Kant's Critique of Pure Reason

A lecture series examining Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. This series looks at German Philosopher Immanuel Kant's seminal philosophical work 'The Critique of Pure Reason'. The lectures aim to outline and discuss some of the key philosophical issues raised in the book and to offer students and individuals thought provoking Kantian ideas surrounding metaphysics. Each lecture looks at particular questions raised in the work such as how do we know what we know and how do we find out about the world, dissects these questions with reference to Kant's work and discusses the broader philosophical implications. Anyone with an interest in Kant and philosophy will find these lectures thought provoking but accessible.

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Episodes

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. When rightly employed, the perceptual and cognitive powers match up the right way with the real world and ground the knowledge-claims of the developed sciences. However, there is a strong tendency to stretch these processes beyond the permissible boundaries and seek what Kant refers to as "transcendental ideas" that go beyond the realm of actual or p...

Mar 16, 2011•37 min

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. It is not merely a condition that I myself require in knowing an object, but is a condition under which every intuition must stand in order to become an object for me".

Mar 16, 2011•42 min

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.

Mar 16, 2011•40 min

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.

Mar 16, 2011•43 min

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. Hence it follows that the propositions of geometry... cannot be referred with the assurance to actual objects; but rather that they are necessarily valid of space... [and] space is nothing else than the form of all external appearances". [Prolegomena 286-287]

Mar 16, 2011•40 min

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. Thus, to the extent that Hume's empiricism restricts knowledge to experience, empiricism succeeds only by accepting the a priori grounding of experience itself.

Mar 16, 2011•49 min

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?

Mar 16, 2011•45 min

Just what is Kant's "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.

Mar 16, 2011•47 min

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