I just want to say thank you! I am majoring in Physics and Philosophy and I came to this video as a means of studying but learned a ton about the importance of my own majors and their connection. This has inspired me to continue pursuing them.
I think it's important here to distinguish Kant's philosophy of metaphysics of the possibility of there existence of appearances with the absolute egoist philosophies of idealism that did try to unify philosophical theory through the basic structure of the ego and personality. Kant's project is as much an ontological one as an epistemological one. The main ontological problem for Kant is the problem of human freedom. The revolution in Europe at the time made freedom of thought, freedom from falsities and dogmas, as an ideal but Kant tried to radicalize it by turning it into a metaphysical doctrine. To have freedom to truly exist, it has to be a system that includes within itself the ability of thought to determine its presuppositions. Kant still left a gulf between the internal experience of life and the philosophical metaphysics of freedom, that Fichte and others thought they were being sincere and faithful to Kant's original intention by bridging the gulf, although Kant would disagree. The reason I see for Kant's focus on reason is social and political in combination with epistemological. The use of human freedom in political and cultural life implies that divine truths don't exist, we do not get knowledge from an outside source from the acts of reason. Yet the pure forms of reason used by Leibniz at the height of the traditional metaphysical era were inadequate to Kant's requirements to challenge the lodged dogmatism of the ages. Reason must be put on a firm, solid footing if it is to govern our institutions instead of superstition, otherwise freedom would be unguided and lead to disastrous outcomes, self-awareness and self-consciousness could not steer the course of human affairs. An ontology of freedom requires reason to become aware of itself. Until Kant, all reason had done was create ontologies of the world, how it came about. What Kant did was make an ontological history of our different ontological frameworks themselves, or as Dieter Henrich puts it nicely, Kant's philosophy is the first philosophical history of philosophy, the first time philosophy tries to become aware of all its history and explain it together, which is why I think it's important that the last chapter of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is reflective on all history of philosophy - ''the History of Pure Reason''. Kant's philosophy, transcendentally speaking is a culmination of all of the history of philosophy, it is logic, ethics, ontology, epistemology, history, metaphysics of causality, and everything in between in one book, that is why it is so difficult to read.
Hume says that the Cartesian rationalist is wrong to use the (mathematical) standard of demonstrated logical necessity as the definition of "knowledge" for the a posteriori side of the "fork." He argues (points out, really) that the only reasonable standard of knowledge of the contingent world is probabilistic, based on induction. This is not at all the same as holding that we somehow "don't know" something about, say, gravity (remember Newton himself insists that he is only ever describing, not "explaining"). Berkeley and Hume see skepticism as a pseudo-problem, erroneously motivated by this equivocation. They are not, themselves, skeptics. Empiricism does not conceive of "experience" as a Cartesian representation; that's the whole point.
Logical necessity and natural necessity are distinguished and explicated through hypothetico-deductive procedures of science, which is the only way we can get explanations, of structures of reality. Synthetic a priori knowledge is indispensable in progressive accumulation of scientific knowledge, evident from the efficacy of various theoretical models. Hume is definitely a skeptic insofar as the criterion of epistemology is pushed to its hypersubjectivist limits through his doctrine of impressions and phenomenalism, much like Berkley (with his doctrine of perceptions and critique of abstraction).
"If you read Hume, and you say 'Hume is boring', the problem is not with Hume, its with you. Hume is not boring." Hehe:) "Maybe" if had Einstein not read Hume, he would not have the curiosity and the courage to discover and contribute what he did. We are all some how inspired and influenced by others.
It's a shame people think Kant is such a genius for this linguistic trick. All he did was describe a human psychological bias towards something, give it fancy philosophical jargon, "synthetic a priori" and voila, now it's *knowledge* ! But this is obviously flawed reasoning. Suppose one was to argue about the existence of faces in the world, or our ability to know about human faces. And they then say "well obviously the knowledge about faces is a synthetic a priori, because our mind is preconditioned to see faces, even where none exist!" But it doesn't actually answer Hume's challenge that we have no *good reason* to believe in causality, or human faces, or anything else. Human bias is perhaps the worst of all reasons.
