Kant’s Theory Of Geometry

Immanuel Kant&s;s argument from geometry is easier to state than it is to understand. Geometry, he says, offers people a body of propositions which combine some of the features of empirical propositions with some of the features of analytic propositions, but which are not themselves either analytic or empirical. To accept the positivist account of geometry is to deny the existence of Kant&s;s problem and so to remove the main theoretical support for his theory of a priori intuition. Most modern critics of Kant would probably say that it was wasted labour to try to attach a clear meaning to either the phrase or the picture. He thought that Euclidean geometry applied to physical objects, to sense-given things in space. He was aware that the truth of its theorems was not simply guaranteed by logic and by explicit verbal definition.

Geometry · Geology · History and Theory of Mathematics · Mathematics · Philosophy