Kant Wakes from His Dogmatic Sleep

By the late eighteenth century, philosophy had reached an impasse. Rationalists and empiricists held fundamentally incompatible views about what we can know and how we can know it. Hume had argued that our deepest convictions, like the belief that one event causes another, rest on nothing more than animal habit. Our prized human reason is nothing more than the reactive instinct that allows animals to seek out morsels of food. Kant found this intolerable. As a champion of the Enlightenment, he insisted that rational beings must have reasons for their beliefs or forfeit the right to hold them. And so he set out to redeem realms of knowledge disallowed by Hume. In this lecture, Lee Braver traces Kant's revolutionary response, beginning with his famous "awakening from dogmatic slumbers" and working through the crucial distinctions between knowledge gained from experience and knowledge independent of it, between judgments that merely unpack definitions and those that genuinely extend what we know. These tools allowed Kant to conceive of a category of knowledge that neither Descartes nor Hume thought possible, a category neither fully rationalist or fully empiricist that allowed the reunification of epistemology on new ground.