Kant and the Metaphysics of Causality - By Eric Watkins

Kantian Review

Philosophical Review, 2010

and Eric Watkins, Kant and the Metaphysics of Causality (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005)

This paper examines Kant’s account of causal knowledge by paying particular attention to the Critique of Teleological Judgment where Kant is concerned not with his well-known account of causality as the transcendental conditions of experience but with the possibility of causally explaining concrete objects in nature and, more specifically, material nature. The chapter develops an interpretation of Kant’s maxim of mechanism as a purely regulative principle that enables us to make determining judgments about mechanical causes. It concludes that knowledge of particular mechanical causes is essentially dependent on both constitutive and regulative principles.

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A, 2014

The aim of the paper is threefold. Its first aim is to defend Eric Watkins's claim that for Kant, a cause is not an event but a causal power: a power that is borne by a substance, and that, when active, brings about its effect, i.e. a change of the states of another substance, by generating a continuous flow of intermediate states of that substance. The second aim of the paper is to argue against Watkins that the Kantian concept of causal power is not the pre critical concept of real ground but the category of causality, and that Kant holds with Hume that causal laws cannot be inferred non inductively (that he accordingly has no intention to show in the Second analogy or elsewhere that events fall under causal laws). The third aim of the paper is to compare the Kantian position on causality with central tenets of contemporary powers ontology: it argues that unlike the variants endorsed by contemporary powers theorists, the Kantian variants of these tenets are resistant to objections that neo Humeans raise to these tenets.

Kant on the Human Standpoint, 2009

Kant on Causality. In the schematism of the categories of the Metaphysical Deduction of the Categories of the Analytic of Conceptions of the Transcendental Analytic, and in the Second Analogy of Experience of the Analytic of Principles, the first part of Transcendental Analytic, both of which are included in the first division of the Transcendental Logic of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant affirmed a transcendental idealist view of causality as an a priori form, a category of the understanding, the second of the categories of relation, derived from the hypothetical judgment of relation. The judgment of causality and dependence (cause and effect), he says, is not analytic a priori nor synthetic a posteriori, but is a synthetic a priori judgment, wherein the intellect expresses an a priori form by means of a judgment, unifying it with a conglomeration of phenomena. Consequently, causality has only a subjective validity within the realm of phenomena, not an objective, extra-mental noumenal one. Efficient causality, therefore, for the agnostic Kant, is not valid to demonstrate, for example, the existence of an extra-mental transcendent God. For Kant, "every synthetic a priori judgment is a complex whole, necessarily formed of three elements: 1) Sensible intuition is the first element as the matter of judgment; it comprises the experientially given which is passively received, and the a priori sensible form. 2) The concept, or a priori intellectual form, is the second element. 3) The schematism, or intermediary of the imagination 1 is the third element. For example, in order to pronounce this a priori synthetic judgment, 'The rising of liquids in a void has a cause,' the understanding, in Kant's view, formulates a hypothetical judgment, as 'If one posits the rising of a liquid, one necessarily posits its cause.' This judgment is such that there is between the two terms a bond of non-reciprocal dependence, that of effect upon cause. The raising of the liquid depends on the weight of the atmosphere , and not vice versa. Thus, when a savant perceives the concrete fact of a liquid raising itself in a void, the a priori form of causality is released in his spirit; and, beyond the frame of temporal succession (schematism of the concept of causality) and in virtue of the principle or general law that 'all changes occur in following the liaison of effects and causes,' he pronounces the scientific judgment, 'the raising of liquids in a void is produced by atmospheric pressure." 2 Describing Kant's views on causality and dependence (cause and effect) in the Critique of Pure Reason, Howard Caygill writes that "within the 'Transcendental Analytic,' causalitymore properly 'causality and dependence (cause and effect)'-features as the second of the categories of relation. These are derived from the pure judgements of relation, the second of which concerns the logical relation of ground to consequence. Causality, along with the other categories, is justified in the deduction as a form of 'connection and unity' which 'precedes all experience' and without which experience would not be possible. However, along with the other 8 By an "arbitrary" order Kant does not, of course, mean an order of succession that is not determined, but only one that is determined by subjectively conditioned direction of attention. Cf. below, p. 377.

Harmonia in commercio vs Harmonia absque commercio.