Kant's antinomies

The antinomies of pure reason (Greek anti, " against", nomoi "laws" ) are logically contradictory answers to the questions of reason. Immanuel Kant discussed in the Transcendental Dialectic of the Critique of Pure Reason (See Immanuel Kant: AA 0003III, 281-382 ).

Already in the preface to the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant writes:

" Human reason has the peculiar fate in a genus of its findings: that she is bothered by the questions they can not refuse; for they are her abandoned by the nature of reason itself, but they also can not answer, because they exceed all assets of human reason. "

According to Kant, reason tends necessarily to seek a summary unity of our ideas and judgments in order to expand the scope of their knowledge. The assessment will be carried away by principles or ideas to judgments, leaving the field of possible experience: " transcendent judgments ". Since a pure reason prior to any experience, a priori already capable of the judgments can only be a critique of reason, the contradictions or antinomies and the errors that can occur while to uncover. Part of this critique of reason are the " antinomies of pure reason " that have the idea of ​​a " universe " to the subject.

The individual antinomies

The individual antinomies are compared with Kant in the form of thesis and antithesis first. After each proof of the thesis and the antithesis is performed. Adjoining the respective evidence of a note. Thesis and antithesis are to be held:

• The world has a beginning in time and space is enclosed after also limited.

• Each composite substance in the world consists of simple parts, and there is nothing but the simple, or that which is composed of this anywhere.
• No composite thing in the world consists of simple parts, and it exists everywhere nothing simple in the same.

• Causality according to the laws of nature is not the only one from which the phenomena of the world can be derived total. It is still a causality through freedom to explain the same to adopt necessary.
• There is no freedom, but everything in the world happens solely according to the laws of nature.

• For the world is something that, as either their part or their cause, an absolutely necessary being.
• It exists everywhere no absolutely necessary being, neither in the world nor out of the world, as its cause.

Resolution ( according to Kant )

The contradiction of opposing thesis and antithesis can not be decided in favor of thesis or antithesis, according to Kant. For both there is an argument that gives a compelling evidence after appearing to the satisfaction of Kant rules of general logic. So there conflicting needs arise, Kant speaks of antinomies. Your derivability from the pure reason shows that even this requires a review of their use. The wrong use of reason in traditional metaphysics, according to Kant, the cause of the conflicting judgments ( see also critique of metaphysics ). The questions listed above are according to Kant only be solved by means of transcendental philosophy: If the reason both sources of knowledge, understanding and sensibility, respected and their contribution is different, they noticed that the term "world" in theses, antitheses and evidence soon empirically, as a collective term for all observed phenomena, will soon be "intellectual " is used as the epitome of a system of all objects. Without this confusion arise thesis and antithesis of the first two antinomies as equally false, the third and fourth antinomy as possibly true both out for one of the two uses of the concept of world. The result of the third, so-called Freiheitsantinomie allows Kant to establish freedom as a postulate in his practical philosophy.