This study shows the inner workings of Immanuel Kant´s Theory of Experience. Kant investigated what the cognitive necessities are for humans to make objective and true judgments, so-called empirical judgments. He asks why such judgments can be objectively true even though they are based on a subjective and relative basis. In this volume the author follows Kant´s methodological path to his final goal: determining the complex deep structures behind simple empirical judgments, such as The sun is warming the rock, and showing the extent to which the objective truthfulness of such judgments depends on these deep structures. This is the first of two volumes on Kant´s Theory of Experience.

Autorentext
Dr. Rainer Enskat ist Professor (em.) für Theoretische Philosophie an der Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg.

Klappentext

This study shows the inner workings of Immanuel Kant s Theory of Experience. Kant investigated what the cognitive necessities are for humans to make objective and true judgments, so-called empirical judgments. He asks why such judgments can be objectively true even though they are based on a subjective and relative basis. In this volume the author follows Kant s methodological path to his final goal: determining the complex deep structures behind simple empirical judgments, such as "The sun is warming the rock," and showing the extent to which the objective truthfulness of such judgments depends on these deep structures. This is the first of two volumes on Kant s Theory of Experience.

Leseprobe
Kant's Theory of Experience analyzes special forms of judgement, thereby investigating into the subjective cognitive conditions, on which it depends that - by forming judgements of these special forms - experience of objective structural traits in our common daily spatio-temporal horizon is possible for man - e.g. experience of some universal substantial entity and of causal relations. These subjective cognitive conditions are fulfilled by each individual human being and apt to enable each of them to overcome spontaneously, step by step, the continuous storm of his sensory affections by forming perception-based, though objectively veridical 'judgements of experience' (Erfahrungsurteile), e. g. of such simple superficial form as in "The sun warms the stone". Kant has two aims: 1.) Clarifying the complicate formal-logical and categorial, object-referential structure of such judgements of experience, and 2.) proving universal judgements about the conditions of possible experience, e. g. a principle of substantiality and a principle of causality, thereby showing why we are justified to rely - as well in our common daily life as in scientific research - on the possibility to acquire a steadily growing, coherent set of objective veridical judgements of experience, though this set will never exhaust the absolute whole of our possible experience.