Introduction

The introduction investigates the literature on Kant’s awakening by Hume. It begins by considering the view, which goes back to Vaihinger and Kemp Smith, that Hume woke Kant by challenging the causal principle defended in the Second Analogy, the principle that every event has a cause. It then takes up the attempts of Kuehn and then of Gawlick and Kreimendahl, in the 1980s, to reconcile Kant’s declaration of his debt to Hume with a later assertion that it was the Antinomy that woke him. Finally, it addresses the rich literature on the topic that has developed in the present century, and in particular the views of Hatfield, Watkins, Forster, and De Pierris and Friedman.

Kant On Temporal Extension: Embodied, Indexical Idealism

I defend what I take to be a genuinely Kantian view on temporal extension: time is not an object but a human horizon of concrete particulars. As such, time depends on the existence of embodied human subjects. It does not, however, depend on those subjects determined as spatial objects. Starting with a realist notion of “apperception” as applied to indexical space (1), I proceed with the need for external criteria of temporal duration (2). In accordance with Kant’s Second Analogy of Experience, these criteria are found in concepts and laws of motion and change (3). I then see what follows from this for a reasonable notion of transcendental idealism (4). Finally, in support of my Kantian conclusions, I argue for the transcendentally subjective nature of particular temporal extension (5).

Kantian Prequel

This chapter argues that Kant in the Critique of Pure Reasons and his Prolegomena problematized the distinction between substance and attribute long before the advent of analytic philosophy. Kant did so because he realized that the distinction between the concepts of substance and attribute is problematic if the concept of causation is problematic, for the reasons Hume gave. Kant’s efforts, including his Metaphysical Deduction and Second Analogy, to transcendentally justify the employment of the category of substantia et accidens were ultimately a failure. This set the stage for Moore’s conceptual realism, an ontological scheme free of both substances and attributes.

How the Understanding Prescribes Form without Prescribing Content – Kant on Empirical Laws in the Second Analogy of Experience

Kant claims that the understanding prescribes the existence and necessity of empirical laws to nature, while it does not prescribe which particular empirical laws hold. That is to say, the understanding prescribes the general form of nature (lawfulness) and the form of the empirical laws (necessity) without prescribing the material content. But how is this possible? How can the understanding guarantee that there are necessary empirical laws without prescribing particular empirical laws to nature? In this paper, I want to answer this question by analyzing Kant’s argument for the Second Analogy of Experience in combination with an analysis of his conception of actuality. As I want to show, an application of Kant’s conception of actuality to the argument for the Second Analogy not only fills a gap in this argument, but also leads to an explanation of how the understanding can prescribe lawfulness to nature without prescribing particular laws.