two kinds of explanations and he never can bring them together and then one more comment about Kant just so you’ll understand why us Vantilians like what he was trying to do but don’t like the way he did it did Kant save human personality the unity of the person Hume said I’m only a bundle of perceptions and twice I’ve now indicated or more he doesn’t even have the right to say bundle because bundle assumes unity and he doesn’t see any unity there but anyway he knew there was no connection on his philosophy between the perceptions so there couldn’t be any person to have the experience now Kant realizes that’s devastating and that destroys the ability to know anything and so Kant argues that there must be a unity of thinking a subject who thinks but according to him that subject cannot be known observationally obviously by the way having mirrors doesn’t help this problem because you’re You may observe a physical body in the mirror, but you’re not observing, to use Descartes’ language, the mind that experiences and unites all of those experiences.

[48:00] Kant says, you do have to have a subject of thinking, but that subject of thinking cannot be known observationally. The subject of thinking can only be known through its thinking. That is, we only know ourselves in the act of knowing. And in that case, in knowing myself, Kant says, I only know a place, well, I’m using my language, a place marker. The human person is diaphanous. When I look at myself, not my body, but when I look at myself as a knower, I’m really looking through me because the only me there is, is this place marker for all of these experiences that are coming in.

[48:43] so we don’t find that an adequate apologetic to be real obvious god cannot be known because god is in the noumenal realm any god that you could rationally know would have to be subject to scientific determinism no miracles etc etc the only god that you could know would be a god that stands behind the moral law as as a limiting notion that there’ll be a day of judgment if we don’t live up to the rational, moral law within us. But that moral law can’t be related to the world that we know rationally about us either. So he has a dichotomy in his philosophy. And then finally, we don’t even know ourselves except as there’s a philosophical necessity for something to unite apperception. Kant’s word was there’s a transcendental unity of apperception.

[49:38] we must think of ourselves as having perceptions it’s a transcendental necessity but that unity is diaphanous it doesn’t have any content any detail it’s essentially a function a place marker in our thinking the expression i don’t think kant was real proud of that in the sense that he had come up with something grand, I think he would just say that’s the way it is. The point is, with that, I can save rationality. Okay, having introduced Kant in his context, let me bring you up to date now and put transcendental arguments in the context of modern philosophical argument. I have a little chart here that I’ve worked out, so you’ll have some appreciation and understanding of what’s distinctive about the transcendental approach. In the case of Kant, we see the transcendental approach is distinct because he’s not looking for observations to justify his philosophy. He’s not an empiricist. But nor is he trying to look for clear and distinct ideas from which he can deduce the nature of reality. He’s not a rationalist. He’s not doing the rational game, the empiricist game. He’s asking what else must be true in order to make sense out of my thinking as a scientist, my thinking as a logician, or whatever it may be. He’s asking for the presuppositions of the intelligibility of any experience whatsoever.

[51:10] Now, in modern epistemology, you can think of the strategies in the theory of knowledge as being responses, various responses to skepticism. The reason why we need a theory of knowledge is because there are skeptics, basically. It’s possible to ask skeptical questions about what we know. Now, when we answer questions on how we know what we know, we get pushed back to assumptions that we’ve been using. And then the skeptic is going to say, how do you know about those assumptions? And then that may push you back further. But eventually, we reach, in every school of philosophy, what will be called fundamental assumptions. Can your fundamental assumptions be justified? Can they be rationally justified? And in the literature that sometimes is put in this form, can rationality be justified?

[52:02] Because you’ve been trying to show the skeptic, here’s how I know what I know, and you’ve gone through various levels of assumptions. You get down to the bottom, can this rational procedure that you’ve been using itself be justified? And the answer of the skeptic is no. Fundamental assumptions cannot be rationally justified, and therefore all belief systems are ultimately arbitrary. because the standards of justification also need justification if you’re going to be rational. You’ll either have an infinite regress of justifications or you’ll reach some level of commitment that is not rational. So that’s the horns of the dilemma.

[52:41] The skeptic’s argument is you’re either going to have an infinite regress, rational justification with another rational justification behind it, and then another rational justification, and that’s going to go on and on and on, in which case nothing ever gets rationally justified or you’re going to stop your appeal to rational justifications and you’re going to have a commitment that’s not rational and therefore rationality itself is not justified now if the skeptic cannot be answered then we’ve given way to intellectual anarchy or dogmatism anarchy says everything’s relative no one can know for sure, and everyone has the right to believe what they believe, and therefore to do what they want to do. This is where we cross the fine line between academic or intellectual sophistication and the playing out of worldviews. Students who are anarchists in their view of literature, philosophy, ethics, don’t tend to live lives that are not anarchistic, where every man’s a law unto himself. Dogmatism, we already talked about earlier, is the view that you just come down to power plays. You have usually institutional restraints on what can be said or believed or lived out. So you have skepticism needing an answer if we’re going to save rationality. And the attempts to meet the skeptical challenge can be divided into three on my outline, and there’s going to be some subdivisions. First of all, there’s the foundationalist attempt. Foundationalism unites together various epistemologies which want to eliminate arbitrariness in our thinking, want to eliminate prejudice, relativism, unwarranted conjecture, and attempt to obtain cognitive certainty that’s not just a kind of psychological assurance. And the way in which we get cognitive certainty, according to foundationalist epistemologies, is to anchor our beliefs in some kind of a foundation, a foundation of propositions which are themselves unassailable. And then from that foundation, we conduct intellectual inquiries according to some strict rules of reliable method for reasoning, and we don’t admit into our belief system any proposition that hasn’t been certified by its connection to the foundation or other foundationally certified beliefs. And in that way, we can guarantee ourselves an accurate depiction of the world. We’ve used the term you may not be familiar with in calling this foundationalism, but you’re all familiar with this way of thinking. I think this is pretty much the naive approach to epistemology most everybody takes. It’s like, if I know this, then this is founded on this, and this is founded on that. And eventually, I get down to the foundation for all of these beliefs, and they’re built up by some kind of strict method. We may not agree on what that method is, but first we have foundations, then we have reliable method, and we can be assured the skeptic is wrong. We have an accurate depiction of the world, and the foundationalists that I want you to get into your outline, the most important kinds of foundationalism are conceptual or logical, perceptual and then finally common sense foundations a logical foundationalist holds that the standards by which we judge everything are the rules of logic now unfortunately the rules of logic are purely formal and so if that’s the only foundation you have the only knowledge you can get is knowledge which is going to be formalized it’s going to be consistent but it won’t have any details from experience, anything that we know about the world.

[56:32] Perceptual foundationalism holds in one form or another, this is the more empirical approach, that ultimately everything we know needs to be traced back to some kind of perception, the perception thought to be infallible. Of course, that’s not accurate. Our perceptions are not infallible. Our perceptions are at best incorrigible. Maybe I can’t deny the way I see things, but I can’t argue that the way I see things is the way they actually are. And so perceptual foundationalism hits the rocks pretty hard. I mean, the naive empirical approach to epistemology hasn’t fared real well. And even its modern advocates, the logical positivist and others, have reduced themselves to self-contradiction and the inability to talk about their own philosophy.

[57:17] And so you can understand the sympathy that many people have then for common sense foundationalism. The common sense approach can be divided into two different ways of seeing common sense. One says it makes no sense to question the rationality of our standards of rationality. Since we accept these as the standards of rationality by common sense, it makes no sense to now question them. The more popular version of common sense philosophy, however, has been conventionalism, usually linguistic conventionalism. The standards that we call commonsensical are part of a form of life in terms of which we’ve grown up, learned to use language and so forth.

[58:02] Well, common sense, you don’t have to be a sophisticated student of philosophy to see through that. You know, one man’s common sense is another man’s absurdity, isn’t it? And when you run into people who don’t accept what you call common sense, as I said earlier, Wittgenstein said all you can do is yell heretic. And I like Wittgenstein in that, I mean, he knew what he was getting at there. He said there’s no reasoning between these things. These are forms of life. What could I say to somebody who believes something as absurd as that? All I could say is you’re a heretic. I can’t reason with you. I can just dogmatically dismiss you. That’s nonsense to talk that way.

[58:38] Okay. Foundationalism hasn’t fared well. It’s not very popular in our days. There are some people who defend it in the common sense and perceptual forms, but not many. Well, I’ll give you a list of them. Actually, if you want to get my article, what’s the title of it? It’s the one on the nature of science and whether science is objective and invariant. Say it again. Science, subjectivity, and presuppositionalism. You were right. It had three words in it. I’m sorry, Bill. Science, subjectivity, and presuppositionalism.

[59:20] And I give a list of some of the major players in epistemology today, okay? Also, Sellars is the one that I know best perceptual foundationalism defending it today. And you have G.E. Moore and Wittgenstein in terms of common sense or linguistic conventionalism and so forth. Wittgenstein, white business, and the best of those. And Alston’s a good philosopher in terms of knowing his stuff. I don’t have to agree with him to honor his ability.

[59:55] But among evangelical apologists, most tend to be foundationalists. And you’ll have Gordon Clark, who early in his career was a logical foundationalist. Coherence is the test. And then you have the evidentialists like Montgomery and and others who are empirically or they would be perceptual. I say that because ultimately that’s what it has to be. The problem is I’m not sure they thought enough through their theory of knowledge to even know where they fit on the scale here. Maybe I’m being too insulting. I don’t mean to be. But, yeah, they eventually are perceptual foundationalists. They believe that observation is the basis for what we know. Don’t point to historical ideologies like that. Right. What we’ve learned through science.

[60:41] And that leads me to the next way to deal with skepticism, and that’s pragmatism. And I’m grouping together in my way of cutting the cake. This may not be the best way, but it helps me. I’m grouping together under pragmatism two different ways of dealing. They’re related, but they are distinct as well. Two ways of dealing with the skeptical challenge.

[61:04] The first one says we deal with skepticism by referring in some way, in some normative way, to the model of science. The logic of scientific inquiry becomes the paradigm of rationality. And the reason why the skeptic ought to accede to this model of rationality is that it’s the most potentially true and potentially successful way to organize our lives intellectually. So when we study science, I mean, all of us are awed by science, right? Look at its accomplishments. Look at its intellectual restraints, so forth. And so the logic of scientific inquiry is the paradigm of rationality.

[61:51] The difficulty with this is that regardless of what you think of science and its accomplishments, the presuppositions of science must first be defended before science itself is a rational answer to the skeptic. And the general organizing principles of experience, that is the way in which all of our experience is organized, interpreted, and made intelligible, those principles are not appraised by experience itself. And so science, resting on experience and observation, is itself assuming some organizing principles that cannot be scientifically verified or made sense of. They are not themselves appraised by experience.

[62:35] Moreover, whenever you start talking about the model of science, you’re going to be embarrassed by two things. First, there have been plenty of cultures, both simultaneous to our own and previous to our own, that did not follow what we call scientific procedure, but we would call them rational people. To say that what we do today in the natural sciences is the model of science assumes that everybody who did things in a way different than we do them now was irrational. They were irrational. And that’s, of course, that’s nothing more but cultural prejudice talking, talk that way. And so what is it that we have in common with those previous cultures that were rational but didn’t do things in the way that we organized them scientifically at the university?

[63:21] And the other thing, and this is the scandal, I think, of those who try to answer the skeptic by the model of science is there is no model of science oh yeah i mean this is what high school students get and even as you say at the college level entry introductory books of science and that’s because the winners in the scientific revolution write the textbooks and they impose them politically by the way i mean that literally as to what can and cannot be said and so forth but the more you study science its history and also its present operation in the first place there’s no agreement within a narrow field of science if there were you wouldn’t have the oj simpson trial with all the experts you know competing with each other and you know what the judge has to do there notice this this is fascinating he has to decide who is scientifically credible and i’m not putting judge ito down just does judge ito have the standards of rationality to decide who’s really doing genuine science and who’s engaged in quackery that’s a scary thing isn’t it that’s what happens if you say the model of science i mean whose model of science and it’s worse than this though it’s not just that you have different and competing schools of science within a narrow domain you don’t have one scientific procedure used by all the sciences that is extremely naive to say as gilbert ryle once said there’s no one science there are many sciences all of which are rational but rash i mean It’s hard to say, to use a Wittgensteinian phrase, you’d have to say, at best, what makes each of them rational is some kind of family resemblance.

[64:54] But there’s no one thing, there’s no standard move in argumentation among all the sciences. And so you look at the way a particular domain in science reasons, what kinds of backings for argument, what kinds of warrants are used, what argument forms are followed. And they are not the same as what you find in another science. And so psychologists and physicists and astronomers and historians are all doing science and they’re all trying to be rational, but they don’t use a common method, so there are many sciences.

[65:27] The other pragmatic answer to the skeptic, apart from the model of science approach, is the appeal to the success of science or the fruitfulness of science. We can’t answer the skeptic ultimately, but we can point to the fruitfulness of science as attaining its goals. Okay, now the question that has to be asked, though, if you’re a skeptic or just trying to be an honest philosopher is, are the goals of science rational? The problem didn’t go away, it just got rephrased. Are the ultimate assumptions of science rational? Can rationality itself be justified?

[66:03] The pragmatist says, well, it’s certainly fruitful. You say, okay, but is your fruitfulness rational? Well, it achieves its ends. We’re very effective at reaching our goals. Okay, which goal should we be pursuing? Please don’t think that that’s an easy thing to answer. Among the pragmatists in our day, there’s all kinds of differences of opinion. Are we supposed to preserve the species? Is that what it is that makes us rational? It’s arbitrary because they’re choosing the consequence that they want to achieve. But what should we achieve? Should it be an economic consequence, as Marx is saying? Should it be something having to do with the environment? Should it be social egalitarianism? I mean, there’s all sorts of things people are striving for. What’s that? Consideration. Yeah, that’s right. Some. They aren’t usually, you know, warmly welcomed among the pragmatists, but that would be another one.

[66:59] Pragmatism assumes we know what is the one rational end we should be achieving. Well, they have no justification for that. They are rivals to the idea of adjusting to our environment or saving the species or bringing social, you know, equality in terms of what we should be pragmatically pursuing.

[67:19] Well, we’re getting to the end of our day, probably to the end of our ability to think anymore. What are we going to do if the foundationalist and the pragmatist are not able to answer the skeptic? Well, there’s one more form of reasoning, and this is getting back to what Immanuel Kant introduced to us, in terms of a procedure or a way of approaching it. He didn’t successfully do it, I don’t think. But the third way in which the skeptic can be met is to offer a transcendental argument. And the transcendental argument takes the form of saying that we know something is true from the impossibility of the contrary.

[67:55] that’s one way of putting it or what we’re looking for is the precondition for the intelligibility of experience we say there are certain things we know to be true because those things are the precondition or the presupposition for intelligibility so now the skeptic can keep blathering all he wants but our point is as long as you want to argue mr skeptic you’re presupposing the intelligibility of what you’re saying and so you’ve been met on your own ground and it turns out you can’t pursue your skeptical argument without this metaphysic or worldview in terms of which your language your argument can make sense okay hopefully this gives you uh something of a map for the landscape of modern epistemology it doesn’t tell you everything by any means but the big hills should be easy to see. You have the skeptic who is really the troublemaker among us all, and the skeptic is going to be answered either in a foundationalist, pragmatic, or transcendental fashion. How does this apply to my opening statement this morning? I believe there’s an objective proof for God’s existence. Well, we have skeptics out there, religious skeptics and other kinds, right? They say, we can’t know these things. Some Christians say, let’s try to satisfy the skeptic with foundational answers others are willing to say christianity works the best you know and this is really the model for how to live your life yet others will say we can meet the skeptic by saying that even your argument presupposes the truth of what we believe because without what we believe your argument wouldn’t be intelligible that’s the strength of the transcendental approach when we regather in the morning i’m going to ask mike butler to take our morning session and if you need some more time a little more after but at least our morning session and go over modern transcendental arguments and what are some of the issues that are involved there so tonight if you wish to prepare for that make sure you look at the everybody received in the mail I think an encyclopedia entry on transcendental arguments and I know it’s not the easiest reading but go back and read Kant you were also sent that material go slow that’s very well written I thought that was very helpful and then the material on transcendental arguments so you’ll be able to enter into Mike’s discussion thanks a lot Thank you.