The rise of modern philosophy a new history of western philosophy volume 3 (new history of western philosophy) ( PDFDrive ) (1) 121

HUME TO HEGEL conclusions (a thesis and an antithesis) The Wrst of the four antinomies has as its thesis ‘The world has a beginning in time and is limited in space,’ and as antithesis ‘The world has no beginning in time and no limits in space.’ Kant oVers proofs of both these propositions He does not, of course, mean us to conclude that both contradictories are true: the moral is that reason has no right to talk at all about ‘the world’ as a whole In each of the antinomies the thesis states that a certain series comes to a full stop and the antithesis states that it continues for ever The second antinomy concerns divisibility, the third concerns causation, and the fourth concerns contingency In each case Kant presents the series as a series of entities that are conditioned by something else—an eVect, for instance, is in his terms ‘conditioned’ by its cause In each of the antinomies, the thesis of the argument concludes to an unconditioned absolute Both sides of each antinomy, Kant believes, are in error: the thesis is the error of dogmatism and the antithesis the error of empiricism The point of constructing the antinomies is to exhibit the mismatch between the scope of empirical inquiry and the pretensions of pure reason The thesis represents the world as smaller than thought (we can think beyond it); the antithesis represents it as larger than thought (we cannot think to the end of it) We must match thought and the world by trimming our cosmic ideas to Wt the empirical inquiry.8 In his fourth antinomy Kant proposes arguments for and against the existence of a necessary being, and then in a later section of the Critique he goes on to consider the concept of God as held out by natural theology He classiWes arguments for God’s existence into three fundamental types, and shows how arguments of every type must fail If God is to have a place in our thought and life, he believed, it is not as an entity whose existence is established by rational proof The Critique of Pure Reason is not an easy book to read, and not all the diYculty is due to the profundity of its subject matter or the originality of its thought Kant (as must already be apparent) was excessively fond of inventing technical terms and (as will appear elsewhere in this book) was too anxious to force ideas into rigid schematisms But any reader who perseveres through the diYcult text will enjoy a rich philosophical reward A further account of the antinomies will be found in Ch 106