Kant and Adam Smith philosophical thought

Kant; Adam Smith

Locke: primary qualities, secondary qualities, substance Kant: Judgment of perceptions, judgment of experience, categories of the understanding Explain all six terms above. Does Kant's position (relevant to those terms) different from Locke's? Is Kant (on these terms) able to deal with some of the problems Locke encountered (when using these terms)?

According to John Locke, "the primary qualities of objects are their real qualities," such as "solidity, extension, figure, motion, rest, and number, all of which excite or produce similar ideas in your mind," which may be contrasted to secondary qualities, which are subjective in nature "like color, sound, smell, and taste" (Shoulder 2012). When apprehending both primary and secondary qualities, the mind does not apprehend the thing itself directly, but merely creates an impression of it. What gives primary qualities' an objective existence is something known as substance, or literally a "substratum underlying and supporting the primary qualities of it" (Shoulder 2012).

Kant's distinction of judgment of perceptions and experience is that judgments of perception are reliant upon "empirical intuitions and are only subjectively valid," like the sense that a rock is warmed by the sun, based upon one's touch of its surface (Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, Spark Notes, 2012). In contrast, "judgments of experience apply pure concepts of the understanding to judgments of perception, turning them into objective, universally valid laws," such as the notions of physics (Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, Spark Notes, 2012). The categories of judgment in terms of quantity, quality, relationship, and modality are ways of understanding how we apprehend specific phenomena.

Like Locke, Kant believed that there were different ways of knowing. However, Kant's typology of perception is more of a differential between ways of knowing and the actions of the mind, versus passing judgment upon the intrinsic properties of the things themselves like Locke. Kant's solution to the problem of much of Locke's thesis (namely, its arbitrary distinction between properties like solidity and color, both of which could be said to have objective qualities) is to focus on how the thinker perceives the object, rather than external stimuli.

Q6. Discuss Rousseau and Locke, on the nature of private property and how that is stated to what they talk to be the nature and role of the political state

Locke believed that human beings had innate rights which could not be superseded by the state. One of these rights was the right to property, specifically private property, including the private property derived from one's labor and one's person. The state only had the right to infringe upon such property rights if absolutely necessary (Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau Econ 205: 18). Locke viewed the ability to retain the property citizens had generated from the toil and sweat of their brows as an integral part of human liberty -- he feared inhumane levels of taxation and appropriation of private property by the state, both which he saw as a way of reducing the population to a state of submission.

In contrast to the positive view of private property held by Locke, Rousseau saw private property as a manifestation of the inequality inherent in the human condition when humans were removed from a state of nature. In the state of nature, every person could simply take what he or she needed from life. In contrast, when society was constructed with divisions of labor, "the property owners and non-laborers" can "dominate and exploit the poor. Rousseau observes that this state of affairs is resented by the poor, who will naturally seek war against the rich to end their unfair domination" (Discourse on inequality, Spark Notes, 2012). Private property is thus a source of discord, rather than a source of personal empowerment and liberty for Rousseau. It reflects the loss of liberty that is the natural causality of the abandonment of a state of nature. Private properties' existence is not a reflection of human liberty. Private property is not a natural extension of human rights as it is for Locke, but an expression of a loss of a purer state of human affairs.