Right. Kant's argument against the principle of causality follows almost trivially from Kant's epistemology and collapses into the more general problem of how to break out of the subjective into the objective, which itself presupposes the argument from illusion's success.

Without Kant's epistemology, the argument doesn't make sense. True, we derive our knowledge of the principle of causality from our experience of sensible things (ie. things which can be sensed). It doesn't, however, follow that it cannot be applied beyond the realm of our sensory experience.

On Thomism in specific, things require causes because their essences must be conjoined with acts of existing. This is a pre-requisite for everything (including any non-sensible beings that might exist) except that in which essence and existence are identical. Hence, Thomists have good reason to not doubt that the principle of causality applies beyond the realm of sensible entities. All this presupposes a Thomistic epistemology over Kant's epistemology, but to simply insist on Kant's epistemology over Thomism's is just to beg the question against Thomism.[1]

Kantians may, however, reverse this charge and point out that to simply assume a Thomistic epistemology over a Kantian epistemology is just to beg the question against Kantianism. So, a more thorough reply needs to actually deal with Kant's arguments for his epistemology.

[1]The reply up to this point is a paraphrase of Ed's to Kant in Aquinas.

iwpoe wrote:

Kant simply assumes his way to that kind of objection. A Thomist has open to say (and a Hegelian, in a different way) that if you take that rout the very general intelligibility of the world threatens to be some mere fact of individual consciousness.

If you go down the Hegel rout and push hard on the mere distinction between subjective and objective in Kant it becomes very hard to even see what allows Kant to talk of a subject *as opposed to* an external objective world (the "thing in itself"), and you end up returning to a modified form of the traditional metaphysics.

Agreed.

Peter Coffey's Epistemology Part I & Part II.

buffgbob wrote:

Not having read Kant, I assumed that there would be good arguments for his epistomology.  What seems especially critical is that the thing in itself is somehow unknowable or alien.  I definetly got the impression from various SEP articles that the thing in itself was not a well formed concept.  Now it's also not so suprising that I couldn't find an argument for this distinction.

I'll check that Peter Coffey's books when I have time.  Thanks for the resources.
 

Kant's epistemology was justified not by a good objective argument but by its argument *in the context of* the best "live options" for epistemology at the time (usually represented rather grossly by empiricism on one side and rationalism on the other).

In that *context* the reason that he asserts a "thing in itself" and the whole rest of his aparatus is clear. Empiricism is entirely motivated by a denial of access. Access to what? Things in themselves. Kant keeps that denial but holds on to the general inteligiblilty of the world as rationalists concieve it.

Last edited by iwpoe (10/06/2015 11:20 am)

I'm going to give a more sympathetic account of Kant's position.

For Kant, the proper object of every concept must be something that you could find in experience.

Now, you can take your general concept of "an object X of experience" and abstract away any part of this concept that refers to its being found in experience.  The remaining "denuded" concept will be that of "an object X in general".  But, by that point, the concept would be so general as to be almost vacuous.

While you could proceed to manipulate this concept according to the rules of logic, none of your inferences would count as knowledge about anything beyond what could be found in a possible experience.  For, your inferences would still be valid of the original "pre-denuded" concept, namely, "an object X of experience".  Removing the proviso "of experience" doesn't open up any new avenues of inference.  (Analogously, any valid logical inference about balls in general is also valid if restricted to red balls in particular. For, if the inference failed when applied to red balls, then it couldn't be true of an arbitrary ball [which could be red, after all], and hence it couldn't be true of balls in general.)  Therefore, such a concept can't teach you anything about whatever is beyond experience as such.

You could further mutilate your concept of "an object X" by adding the negation of experience.  This would leave you with the concept of "an object X, but not one of experience".  But, in Kant's view, merely negating part of a concept cannot open up any new inferences.  You're merely "cutting the legs out from under" some of the inferences that applied to the original concept.  You learn nothing positive about such an object X.  You only learn that any predicate that entails the possibility of being experienced does not apply to X.

Nonetheless, Kant says that we can know that something exists beyond the experienceable. For, he claims, the manifold of experience always points to its own incompleteness.  For example, it can never contain a complete causal series.  It is a rule of reason that every event in experience has a cause.  However far back we have pushed our knowledge of the causal series, reason insists that there must be events further back in the causal series to account for the ones that we already know about.  This is one sense in which experience points to its own incompleteness.

More abstractly, the manifold of experience is (according to Kant) something that we construct to give order and unity to our sensations.  It is constructed according to the rule that everything in experience rests on, or "points back to", something as its condition, as that by which the thing is determined to be as it is.  Thus, if the totality of experience were all that there were, there would be nothing for experience itself to rest on, contrary to the rule according to which experience itself was constructed, namely that everything in experience rests on something else as its condition.

Hence, we are compelled to acknowledge that there is something X that is beyond experience and which is the condition of experience.  But of this thing X we can form only the nearly vacuous concept of "an object X, but not one of experience" that I discussed above.  We cannot add anything positive to the concept to replace what we removed when we negated the "in experience" part.

For example, we cannot attribute divine simplicity to the thing X.  Yes, our concept of X is certainly simple, for anything on the basis of which a distinction among components of X could be made has been abstracted away.  But this does not justify a judgment about whether X itself is simple.  We can't even form the concepts of the alternatives that such a judgment would consider.  That is, we cannot form the concept of such a thing X with parts, nor of such a thing X without parts.  (We can add the predicate "has parts" to the concept, but this is mere logical legerdemain. We can't form a concept of such a thing having parts, or lacking them, in a particular way.  So we can't judge whether such a concept actually applies to any actual object beyond experience.)

Thus, while we can see that experience itself points outside of itself to something beyond, we can get no grasp on what is beyond, much less on whether there is something beyond that, and so on.  If we could follow the pointer to its end, we would arrive at God.  But we can only acknowledge the pointer.  We must concede the incompleteness of our experience, indeed of any possible totality of experience.  Sometimes we can follow the pointer a short ways and bring something further within experience, as when we seek out the cause of the earliest cause that we know so far.  But the addition to our experience still leaves us with something incomplete, which still has a pointer pointing to something beyond itself, indeed to something beyond all possible experience.  Our knowledge cannot reach to the ultimate pointed-at.

I gather that Aquinas's response would appeal to the doctrine of analogy.  (Here I am very open to correction.)  As I understand it, Aquinas would agree that we can form no positive concept of God.  But we can still have knowledge about God, because we can know that analogues of concepts that we do have do apply to God.

The "pointing" language was just my attempt to render what seemed to me to be the plain reading of the first Critique. I didn't realize that I was stumbling into a controversial interpretation! I haven't read Husserl yet, so I didn't get it from him. To be honest, I am not as familiar as I should be with continental philosophy after Kant. I've read some Heidegger, who was a student of Husserl, and who does use "pointing" language, but not to say what I'm attributing to Kant. (Or, at least, I didn't consciously make that connection.)

I should clarify something that I may have expressed poorly above. For Kant, experience doesn't contain pointers that point at noumena, strictly speaking. To explain what I mean by "strictly speaking", let me distinguish the following three cases of "pointing":

(1) A finger pointing at the Moon in the sky.

(2) The track left by a subatomic particle in a bubble chamber.

(3) The inadequacy of the totality of experience to account for its own existence.

In the first case, our eyes can follow the finger to look directly at the Moon. The pointing brings the pointed-at within the realm of the actually experienced.

In the second case, we can see only the track itself (in a photograph, say). The track "points at" the subatomic particle, but the particle itself is merely inferred, not experienced. We cannot follow the track as if it were the finger in Case (1) to gaze upon the particle itself.

Nonetheless, as with the finger in Case (1), we can use the track somehow to add the particle itself to the "furniture" with which we populate the world. We acquire a concept of the particle as an object within the empirical world that we inhabit. We have real knowledge of the particle itself. Moreover, Kant would insist that the particle itself is a possible experience. We'd just need a sufficiently strong microscope to see it directly. That power of magnification may be forever beyond our ability as a practical matter, but it remains possible, in the relevant sense.

The third case is like neither of these. We cannot in any sense "follow" the pointer to acquire knowledge of anything beyond experience. For, strictly speaking, this pointer points only at the incompleteness of the totality of experience. The pointer does not point at whatever it is that would "complete" experience. The pointer does not point at whatever it is that, when taken together with experience, constitutes a complete totality with no deficit. It's like an arrow that points at the edge of a hole, but which doesn't point at whatever is within the hole, or even at the hole itself.

I was clearest about this above when I wrote that "the manifold of experience always points to its own incompleteness." Unfortunately, I also made the same claim in words that were open to misinterpretation. For example, I wrote that "experience itself points outside of itself to something beyond", and I wrote of "a pointer pointing to something beyond itself, indeed to something beyond all possible experience". That was a misleading way to write.

Strictly speaking, the "pointer" points only to experience's own incompleteness. Talk about "pointing to something beyond" has to be understood as shorthand for "pointing to there being something beyond", which, in turn, is more accurately rendered as "pointing to the necessity of rejecting the claim that there is nothing beyond."

iwpoe wrote:

Also, where specifically are you drawing that "something X that is beyond experience and which is the condition of experience" bit? I know it's certainly a Neo-Kantian way of talking that Husserl also takes up and develops in his own more accommodating framework, but I thought Kant speaks of the noumena more as a mere abstraction from experience not something as intimately bound to it as all of that.

Here are a couple quotations that I read this way.

The much-discussed question of the communion between the thinking and the extended, if we leave aside all that is merely fictitious, comes then simply to this: how in a thinking subject outer intuition, namely, that of space, with its filling-in of shape and motion, is possible. And this is a question which no man can possibly answer. This gap in our knowledge can never be filled; all that can be done is to indicate it through the ascription of outer appearances to that transcendental object which is the cause of this species of representations, but of which we can have no knowledge whatsoever and of which we shall never acquire any concept.

[CoPR, A393]

[T]o think an intelligible [i.e., transcendental] ground of the appearances, that is, of the sensible world, and to think it as free from the contingency of appearances, does not conflict either with the unlimited empirical regress in the series of appearances nor with their thoroughgoing contingency. That, indeed, is all that we had to do in order to remove the apparent antinomy; and it can be done in this way only. If for everything conditioned in its existence the condition is always sensible, and therefore belongs to the series, it must itself in turn be conditioned, as we have shown in the antithesis of the fourth antinomy. Either, therefore, reason through its demand for the unconditioned must remain in conflict with itself, or this unconditioned must be posited outside the series, in the intelligible.

[CoPR A563/B591]