칸트의 인과론 연구

Abstract

We are trying to figure out various events taking place in the world based on causality. Some people argue that such causality should be absolutely hard and fast. Such cases are found in the theories of Plato and Descartes. Others maintain that causality should keep changing. Such arguments are found in the theories of Hume. Kant, however, proposed his original opinions on causality, which were the focus of this study. Kant claimed that those above-mentioned philosophers interpreted causality in a wrong way for the following reasons: according to Kant, human reason is destined to move forward toward something limitless. Human reason thus sets the beginning point of cause and effect to escape from such suffering, and those philosophers neglected it according to him. Another argument of his was that space and time should be the forms of intuition. Traditional philosophers, however, set space and time as something having nothing to do with human beings or saw that space and time belonged to things. Kant thus pointed out that it would be irrational for human beings to apply causality in areas beyond space and time based on his own arguments. He also maintained that causality should be able to obtain objective validity through categorization, which is a form of pure intelligence with no experiential elements to him. We should be careful here to understand that those forms of Kant do not mean the innate ideas argued by rationalists. Kant calls them transcendental. His transcendental philosophy should be clearly distinguished from the term, transcendent, used by rationalists. It does not merely mean existence before experience on the timeline since such existence means an innate idea. Kant thus defined transcendental as allowing for an experience in advance logically. In addition, Kant maintained in his first inference that substantiality should be the subject of causality. If substantiality is not a premise to Kant, we will be unable to perceive any changes since there will be no criteria to perceive changes except for substantiality. In his second inference, Kant proposes the essence of causality. According to him, the combination of cause and effect is objective when the time order is irreversible. Furthermore, he argued that such time order should not be defined by an experience but by a logical relation intuitively. Finally, he claimed for interactions among substances in his third inference. All perceptions will be severed from one another and causality will be impossible without those properties. Kant maintained that nature should be the whole of phenomena through those interactions and that man should be able to pursue universal and valid knowledge about nature.