|
If only one question is answered, let it be this one: How does Kant come to the conclusion that sythetic aprior judgements are possible? He's not just saying that we can make them, but that we can KNOW them, right? His example is "every happening has a cause". How does he conclude that we know that?
I recently bought The Critique of Pure Reason, but I haven't actually read it at all, yet. Although I don't really know the terminology, I can tell you this much:
The whole idea behind synthetic a priori knowledge is that you can take normal (I think analytic is the word for it) a priori knowledge, and derive further things from it. In the case of that one example, he takes the most basic a priori facts (or whatever he calls them), space and time, and derives from them the synthetic a priori fact that every happening has a cause. Because if absolutely everything operates in both space and time at all times, nothing is truly isolated, and everything must be part of a continuous chain of events.
I think what the theory of Relativity and other theories like it did to screw with Kant's theory was show that we <i>can</i> know things that don't fit with our functions of perception. We don't figure them out directly, but we can discover them through math and science.
And yes, the most important step in making the theory of Relativity possible was figuring out how screwy light was. If Einstein had been born 50 years earlier he never would have come up with any of those theories.
|