(I know the exchange isn’t primarily about Kant, but...)
Kant certainly isn’t a “distrusting logical reasoning” kind of guy. He takes for granted that “analytic” (i.e. purely deductive) reasoning is possible and truth-preserving. His mission is to explain (in light of Hume’s problem) how “synthetic a priori knowledge” is possible (with a secondary mission of exposing all previous work on metaphysics as nonsense). “Synthetic a priori knowledge” includes mathematics (which he doesn’t regard as just a variety or application of deductive logic), our knowledge of space and time, and Newtonian science.
His solution is essentially to argue that having our sensory presentations structured in space and time, and perceiving causal relations among them, is universally necessary in order for consciousness to exist at all. Since we are conscious, we can know a priori that the necessary conditions for consciousness obtain. [Disclaimer: This quick thumbnail sketch doesn’t pretend to be adequate. Neither am I convinced that the theory even makes sense.]
What Kant says we cannot know is how things (“really”) are, considered independently of the universal and necessary conditions for the possibility of experience. As far as I can tell, this boils down to “it’s not possible to know the answers to questions that transcend the limits of possible experience”. For instance, according to Kant we cannot know whether the universe is finite or infinite, whether it has a beginning in time, whether we have free will, or whether God exists.
It’s important to understand that Kant is an “empirical realist”, which means that the objects of experience—the coffee cups, rocks and stars around us—really do exist and we can acquire knowledge of them and their spatiotemporal and causal relations. However, if the universe could be considered ‘as it is in itself’ - independently of our minds—those spatiotemporal and causal relations would disappear (rather like how co-ordinates disappear when you consider a sphere objectively).
(I know the exchange isn’t primarily about Kant, but...)
Kant certainly isn’t a “distrusting logical reasoning” kind of guy. He takes for granted that “analytic” (i.e. purely deductive) reasoning is possible and truth-preserving. His mission is to explain (in light of Hume’s problem) how “synthetic a priori knowledge” is possible (with a secondary mission of exposing all previous work on metaphysics as nonsense). “Synthetic a priori knowledge” includes mathematics (which he doesn’t regard as just a variety or application of deductive logic), our knowledge of space and time, and Newtonian science.
His solution is essentially to argue that having our sensory presentations structured in space and time, and perceiving causal relations among them, is universally necessary in order for consciousness to exist at all. Since we are conscious, we can know a priori that the necessary conditions for consciousness obtain. [Disclaimer: This quick thumbnail sketch doesn’t pretend to be adequate. Neither am I convinced that the theory even makes sense.]
What Kant says we cannot know is how things (“really”) are, considered independently of the universal and necessary conditions for the possibility of experience. As far as I can tell, this boils down to “it’s not possible to know the answers to questions that transcend the limits of possible experience”. For instance, according to Kant we cannot know whether the universe is finite or infinite, whether it has a beginning in time, whether we have free will, or whether God exists.
It’s important to understand that Kant is an “empirical realist”, which means that the objects of experience—the coffee cups, rocks and stars around us—really do exist and we can acquire knowledge of them and their spatiotemporal and causal relations. However, if the universe could be considered ‘as it is in itself’ - independently of our minds—those spatiotemporal and causal relations would disappear (rather like how co-ordinates disappear when you consider a sphere objectively).
(It’s similar to the dust theory.)