Oxford Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason

Oxford Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason

Just what is Kants project

Lecture 1/8. Both sense and reason are limited. Kant must identify the proper mission and domain of each, as well as the manner in which their separate functions come to be integrated in what is finally the inter-subjectively settled knowledge of science.

The broader philosophical context

Lecture 2/8. The significant advances in physics in the 17th century stood in vivid contrast to the stagnation of traditional metaphysics, but why should metaphysics be conceived as a “science” in the first place?

Space, time and the Analogies of Experiences

Lecture 3/8. Kant’s so-called “Copernican” revolution in metaphysics begins with the recognition of the observer’s contribution to the observation.

How are a priori synthetic judgements possible

Lecture 4/8. Kant claims that, “our sense representation is not a representation of things in themselves, but of the way in which they appear to us.

Idealisms and their refutations

Lecture 5/8. The very possibility of self-awareness (an “inner sense” with content) requires an awareness of an external world by way of “outer sense”. Only through awareness of stable elements in the external world is self-consciousness possible.

Concepts, judgement and the Transcendental Deduction of the Categories

Lecture 6/8. Empiricists have no explanation for how we move from “mere forms of thought” to objective concepts. The conditions necessary for the knowledge of an object require a priori categories as the enabling conditions of all human understanding.

The Self and the Synthetic Unity of Apperception

Lecture 7/8. Kant argues that: “The synthetic unity of consciousness is… an objective condition of all knowledge.

The discipline of reason The paralogisms and Antinomies of Pure Reason.

Lecture 8/8. Reason, properly disciplined, draws permissible inferences from the resulting concepts of the understanding. The outcome is knowledge.