Kant to Skeptics: Drop Dead

I Kant on Knowledge

Kant to Skeptics: Drop Dead

The Kantian Copernican Revolution was that reality has to conform to minds, and minds do not have to conform to reality.

Kant also divides reality into phenomenal and noumenal. Phenomenal is experience and potential experience, noumenal is things in themselves.

He makes a move like time and space are transcendentally ideal. This means that time and space are objective and absolutely outside of minds, and so are objectively real. This also means that they are subjectively real, they exist in minds.

He makes a move from mathematical, without-experience truths, such as the physical laws of nature (e=mc squared, rules of logic, and rules of math) and with-experience truths, such as natural facts (anything from experience, like looking out the window or having an apple fall on your head).

He makes a move from what can be known from analysis of definitions (analytic truths) and what comes from our minds (what he calls synthesis).

He then states that the greatest information about our worlds is what we supply from our minds' without-experience knowledge. These is synthetic, a priori truth.

The synthesis comes from a simultaneously controversial (because its in our brains only) and modest (well, is the right to substance that big of a deal?) ownership of each mind of a series of Categories. To basically everyone, the Categories are very controversial because they come from our individual brains. To me, they seem pretty modest because they are stuff like the ability to differentiate one thing from a whole bunch of things.

Space and time introduce this argument because they are a premise to step on. All of this happens in our conceptions of space, which are subjective, but exist necessarily in the world.


II Morality

Kant then takes all of these important lessons and applies them to Morality.

The Categorical Imperative says that every means should be treated as an end in itself.


That is, the ends never justifies dubious means.


This is a swell answer to promised Utopias achieved from heinous means.

So the Holocaust is right out because the means do not justify the ends.


Kant's Categorical Imperative is not just above the (obvious) abolition of the Holocaust.

The CI is above all consequences!


But more on this later.