Kant on the antimonies

 The most interesting part of Immanuel Kant’s Prolegomena is his account of the four antimonies. They are:

• The world has, as to time and space, a beginning.

• Everything in the world consists of elements that are simple.

• There are in the world causes through freedom.

• In the series of world-causes there is some necessary being.

No. 1 is cosmology. No. 2 is atomic theory. No. 3 is the old debate about free will and determinism. No. 4 involves the existence of God.

Kant was fascinated that you could find “equally clear, evident and irresistible proofs” for and against each thesis.

 

Here is the most singular phenomenon of human reason, no other instance of which can be shown in any other use of reason.

 

Kant said that in these four cases, reason “perceives that it is divided against itself, a state at which the skeptic rejoices, but which must make the critical philosopher pause and feel ill at ease.”

I’m interested but less disturbed. Logical arguments are concerned with truth, and when we speak of truth we are looking at the basis for a claim. Some claims are not based on anything. While some baseless claims are just nonsense, Euclid didn’t offer proofs of his axioms. A system that allows us to have arguments within it has to begin somewhere.

• Source and notes: Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics; Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1950, pp. 86-8.

Kant was born on this date 300 years ago, April 22, 1724, in Königsberg, East Prussia, now Kaliningrad, Russia. Kant has appeared in a handful of these notes. By contrast, Wittgenstein has appeared in 35. I have a couple of friends who are more interested in Kant’s thought than I am. I am thinking of them today with gratitude.