Kant and Skepticism - Michael N. Forster

In this little book, or longish essay, Forster argues that the two primary concerns of the CPR and the Critical Philosophy are first to respond to scepticism, and secondly to develop a reformed metaphysics, i.e., transcendental idealism. But most philosophical treatments of scepticism fail to distinguish between (i) Cartesian ‘veil‐of‐perception’ scepticism or Berkeleian sceptical metaphysical phenomenalism, (ii) Humean scepticism about (a) allegedly a priori concepts such as causation and causal necessity, and also about (b) the alleged existence of a class of necessary and non‐empirical truths falling between propositions about ‘relations of ideas’ (roughly, analytic a priori truths) and propositions about ‘matters of fact’ (roughly, synthetic a posteriori truths), and (iii) Pyrrhonian scepticism, which radically attacks human rationality itself by establishing a universal ‘equipollence’ or ‘suspension of judgement’, by showing how human reason falls inevitably into not only ordinary contradictions, but also vicious regresses like the third man, reflexive hyper‐contradictions like the liar, and impredicative (a.k.a. ‘vicious circle’) hyper‐contradictions like Russell's paradox

Epistemology · Idealism · Judgement · Metaphysics · Rationality · Skepticism · Transcendental idealism · Philosophy · Philosophy and Theoretical Science