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6. Kant’s Proofs of Substance and Causation 1. preliminary remarks Kant’s views on the nature of causation and substance do not depend on any compromise between or any combination of rationalism and empiricism, but on what he calls a “third thing,” the pure intuition of time, which is completely missing in both rationalism and empiricism. For Kant the empiricist position on causation fails to establish the necessary connection between events, that one event “arises out of” or “emerges” from another. Besides constant conjunction in experience Kant grants the empiricist “empirical” universality through induction (A91, B124, pp. 124–25),1 or completely universal generalization. This universality, however, only implies that all events whatsoever of a certain type are followed by events of a second type—but not that any particular event of the first type forces, produces, or necessarily yields an event of the second type. The regularity theory that defines causation in terms of subsumption under inductively allowable universal generalization2 simply fails to account for the connection in singular causation. For Kant, the rationalist position on causation is that the causal connection is a connection of inference in the intellect, viz., that the existence of a second event can be inferred or deduced from a first event (A243, B301, p. 262).3 But for Kant this idea of inferring existence makes no sense apart from causation (one event’s producing or yielding another) and so cannot explain it.4 95 1. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (Boston: Bedford , 1965). All references are to this edition. 2. For Kant a “true” (as opposed to an inductive) universal would hold that all events whatsoever of a certain type force or produce events of a second type, and so would contain necessity. 3. For this view, see, for example, Spinoza’s Ethics, book 1, axioms 4 and 5, and proposition 3, where the effect is said to be “apprehended” or “understood” by means of the cause. 4. For example, transformations between mathematical equations have to be interpreted as signifying real causal processes before the mathematical deducibility counts as an explanation of a transition in existence. A variant of the rationalist view is that causation is to be understood in terms of explanation. Thus, if we have an explanatory theory according to which an event explains another event, that is all there is to the first event causing the second one. If we combine this rationalism with the empiricist’s regularity theory, we simply get as an analysis of causation that events come under a universal regularity that is also explanatory (a consequence of an explanatory theory). Such a combination is not Kant’s view. If we cannot get the necessity of singular causation from regularity or explanation alone, we cannot get it by combining them. I will argue that Kant derives the nature and universal existence of causation from its function or role in constituting the necessary advance of time and therefore that Kant holds his own unique version of what later came to be called a causal theory of time. He locates the source of necessary connection, then, neither in the inferences of the intellect (rationalism), nor in the features and patterns of events (empiricism ), nor in both together. Rather, he finds it in a “third thing,” which is the nature of pure time. For Kant, an empiricist conception of substance is impossible. He says that the concept of substance is what is left “if we remove from our concept of any object .l.l. all properties which experience has taught us” (B6, p. 45). For Hume, roughly, it is aspects of experiences such as uniformity of features or continuity of change that are the sole (objective ) basis of the concept of substance or of identity through time. As even Hume recognizes, however, these are not sufficient since they are compatible with the existence of a series of connected but distinct momentary objects. For Kant the rationalist conception of substance is the intellectual concept of a subject that is not also a predicate.5 This concept , Kant says, is “ignorant of any conditions under which this logical pre-eminence may belong to anything” (A243, B301, pp. 261–62). In particular this rationalist conception does nothing to determine a singular use of subject term (pertaining to a substance existing through time) as opposed to a plural use of subject terms (pertaining to momentary existents). Nor will combining the rationalist’s logical concept of a subject with...

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