Kant's Critique Of Pure Reason

Kant published the Critique of Pure Reason in 1781. Kant’s goal was to determine the limits of pure reason which means that he wants to know what reason alone can determine without the help of the senses or any other faculties. Kant is encouraged by Hume’s skepticism to doubt metaphysics existence. Kant makes a differentiation between priori and posteriori knowledge and between analytic and synthetic judgments. A posteriori knowledge is knowledge from experience and a priori knowledge is the necessary and universal knowledge we have independent of experience, such as our knowledge of mathematics. In an analytic judgment, the concept in the predicate is contained in the concept in the subject, as, for instance, in the judgment, “a bachelor …show more content…
Although distinctions similar to Kant’s a priori–a posteriori distinction and his synthetic–analytic distinction have been made by thinkers such as Hume and Leibniz, Kant is the first to apply two such distinctions to generate a third category for knowledge. Hume, for instance, does not distinguish between what Kant calls the analytic and the a priori and what he calls the synthetic and the a posteriori, so that, for Hume, all synthetic judgments are necessarily a posteriori. Since only a priori truths have the important qualities of being universal and necessary, all general truths about reality—as opposed to particular observations about unconnected events—must be a priori. If our a priori knowledge is limited to definitional analytic judgments, then Hume is right in concluding that rationally justified knowledge of universal and necessary truths is impossible. Kant’s coup comes in determining that synthetic judgments can also be a priori. He shows that mathematics and scientific principles are neither analytic nor a posteriori, and he provides an explanation for the category of the synthetic a priori by arguing that our mental faculties shape our