Kant’s Experiments of Reason and Thought Experiments in Philosophy
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.56550/d.4.1.1Keywords:
Kant’s Experiments of Reason, Transcendental Arguments, Thought Experiments in Philosophy, Functional Vs. Material A priori, Philosophy and Science, Thought Experiment and Human PersonAbstract
Kant did not distinguish between thought experiments (TEs) and real world experiments, nor did he use the German term “Gedankenexperiment”. But many aspects of Kant’s thought are related to the concept of TE, and especially “the experiments of reason” (Experimente der Vernunft), which are the distinguishing feature of transcendental arguments in philosophy as compared with the mathematical and empirical sciences. The first part of this paper reconstructs the Kantian concept of “experiments of reason”. In the second part, a functional account of Kant’s a priori is defended and contrasted with Ørsted’s first Kantian interpretation of TEs. The entirely functional view of the a priori leads to an account of TEs in philosophy which is characterized by the following four features: 1) transcendental arguments, interpreted as philosophical TEs, are exemplifications of counterfactual reasoning that are expressions of the unlimited criticism typical of philosophy; 2) as far as their content is concerned, they depend entirely on information from ‘outside’, i.e. from common life experience and the empirical sciences, and it is this content that, albeit with respect to the conditions of possibility, grounds the criterion of their internal consistency; 3) apart from the reversal of the direction of enquiry, there is no difference in principle between the special methods of reasoning adopted in scientific and philosophical TEs (any such difference could only be based on a material conception of the a priori); 4) both philosophy and philosophical TEs have in the last analysis only a critical or negative task, that of denouncing all attempts to reduce the human person to categories or concepts derived, explicitly or implicitly, from empirical reality (whether natural or cultural).
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