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Introduction Causation was an important topic for Kant. In fact, if we take him at his word, then perhaps, in terms of his order of discovery, it was the most important topic for him. Of course, Kant famously confessed that “the recollection of David Hume was just the thing which many years ago first interrupted my dogmatic slumber, and gave my investigations in the field of speculative philosophy a completely different direction” (Prolegomena, 260).1 What was it in Hume’s writings that affected Kant so powerfully? It was Hume’s treatment of cause and effect. Kant tells us that “Hume started principally from a single but important concept of metaphysics, namely that of the connection of cause and effect” (Prolegomena, 257). Kant sees Hume as presenting us with a dilemma. From a pre-critical framework,2 there were two ways we could think about the concept of cause and effect. On the one hand, the connection of cause and effect could be a conceptual connection produced through reason. In what should have been a startling result,3 however, Kant tells us that Hume proved incontrovertibly that it would be completely impossible for reason to think such a combination a priori and from concepts, because this contains necessity. However, it cannot be seen how, because something exists, something else must also necessarily exist, and thus how the concept of such a connection can be introduced a priori. (Prolegomena, 257–58) Kant’s first step out of his dogmatic slumber was to realize that Hume was right. That is, concepts alone cannot give us any necessary connection between objects and so concepts alone cannot be the source of our concept of cause and effect. So the concept of cause and effect must come from somewhere else. xi 1. All translations from the Prolegomena are my own. The text used is from Werke Volume III, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel (Wiesbaden: Insel-Verlag, 1956), however the page number references are to the standard page numbers of volume IV of Kants gesammelte Schriften, ed. Königlichen Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co., 1902). 2. That is to say, the philosophical framework shared by all thinkers before Kant developed his new philosophical framework as first presented in the Critique of Pure Reason. 3. I say should have been a startling result here because Kant does not believe others were startled by Hume’s conclusion because they did not actually understand Hume’s conclusion. In this regard Kant particularly mentions Reid, Oswald, Beattie, and Priestly. See Prolegomena, 258–59. xii INTRODUCTION So what is the other horn of the dilemma? Kant puts this quite colorfully . He tells us since reason cannot produce the connection of cause and effect through concepts, then this, in turn, led Hume to conclude that reason is altogether deceived with regard to this concept, which she falsely thinks of as her own child, yet it would be nothing other than a bastard of imagination that, impregnated through experience, brought certain representations under the law of association, and substituted a subjective necessity arising from it, i.e., habit, for an objective [necessity] from understanding [Einsicht]. (Prolegomena, 258) Although Kant recognizes the force of Hume’s conclusion that it is only through the force of habit that we are able to make the connection between objects, he is simply unwilling to accept this conclusion. This is Kant’s second step out of his dogmatic slumber. Now, he may be making progress, but Kant realized that he still needed to find a way to solve Hume’s problem. With this in mind, he set out to determine whether Hume’s problem was unique. That is, whether the concept of causation was the only one subject to Hume’s criticisms. Kant tells us that he quickly realized it was not unique at all. For he soon found that the concept of the connection of cause and effect is by far not the only one through which the understanding thinks a priori the connection of things, but rather that metaphysics consists entirely of this. (Prolegomena, 260) This of course does not solve anything. On the contrary, there is a clear sense in which this just makes things worse. From a pre-critical framework, this would simply subject all of metaphysics to a generalized version of Hume’s dilemma concerning cause and effect. Kant quickly realized that since through concepts alone, reason cannot make any connections between objects a priori, then this generalized version of the...

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