Hume & Kant on a Common Project re Causality

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Veritas Aequitas
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Hume & Kant on a Common Project re Causality

Post by Veritas Aequitas »

The general view is Kant was refuting Hume on the issue of Causality.
As I had written in the other post, the original rationalist-Kant was woken from his dogmatic slumber by Hume's Theory of Causality; but whilst Kant was very appreciative of Hume's work [purely empirical] and agreeing with it partially, he did not agree with Hume totally.
Then Kant went on to improve on the Theory of Causality on a combined Empirical-Reason Model.

Here is an article by Lewis W Beck on Hume and Kant on a Common Project re Causality.
A Prussian Hume and a Scottish Kant
Chapter 7 in Essays on Kant and Hume
LEWIS WHITE BECK
https://www.amazon.com/Essays-Kant-Hume ... 0300021704

In a letter to Herder written in 1781, Hamann said of Kant: "He certainly deserves the title, 'a Prussian Hume.” "1
No one, so far as I know, has had the temerity to state explicitly that Hume deserves the title, "a Scottish Kant.”
But almost.
One trend in contemporary Hume interpretation may finally lead someone to make this claim, or accusation.
H. H. Price refers to "a Scottish version of Kant's Copernican Revolution.2
Robert Paul Wolff finds that Hume's propensities "play a role quite similar to that of the categories in the Critique of Pure Reason.3
W. H. Walsh says of the Humean Imagination that it is "simply the Kantian Understanding in disguise.4

The traditional notion that Kant and Hume are diametrically opposed, and that whatever merit Kant's philosophy has depends upon his having given a cogent "answer to Hume," does not seem as obvious as it used to.

While no one would deny that the great divide between naturalism and transcendentalism s in the theory of knowledge separates these two thinkers,
even that divide is not as clear-cut as it once appeared,
and is now rendered somewhat obscure by emphasis upon a pragmatism 6 believed to be pervasive in their constructions of a common world out of private experiences.
With growing attention to the role of normative structures in Hume's analysis of experience,
and to the possibility of relativizing the hard, fixed categorial lines found in Kant's analysis,
it becomes possible to see Kant and Hume as engaged in a common project.”

I do not wish to go too far and talk as if the differences were less important than the similarities between these two men.
But I do wish to make it appear meet, fitting, and seemly to talk about Kant in a gathering called to celebrate the life and work of Hume—something that would, I think, have appeared thirty or forty years ago to be in bad taste.

The problem of Causation has traditionally been seen as the bone of contention between Hume and Kant.

I shall, on the contrary, argue that it is precisely here that a surprising degree of accommodation between them is possible.
For more details read Chapter 7 in the above book.

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