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How is Nature Possible?: Kant's Project in the First Critique
How is Nature Possible?: Kant's Project in the First Critique presents a clear and systematic appraisal of what is perhaps the most difficult treatise in the philosophical canon. Daniel N. Robinson situates Kant's undertaking in the First Critique within the context of the history of philosophy and as a response to the challenges of scepticism. Kant's central task in the First Critique is to tie his metaphysical analysis to the very possibility of nature itself. Where others assumed the validity or the weakness of perception and reason, Kant presents a critical appraisal of both, thereby establishing the very limits of sense and reason as instruments of discovery. Ideal for students at all levels, this fascinating introduction clarifies the aims and significance of Kant's project, locates its place within the history of philosophy and identifies the strengths and weaknesses reasonably attributed to this most significant contribution to the history of philosophical reflection.
- GenresPhilosophyMetaphysics
223 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2012
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58 people want to read
About the author
Daniel N. Robinson
67 books74 followersDaniel N. Robinson is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Georgetown University and a Fellow of the Faculty of Philosophy, Oxford University.
Robinson has published in a wide variety of subjects, including moral philosophy, the philosophy of psychology, legal philosophy, the philosophy of the mind, intellectual history, legal history, and the history of psychology. He has held academic positions at Amherst College, Georgetown University, Princeton University, and Columbia University. In addition, he served as the principal consultant to PBS and the BBC for their award-winning series 'The Brain' and 'The Mind', and he lectured for 'The Great Courses' series on Philosophy. He is on the Board of Consulting Scholars of Princeton University's James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions and is a Senior Fellow of BYU's Wheatley Institution. In 2011 he received the Gittler Award from the American Psychological Association for significant contributions to the philosophical foundations of Psychology.
Robinson has published in a wide variety of subjects, including moral philosophy, the philosophy of psychology, legal philosophy, the philosophy of the mind, intellectual history, legal history, and the history of psychology. He has held academic positions at Amherst College, Georgetown University, Princeton University, and Columbia University. In addition, he served as the principal consultant to PBS and the BBC for their award-winning series 'The Brain' and 'The Mind', and he lectured for 'The Great Courses' series on Philosophy. He is on the Board of Consulting Scholars of Princeton University's James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions and is a Senior Fellow of BYU's Wheatley Institution. In 2011 he received the Gittler Award from the American Psychological Association for significant contributions to the philosophical foundations of Psychology.
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February 26, 2021
Daniel Robinson gave a wonderful series of lectures at Oxford University (available online) which I found exceptionally helpful when reading through Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Robinson's exegesis is sympathetic to Kant in that he really tries to envision what the legendary philosopher was trying to get at, while at the same time hinting at (though not to the point of confusion) the controversies and limitations of Kant's analysis which later authors would come to focus on.
This book - How is Nature Possible - treads much the of same ground, though in a more systematic format befitting a book as opposed to a lecture series. There is refreshingly little background; those picking up a book on a specific Kant text don't need yet another primer on rationalist / empiricist trends in philosophy. The book then dives straight into Kant's main question (for Robinson at any rate): how is nature possible? Put another way, the question concerns the possibility of metaphysics - the study of what goes beyond physics - which for Kant concerns how to make objective the findings of natural science. This seemingly arcane question is important for Kant so he can save the objectivity of science from the scepticism of the empiricist and rationalist philosophers for whom what is in the mind is all we can even be certain of.
As in his lectures, Robinson often tries to make abstract ideas concrete by recasting Kant's ideas. For instance, to illustrate the magnitude of philosophy's task, he points out that the "ordinary percipient [you and me; people who perceive things] lives in a sea of disconnect physical impingements - incessant, unnameable, and dynamic. Out of all this, and in the manner of discovery rather than invention [against the sceptics for whom my experience could be an invention of the mind], a knowable world emerges. Kant's Critique sets out to establish how this is so, the implications arising from the very nature of the process and, thus, both the achievements and the limits of sense and reason". That this is the same as an investigation of the possibility of metaphysics is made clear later on: "metaphysics ... finds its content in that domain of a priori knowledge that is foundational for both the physical sciences and rational psychology". Kant will try to ground objective reality by an investigation of how we come to have experiences at all - and Robinson expertly weaves this key question throughout his book. This is important, because without such clear signposting (where are we going; where are we know) it is extremely easy to get lost in the weeds.
Robinson repeatedly draws analogies like the one above regarding the wealth of sense data we receive and the miraculous way we have stable experiences of things and events. He also often quotes Kant, who refers to the "scandal" in philosophy, "namely, the ability to establish the reality of an external world" and uses this hyperbole to tie much of the book together. For Kant, this scandal has been brought about both by sceptics and rationalists. Sceptics conclude that knowledge of the external world is achieved through habituation and, so, can never be more than contingent (in Bayesian terms today we would say that the sun is extraordinarily likely to rise tomorrow but it is not certain, p is close to 1 but not 1 exactly). Rationalists too, who generally are more comfortable ascribing certainty to some knowledge claims, have displayed "neglect ... in their reliance on a faculty of reason whose nature and limits had never been subject to critical appraisal". As Robinson concludes in this early chapter, "If [as for the rationalists] reason is the instrument of choice, it must be calibrated. The range over which it can be productively employed must be established. If, instead, the senses are the instruments of choice [as for the empiricists], it is essential to establish the form of knowledge thereby obtained and the manner in which such knowledge is incorporated into the systematic bodies of knowledge claimed by science".
By such devices as reminding the reader of the "scandal" in philosophy, Robinson keeps the reader on track in following Kant's arguments. Which is not to say Robinson is not strong on the detail too. While in a book of less than 200 pages the author could not claim comprehensiveness or to tackle much in huge detail, he nevertheless concisely and intelligible outlines key arguments. For instance, Robinson wonderfully summarises why Kant introduces pure intuitions and pure concepts, the (transcendental) necessary conditions of experience: "The Kantian observer is not the passive recording instrument of the empiricists, but one who brings to reality (a priori) an assortment of cognitive-perceptual powers that will establish the very possibility of sensibility, knowledge and understanding .... Asserted here is not a skeptical reduction of reality to mere mental contents but the recognition that any explanation of the phenomena of the external world must include the sensual and cognitive framework provided by the observer. What must be uncovered are the enabling conditions, absent which there can be no experience of objects at all".
Such passages as these and many others illustrate Robinson's deft means of getting across in plain(ish) language what Kant's often comically obtuse prose is trying to say. Hidden in here too we get a hint of why Robinson might be so receptive to the notion that humans have inbuilt (a priori) "enabling conditions" - the pure intuitions and concepts, the transcendental apparatus that makes experience possible (in Kant's much more intimidating language). Robinson draws precise attention to the role of the "observer"; as a former physicist, Robinson likely had in mind the relevance of taking the observer into account in the formulation of quantum mechanics. We cannot probe nature at the smallest levels in an agnostic way - we are necessarily caught up in the quantum system. Similarly, for Kant (and clearly Robinson), humans cannot approach the world either with it entirely built out of our own cognitive apparatus (as Hegel would later claim) or as a tabula rasa, building up the world as so many impressions on a previously blank slate (Locke).
Robinson hammers home why the 'tabula rasa' image of the human mind fails to capture human experience in a passage that epitomises the author's clear and engaging style: "Imagine a device that records with undeviating accuracy the physical properties of entities delivered to its sensory processes. Assuming thought on the part of such a device, it could not distinguish between the arrival of actual (external) objects and the mere internal generation of events. In a word, it could not establish the reality of an external world and would thus perpetuate philosophy's 'continuing scandal'. If this is to be avoided, what is needed are powered or processes not determined by the stimuli but determining instead how such stimuli will and can be received."
20 pages later, when speaking about the 'pure concepts' of the understanding, rather than the 'pure intuitions' as in the above, Robinson again reminds the reader of the importance of the fact that a "passive relationship between physical impingements and sensory responses does not establish 'experience' for the latter is an ordered, unified, and coherent conscious event .... there must be governing principles that ordain the manner in which external impingements will be registered. The resulting order and organisation are not 'given' by the stimuli themselves but are determined by the very mode of sensibility." Several pages after this, Robinson again repeats this issue of how to join up sense data into a coherent experience, this time in the context of the Kantian schematism. This is a notoriously tricky (and contested) idea, "an intrinsic feature of cognition ... to impose on the objects of sensibility a schematic organisation". Though the details are challenging, by making clear why Kant introduces a schematism - as a means to solve one aspect of the sense data / experience issue - Robinson draws together and elucidates what could have been seen as an unnecessary (and likely impenetrably complex) technical detail in Kant's system.
Through both such repetition of the key questions as well as gradual building up of the ideas, Robinson steps through Kant's main arguments. The overall effect is to leave the reader with a clear, surprisingly complete reading of Kant (all the way through to the failures of reason towards the end of the Critique in Kant's wonderful antinomies and paralogisms).
Providing the reader with such a singular vision of the first Critique is, I think, what sets Robinson's book apart and demonstrates the author's particular skill. Rather than getting bogged down in the detail he helps get the reader going with an intuitive and graspable purpose of the book. This is then a solid platform from which to jump into whatever nuances and details the reader may choose.
Which is not to say this book is perfect: the repetition that is so valuable to reenforcing Robinson's reading of Kant can go too far, with the reader left wondering if they've missed some key new development when the author is actually just regurgitating something very recently said. This is extremely grating when the repetition is virtually verbatim (see e.g. 128 and repetition on 145-6). There are quite a lot of typos as well - both issues suggestive of too little editing and proofreading, making the book feel like a bit of a rushed job.
A bigger issue is that this is, as I've tried to emphasise, very much Robinson's viewpoint - a sympathetic but necessarily very specific reading. I think this is the book's great virtue, but also might lull the reader into a belief that what Robinson sets out is uncontroversially what Kant meant, or else that (even within Robinson's reading) Kant solved the problems he set out to. Anyone with a passing interest in philosophy will know this is unlikely. All of which left me wanting to read a critique of Robinson's views - but written in precisely the same, easy-to-read style that makes Robinson himself so convincing in the first place. That I want a response to this book written by the same author is likely as strong an indication as any that this book is well worth a read. Highly recommended if you want to have a chance at getting to grips with the formidable Kant.
This book - How is Nature Possible - treads much the of same ground, though in a more systematic format befitting a book as opposed to a lecture series. There is refreshingly little background; those picking up a book on a specific Kant text don't need yet another primer on rationalist / empiricist trends in philosophy. The book then dives straight into Kant's main question (for Robinson at any rate): how is nature possible? Put another way, the question concerns the possibility of metaphysics - the study of what goes beyond physics - which for Kant concerns how to make objective the findings of natural science. This seemingly arcane question is important for Kant so he can save the objectivity of science from the scepticism of the empiricist and rationalist philosophers for whom what is in the mind is all we can even be certain of.
As in his lectures, Robinson often tries to make abstract ideas concrete by recasting Kant's ideas. For instance, to illustrate the magnitude of philosophy's task, he points out that the "ordinary percipient [you and me; people who perceive things] lives in a sea of disconnect physical impingements - incessant, unnameable, and dynamic. Out of all this, and in the manner of discovery rather than invention [against the sceptics for whom my experience could be an invention of the mind], a knowable world emerges. Kant's Critique sets out to establish how this is so, the implications arising from the very nature of the process and, thus, both the achievements and the limits of sense and reason". That this is the same as an investigation of the possibility of metaphysics is made clear later on: "metaphysics ... finds its content in that domain of a priori knowledge that is foundational for both the physical sciences and rational psychology". Kant will try to ground objective reality by an investigation of how we come to have experiences at all - and Robinson expertly weaves this key question throughout his book. This is important, because without such clear signposting (where are we going; where are we know) it is extremely easy to get lost in the weeds.
Robinson repeatedly draws analogies like the one above regarding the wealth of sense data we receive and the miraculous way we have stable experiences of things and events. He also often quotes Kant, who refers to the "scandal" in philosophy, "namely, the ability to establish the reality of an external world" and uses this hyperbole to tie much of the book together. For Kant, this scandal has been brought about both by sceptics and rationalists. Sceptics conclude that knowledge of the external world is achieved through habituation and, so, can never be more than contingent (in Bayesian terms today we would say that the sun is extraordinarily likely to rise tomorrow but it is not certain, p is close to 1 but not 1 exactly). Rationalists too, who generally are more comfortable ascribing certainty to some knowledge claims, have displayed "neglect ... in their reliance on a faculty of reason whose nature and limits had never been subject to critical appraisal". As Robinson concludes in this early chapter, "If [as for the rationalists] reason is the instrument of choice, it must be calibrated. The range over which it can be productively employed must be established. If, instead, the senses are the instruments of choice [as for the empiricists], it is essential to establish the form of knowledge thereby obtained and the manner in which such knowledge is incorporated into the systematic bodies of knowledge claimed by science".
By such devices as reminding the reader of the "scandal" in philosophy, Robinson keeps the reader on track in following Kant's arguments. Which is not to say Robinson is not strong on the detail too. While in a book of less than 200 pages the author could not claim comprehensiveness or to tackle much in huge detail, he nevertheless concisely and intelligible outlines key arguments. For instance, Robinson wonderfully summarises why Kant introduces pure intuitions and pure concepts, the (transcendental) necessary conditions of experience: "The Kantian observer is not the passive recording instrument of the empiricists, but one who brings to reality (a priori) an assortment of cognitive-perceptual powers that will establish the very possibility of sensibility, knowledge and understanding .... Asserted here is not a skeptical reduction of reality to mere mental contents but the recognition that any explanation of the phenomena of the external world must include the sensual and cognitive framework provided by the observer. What must be uncovered are the enabling conditions, absent which there can be no experience of objects at all".
Such passages as these and many others illustrate Robinson's deft means of getting across in plain(ish) language what Kant's often comically obtuse prose is trying to say. Hidden in here too we get a hint of why Robinson might be so receptive to the notion that humans have inbuilt (a priori) "enabling conditions" - the pure intuitions and concepts, the transcendental apparatus that makes experience possible (in Kant's much more intimidating language). Robinson draws precise attention to the role of the "observer"; as a former physicist, Robinson likely had in mind the relevance of taking the observer into account in the formulation of quantum mechanics. We cannot probe nature at the smallest levels in an agnostic way - we are necessarily caught up in the quantum system. Similarly, for Kant (and clearly Robinson), humans cannot approach the world either with it entirely built out of our own cognitive apparatus (as Hegel would later claim) or as a tabula rasa, building up the world as so many impressions on a previously blank slate (Locke).
Robinson hammers home why the 'tabula rasa' image of the human mind fails to capture human experience in a passage that epitomises the author's clear and engaging style: "Imagine a device that records with undeviating accuracy the physical properties of entities delivered to its sensory processes. Assuming thought on the part of such a device, it could not distinguish between the arrival of actual (external) objects and the mere internal generation of events. In a word, it could not establish the reality of an external world and would thus perpetuate philosophy's 'continuing scandal'. If this is to be avoided, what is needed are powered or processes not determined by the stimuli but determining instead how such stimuli will and can be received."
20 pages later, when speaking about the 'pure concepts' of the understanding, rather than the 'pure intuitions' as in the above, Robinson again reminds the reader of the importance of the fact that a "passive relationship between physical impingements and sensory responses does not establish 'experience' for the latter is an ordered, unified, and coherent conscious event .... there must be governing principles that ordain the manner in which external impingements will be registered. The resulting order and organisation are not 'given' by the stimuli themselves but are determined by the very mode of sensibility." Several pages after this, Robinson again repeats this issue of how to join up sense data into a coherent experience, this time in the context of the Kantian schematism. This is a notoriously tricky (and contested) idea, "an intrinsic feature of cognition ... to impose on the objects of sensibility a schematic organisation". Though the details are challenging, by making clear why Kant introduces a schematism - as a means to solve one aspect of the sense data / experience issue - Robinson draws together and elucidates what could have been seen as an unnecessary (and likely impenetrably complex) technical detail in Kant's system.
Through both such repetition of the key questions as well as gradual building up of the ideas, Robinson steps through Kant's main arguments. The overall effect is to leave the reader with a clear, surprisingly complete reading of Kant (all the way through to the failures of reason towards the end of the Critique in Kant's wonderful antinomies and paralogisms).
Providing the reader with such a singular vision of the first Critique is, I think, what sets Robinson's book apart and demonstrates the author's particular skill. Rather than getting bogged down in the detail he helps get the reader going with an intuitive and graspable purpose of the book. This is then a solid platform from which to jump into whatever nuances and details the reader may choose.
Which is not to say this book is perfect: the repetition that is so valuable to reenforcing Robinson's reading of Kant can go too far, with the reader left wondering if they've missed some key new development when the author is actually just regurgitating something very recently said. This is extremely grating when the repetition is virtually verbatim (see e.g. 128 and repetition on 145-6). There are quite a lot of typos as well - both issues suggestive of too little editing and proofreading, making the book feel like a bit of a rushed job.
A bigger issue is that this is, as I've tried to emphasise, very much Robinson's viewpoint - a sympathetic but necessarily very specific reading. I think this is the book's great virtue, but also might lull the reader into a belief that what Robinson sets out is uncontroversially what Kant meant, or else that (even within Robinson's reading) Kant solved the problems he set out to. Anyone with a passing interest in philosophy will know this is unlikely. All of which left me wanting to read a critique of Robinson's views - but written in precisely the same, easy-to-read style that makes Robinson himself so convincing in the first place. That I want a response to this book written by the same author is likely as strong an indication as any that this book is well worth a read. Highly recommended if you want to have a chance at getting to grips with the formidable Kant.
March 24, 2020
Decided to read this book after watching Robinson's lectures on YouTube. Concise and clear, just like his lectures.
December 16, 2022
The first few chapters started out promising but the author ended up giving a general commentary on the First Critique instead of focusing on Kant's transcendental construction of Nature.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews