Why the Cosmos Breaks Reason
Reed Winegar
Reed Winegar walks through one of the most thought-provoking arguments in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason: the antinomy of pure reason. Kant shows that we can construct equally compelling proofs for contradictory claims about the world. Is the world infinitely old, or does it have a beginning in time? Is it infinitely large, or finite in size? Each option leads to absurdity. Winegar reconstructs why an infinitely old world seems impossible, why a world with a beginning in time also seems impossible, and why the same pattern holds for the world's spatial extent. The lecture then turns to Kant's proposed solution: transcendental idealism. By distinguishing between appearances and things in themselves, and by reinterpreting the world's extent as indefinite rather than actually infinite, Kant claims to dissolve the contradiction. Winegar closes by examining whether this resolution comes at a cost: what, if anything, we can know about things in themselves?
Suggested reading:
Associated Kant Readings:
Critique of Pure Reason, Transcendental Dialectic: The Antinomy of Pure Reason, Section II. The Antithetic of Pure Reason, First Conflict
Critique of Pure Reason, Transcendental Dialectic: The Antinomy of Pure Reason, Sections VI: Transcendental Idealism as the Key to Solving the Cosmological Conflict
Winegar discusses Kant's First Antinomy further in the articles "Kant's Three Conceptions of Infinite Space," Journal of the History of Philosophy 60: 635-659 (2022) and "To Suspend Finitude Itself: Hegel's Reaction to Kant's First Antinomy," Hegel Bulletin 37: 81-103 (2016).
For a recent overview and interpretation of Kant's theory of transcendental idealism, see Lucy Allais, Manifest Reality: Kant's Idealism and his Realism, Oxford University Press (2015).
The dilemma presented at the end of the lecture is indebted to both Paul Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Knowledge, Cambridge University Press (1987) and to Winegar's conversations with Eric Watkins.
