Wednesday, August 1, 2012

Sufficient Reason, Experimental Reason, Imagination

Kant interprets the Principle of Sufficient Reason as the concept Causality, which he, more precisely, formulates, in the Second Analogy of the 1st Critique, as 'every event is an effect that is necessarily preceded by some cause'.  Now, this formulation is presumably mediated by a Schema, which is the source of the entailed time-ordering, i. e. it presupposes an analogous formulation of the PSR in the Schematism.  However, there, at B 183, Causality, and, hence, the PSR, is defined in terms of the efficacy of the Cause, from which "something else always follows", not in terms of the conditionality of the Effect.  In other words, the discrepancy between the formulations, which Kant seems to not notice, is an inversion, thereby suggesting, initially, at least, the distinction between a Theoretical and a Practical PSR, as has been previously discussed.  But, a second alternative to the Theoretical PSR, that has been previously proposed, might be an Experimental PSR, based on the concept of a Reason that Kant, in the B edition Preface, ascribes to the experimental method.  And, indeed, the prototypical example, in those passages, of that method, is the production of geometrical figures, the source of which, more precisely, is the same Productive Imagination that generates the Schematism.

No comments:

Post a Comment