Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics

Can occur with his Prolegomena to any future metaphysics that will be as a science ( often simply Prolegomena ) tried Immanuel Kant in 1783, "critical" philosophy or transcendental represent the essential aspects of its clear. Kant understood this small font itself as a simplified and clear presentation of the first edition of his major work, Critique of Pure Reason (1781 ), in which he dealt with the same issues in more depth and philosophically challenging.

The leading question

" Prolegomenon " (Greek: the, usually in the plural " Prolegomena " is used ) means " foreword, introduction, preface ". As such, the work is also to be understood: for a preliminary clarification of what may be metaphysics, after the Critique of Pure Reason is complete. The following questions are for Kant at the center:

• How is our ( noumenal ) awareness structured?
• How do we get to insights about our world?
• What is time? How does it develop?
• What is space? How it formed?
• How is our world, our Cosmos structured?
• Is there a God?

Besides the obligatory preface and introduction ( " Summary of Hegel " ) unfolds Kant a parent, general question, which he formulated as follows:

Or, in other words:

Structure

This " transcendental main question " Kant divided into three sub- questions, which he answered in turn:

How is pure mathematics possible?

This section presents an abridged version of Transcendental Aesthetic of the Critique of Pure Reason dar. In it Kant develops his doctrine of transcendental ideality of space and time. Briefly, this states that space and time are not real, that is not independent of man exist: rather, they represent the fundamental condition of all sensory experience ( in humans), are in a sense a kind of lens or glasses with which we unknowable to the look reality of things in themselves.

With the pure forms of intuition, space and time as necessary conditions of all sensory experience, this theory attempts, inter alia, to explain why judgments in mathematics and geometry ( in Kant's time ) play a irrefutable necessity which is still above all experience judgments: If both entities independently make out of us in the reality, the statements made about them could only safety comparative- general, Met after the induction conclusion statements such as " All (healthy) dogs have four legs " claim: So far we have seen so far have (healthy ) creatures of the genus dog four extremities; making it not impossible that we will meet with three of those one day.

How is pure natural science possible?

This section is coming soon the idea of ​​the Transcendental Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason again: Were playing in the last section the necessary conditions all sensory cognition, the main role is here now the recognition of the mind ( in the Kantian sense ) in the center. He tries to prove that basic, in the natural sciences (at the time of Kant ) key concepts (Kant calls " Categories " ) such as substance, causality, universality, etc. similar to space and time is a necessary condition within our cognition plays: So consider we the correlation of two consecutive events ( the sun shines on a stone, this warms up ), according to Kant under the category of causality, which highlighted the formerly bare succession of an objective necessity: Just because the sun shines on the stone that warms this.

Again, similar to the above, the goal of general and scientific statements to secure a kind of necessity and legality, which could not be achieved through the mere induction. Especially the treatment of cause and effect is to be understood as an explicit response to David Hume, who denied the objective necessity of our statements about causal relations and had only a subjective- psychological tendency of habit, to adopt such a case the observed correlation of events allowed.

How is metaphysics in general possible?

The third section of the work provides a simplified and abbreviated version of the Transcendental Dialectic of the Critique of Pure Reason. As the central organ of knowledge here reason in its narrow sense ( again, according to Kantian terminology ) deals. While, sensibility and understanding (see above) constitute our knowledge of nature, the reason of this. Than regulating by instructs us to pursue a whole of all possible knowledge is This creates the risk that we will provide you with a constitutive ability to new insights and thereby fall into so-called antinomies, all of that to the confusion, what we should aspire to as cognitive beings capable based with what we can see.

This then caused the metaphysical questions on the spatial and temporal boundaries of the world, according to a first cause of all that exists, or the existence of God. By means of a critique of reason as a faculty of knowledge to be confirmed this in their function, but also limits the same time and the (theoretical ) insolubility of all these issues proved.