The scandal in philosophy

¶ … 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 of Cartesian Dualism, which posits that mind is a mysterious substance that is not to be confused with the body that houses it. 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 the colonial possessions of Great Britain (Ireland and Scotland) would arise the Enlightenment philosophers who issue a stern wake-up call to the blithe post-Cartesian rationalists who do not attend to sensory evidence. The first of these is John Locke, who is considered to be the classic Empiricist. Locke recognized that, in the wake of Cartesian dualism, there were significant epistemological questions to be answered: what are the origins of our ideas, for example? Descartes had believed in the existence of "innate ideas" which existed "a priori," almost as a built-in condition of thought itself: these included such things as mathematical statements of identity (2 + 2 = 4) and the basic facts of geometry. To a certain degree, Descartes' thinking on this matter is not as odd as it may sound: in Plato's Meno, Socrates takes great effort in asking Meno's uneducated slave-boy, in plain language through the questioning Socratic method, to conclude with universal geometrical truths that he had never been taught. For Platonic dualism, these geometrical truths indicated the existence of a kind of purity of knowledge and intent in the realm of the Forms, which is why the boy is able to access them despite no prior instruction (or so Socrates seems to prove) -- Socrates and Plato hold to the belief that knowledge is "anamnesis" or "un-forgetting" of eternal truths known by the soul due to its participation in the realm of the Forms. In Cartesian dualism, the geometrical and mathematical proofs actually serve more to indicate the existence of a world outside the mind. Of course Locke challenges the notion that somehow these mathematical ideas could be pre-existing in the mind with his famous definition of mind as a "tabula rasa" or