¶ … Scandal in Philosophy
In Soccio's account of Immanuel Kant's philosophy, Immanuel Kant saw as a "Scandal in Philosophy" the basic disjunction between western philosophical schools, such that indicated both sides were in part mistaken about their premises. There are several important mediating figures here, whom we must understand first if we wish to understand Kant's own identification of this problem, his "Scandal in Philosophy," and Kant's means of correcting it. For this reason, an account of Kant requires a long foregrounding, because to a certain degree the "Scandal" Kant identified had been brewing for well over a century, and it involved four major predecessors: Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. We must summarize them before approaching Kant's critique of them.
We need to cast back first to Descartes in the seventeenth century, and recollect the phenomenon...
But Descartes, pressed to identify some of the qualities of this "substance" of the human mind, presented mind as a "rational substance," in other words, that it was capable of reason and logic. Meanwhile, Descartes must resort to a proof of his own existence -- the famous "cogito ergo sum" -- but this could not, by the terms of his Dualism, also serve at the same time as a proof of the external world. Descartes did not bother to pursue the conclusions of his Rationalist world picture to their weirder conclusions, but plenty of European Rationalist philosophers in his wake did press their logic to a point where they could account for human behavior logically, but in a way which seemed directly to contradict the evidence of experience or the senses.
However, in…
