PHILOSOPHY - Kant: On Metaphysical Knowledge [HD] 

This video did a great job of explaining the complexities of Kant. He's a difficult read.

This description is excellent! I've been struggling with understanding this concept for the past 4 hours. Specifically, Kant's concept in contrast to Hume's. I wish I would have watched this video 4 hours ago.

Yo this video is synthethicc

this is a great video, very concise and to the point- makes it easy to understand Kant's transcendental idealism

You’re a lifesaver man, I’ve been stuck reading Kant for the last 2 hours trying to understand him and this is what really got me to understand it.

My 2 cents: This video, while good, is presented in isolation from all that Kant was saying in the Critique. With his Critique, Kant was objecting to Hume and Locke, whose explanations resulted in a totally constructivist world view, thus a totally subjective world view. Kant agreed that we see a constructed world view, but claimed we don't actively construct it, rather the brain/mind is set up in such a way - with filters and concepts built in - that what we see (world picture) is fated. Then, if there is a way to get beyond that fate, the way might be to find apriori synthetic stuff that helps reveal how the mind/brain bases it's construction of our world view. Then maybe we get closer to knowing things in themselves rather than just their attributes. Maybe apriori synthetics offer shortcuts to certainties. I think Kant would agree that any way we may get at certainties may not reveal ultimate reality, or it might, we won't know for sure, but merely cutting to the chase may be very useful in sorting things out. Apriori synthetic may be the most reliable knowledge that we can bank on.

I reduced the settings speed down to a lower level in this video so I can hear it at a slower rate to absorb the information better and allowing me time in between to think and compare to what is being said.

One of the best explanations on Kant's metaphysics. Thank you for this explanation

And hats off to Scott Edgars, the people who put this whole series together, and whoever paid for it. Really helps dig through the inscrutable inscrutability of dense philosophy.

Thank you Sir, I hope everyone enjoyed the vedio , it is one of the most easiest look to understand Kant , I got 80% by the grace of ur this act , thank you once again... 👌👌👌👌

I haven't gotten this far into Kant yet but I actually understood this and have a greater understanding of what we have covered. Very well done, love Kant, TFS!

I've just discovered your channel and I'm more than happy! Great job!

Fantastic work breaking this down. Please do more of these!

Fun fact: for non-flat geometries there can be triangles which angles sum up to more or less than 180 degrees.

Great, but shouldve included a few more examples/spent more time on the last portion explaining synthetic apriori

Wow this channel is perfect. Just what I was looking for. Thanks for the graphics and explanation of every technical term.

Best explanation of Kant I've seen (because it is understandable and confirms what I thought Kant meant...)

I see that this is restricted to the realm of math, however, is there any other examples of synthetic a priori knowledge? I cant fathom any.

The last minute is gold! Thanks a lot! All other lectures make this distinction seem to be pointless.

This is incredible! This is the best explanation of Kant's synthetic apriori knowledge. Thank you so much!

I'm of the impression that Frege didn't agree here and subsequently nor did Quine? However, I still think Kant is key to understanding the nature of knowledge in any deep way. Thanks.

Are all empirical judgements are synthetic? Kripke noted that if x=y -> □x=y. When we discovered the Morning Star and the Evening Star were the same star, it means that the the two names were interchangeable as they picked out the same object. So it seems even though we discovered that empirically, any analysis of the two words would have to contain the other. Which would imply there are Empirical Analytic Truths.

I don't see the fact that the angles of a triangle sum to 180° as a fact that is not contained in the definition of a triangle, "a three sided figure enclosed on a plane". Mathematical knowledge is discovered, not invented; analytic knowledge is not necessarily trivial.

What is the current state of philosophy in accepting this idea about metaphysics? It seems to me that's falling out of favor for a few reasons, but mainly because science has begun to tackle metaphysics questions like free will, the arrow of time, and existence of time itself as an irreducible property of reality, and the need for causality relations. The metaphysical idea of locality and absolute time have already been tackled and found to not hold experimentally, which means that these metaphysical ideas cannot be a priori. That raises the question if any metaphysical ideas are a priori. It's also clear to mathematicians that definitions used in mathematics are arbitrary and in fact many varieties of mathematics exist which have been found useful in physics but where the set of those a priori axioms are different. I don't think we can take Kant's claim about the necessity and universality of a priori truths seriously anymore.

" I am reminded of a great German philosopher, Immanuel Kant. He is a specimen of those people who are absolutely in the mind. He lived according to mind so totally that people used to set their watches, whenever they saw Immanuel Kant going to the university. Never - it may rain, it may rain fire, it may rain cats and dogs, it may be utterly cold, snow falling … Whatever the situation, Kant will reach the university at exactly the same time all the year round, even on holidays. Such a fixed, almost mechanical … He would go on holiday at exactly the same time, remain in the university library, which was specially kept open for him, because otherwise what would he do there the whole day? And he was a very prominent, well-known philosopher, and he would leave the university at exactly the same time every day. One day it happened … It had rained and there was too much mud on the way - one of his shoes got stuck in the mud. He did not stop to take the shoe out because that would make him reach the university a few seconds later, and that was impossible. He left the shoe there. He just arrived with one shoe. The students could not believe it. Somebody asked, “What happened to the other shoe?” He said, “It got stuck in the mud, so I left it there, knowing perfectly well nobody is going to steal one shoe. When I return in the evening, then I will pick it up. But I could not have been late.” A woman proposed to him: “I want to be married to you” - a beautiful young woman. Perhaps no woman has ever received such an answer, before or after Immanuel Kant. Either you say, “Yes,” or you say, “No. Excuse me.” Immanuel Kant said, “I will have to do a great deal of research.” The woman asked, “About what?” He said, “I will have to look in all the marriage manuals, all the books concerning marriage, and find out all the pros and cons - whether to marry or not to marry.” The woman could not imagine that this kind of answer had ever been given to any woman before. Even no is acceptable, even yes, although you are getting into a misery, but it is acceptable. But this kind of indifferent attitude towards the woman - he did not say a single sweet word to her. He did not say anything about her beauty, his whole concern was his mind. He had to convince his mind whether or not marriage is logically the right thing. It took him three years. It was really a long search. Day and night he was working on it, and he had found three hundred reasons against marriage and three hundred reasons for marriage. So the problem even after three years was the same. One friend suggested out of compassion, “You wasted three years on this stupid research. In three years you would have experienced all these six hundred, without any research. You should have just said yes to that woman. There was no need to do so much hard work. Three years would have given you all the pros and cons - existentially, experientially.” But Kant said, “I am in a fix. Both are equal, parallel, balanced. There is no way to choose.” The friend suggested, “Of the pros you have forgotten one thing: that whenever there is a chance, it is better to say yes and go through the experience. That is one thing more in favor of the pros. The cons cannot give you any experience, and only experience has any validity.” He understood, it was intellectually right. He immediately went to the woman’s house, knocked on her door. Her old father opened the door and said, “Young man, you are too late. You took too long in your research. My girl is married and has two children.” That was the last thing that was ever heard about his marriage. From then on no woman ever asked him, and he was not the kind of man to ask anybody. He remained unmarried."

2:57 can't we say that maths or a priori knowledge is also ultimately empirical knowledge as we know those truths only after having the empirical experience of our world? e.g., we know 7+5=12 only after having experienced such truth in our childhood. Whereas a stone or any other thing can't say that 7+5=12 simply because they can't experience it like we do.

So far the best video I’ve watched on this topic. Thank you professor! Now, back to making cooking videos.

Thank you for this video, it was exactly what I was looking for.

Thank you so much for this video. This wasn't very clear when my professor taught this but now I feel like I will get an A on my paper.

I see comments assuming the converse of Kant’s claim is true; that because synthetic knowledge is ampliative, ampliative knowledge must be synthetic, the implicit assumption being that analytical knowledge can’t be ampliative. Thinkers disagreeing with Kant tend to claim that that is not true

This video is great! Wonderful explanation. Thanks for publishing it.

This video is just amazing. Thank you.

Nice video, just a little comment. Kant's example of synthetic a priori knowledge is the mentioned example: 5+7=12. He says this is not analytic a priori: but synthetic a priori. So the example of the triangle, where the predicate says something IN ADDITION to the subject, holds for 5+7=12. Kant's reference to mathematics is, of course, very much disputed. Many would take mathematical truths as analytical truths. The point Kant wants to make against Hume's scepticism is, that knowledge is articulated within a transcendental frame of veridicality that cannot be put into question.

Math was not a very helpful example...it's highly debatable. Aren't time and space generally given as examples of synthetic a priori? We necessarily interpret experience according to time and space (also cause-and-effect), but they cannot be intuited prior to experience. Meaning: we only discover the constructs of time and space through experience, but there is no way to experience reality without time or space. Synthetic (we know it through experience), a priori (necessarily true).

Is there another example of synthetic a priori knowledge? Not all triangles add up to 180 degrees such as those on a sphere add up to something greater. And I don't see how you can figure this out by non-empirical means.

Didn't differential geometry and general relativity basically blow up Kant's argument. There are triangles in curved space (or at least the best possible triangles we can define in curved space) that do have 190 degrees, and they are in our universe no less, and empiricism helped lead us to that idea.

Could a synthetic a priori to us just be empirical to an alien species that can intuitively sense that the interior angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees?

I see a lot of comments saying that because a triangle always has a sum of 180 degrees at it's angles it needs to be analytic a priori knowledge. The way I see it is that analytic a priori knowledge defines something, in this case a triangle, in the most basic form necessary. For a triangle this wouldn't include saying the sum of the angles always makes 180 degrees, but saying it needs three sides touching eachother does. However, in this sense saying it always has three angles would also be synthetic a priori, because it doesn't need to be said to get the concept of 'triangle'.

beautifully described, it's such a complex topic to read through the text. Thanks :)

Can someone please clear up this confusion that i have - i am getting a feeling that synthetic apriori is just saying that there are some undiscovered intrinsic properties of an apriori judgement that were not known when creating that apriori. So since we are talking about an undiscovered property of an apriori judgement, it is still an apriori. Hence the name "synthetic apriori". But doesn't that mean that synthetic apriori is just an emperical/synthetic judgement. It is discovered through experience, so why is it still an "apriori".

Awesome. Thank-you. The best explanation of a priori knowledge I have seen.

Great video and explanation. Still, it makes me want to lay down in a corner and cry myself out of existence.

The theory of synthetic a priory knowledge is brilliant. I think he's right about this.

To anybody who has doubts about the analytic\synthetic distinction, I highly recommend Sebastian Gardner's book "Kant and the Critique of Pure Reason". For instance, if you are not convinced that mathematical truths are synthetic, or if you think that a synthetic truth becomes an analytic one, by virtue of the expansion of definitions, you really, really should check the 3rd chapter of the book. You can find it for free online.

Great video. Suggest you put lots of soft stuff in your room to stop the echo - hard to listen.

this was actually a very well explained video that has helped me understand the concept so much better in one go. very well made, thank you.

Im really uncertain how Kants views are any different than Aristotle's and Aquinas, or even Plato's. All of them recognized the same thing, and argued that we come to knowledge about reality via 1) "The senses" and 2) "reason". It seems to me, modern philosophers merely replace "the senses" with the word "Empiricism" and "reason" with "aprori" and "ampliative" with what Aristotle understood as "universals (form) plus matter (the stuff) equals reality". Ive read a decent amount about classical philosophy recently, and now learning about the moderns, and to be honest it sounds like a less sophisticated understanding of the older stuff. Maybe that will change as i learn more.

So triangle is a figure with three sides which means that triangle is a priori and analytical? (If we only take 3 sides into consideration and not 180 degrees)

I'm a bit confused. In the statement "The interior angles of a triangle add up to 180°" isn't the subject the interior angles of the triangle and not the triangle itself? The idea that the interior angles of a triangle are equal to 180° is contained in the concept of the interior angles of a triangle, so if "the interior angles of a triangle" is the subject and not "a triangle" isn't the statement analytic a priori? I'm not sure if this makes sense or its just a bit of logical/linguistic sleight of hand. Great video other than this btw.

Really good explanation of a very complicated idea.

8:40 wrong! Its angles BY DEFINITION sum to 180 degrees. Can you conceive of a triangle that doesn't??

does that also mean that there are types of Empirical analytical knowledge as well? and if so what are examples of that?

In 5:30 , the statement becomes synthetic but doesn't it still stay a priori? So that statement is a bachelor is happy-go-lucky is a synthetic a priori isn't it? For example string theory is all theoretical, and purely mathematical and there isn't any empirical experience involved - making it a priori, yet it is also synthetic as we are making claims. So string theory is synthetic a priori. Right?

So this is true, if we're expressions of Source (consciousness) and our thoughts come from who we really are. What's the alternative?

Excellent summation.

such a great video and helped understand kants philosophy

Thats great! Really helpful!! Willt you will you also do something about the transcendental analytic as well? ;) It would be really helpful, and Kant is so important to understand, for anyone wanting to study philosophy

Only the individuals experience in meditation can determine the value of metaphysics. Kant was a master of words and math, so we got a triple wammy.

best explanation on the topic that i had ever heard. thank you

if red is red is an example of a priori knowledge then i have question in my mind. red is red becuase we see it, and because we are seeing it as red we are using our senses, doesnt that make it dependable on our senses?

Wonderful video. Very interesting. As for the triangle having 180 degrees being synthetic apriore, because the definition of a triangle (a three sided figure) doesn’t inherently contain that its internal angles will sun to 180 degrees. Isn’t this just a definitional issue. Aren’t we saying that if all triangles angles equal 180 degrees that we therefore have that as part of its definition? If it were not part of its definition, then we can have triangles that do not contain 180 degrees worth of angles. Or am I missing something.

Thank you man! Very easy to grasp. Good job!

Flawlessly explained

I don't quite get the point where maths like 5+7=12 is a priori. If that's the case, why bother kids to learn sums? What if sums are just experiments we use to justify countings? I have 5 apples, he has 7 apples, together we have 12 apples. was it a priori maths? or is this countings?

Very helpful video. Thanks.

I don’t really understand how a triangle having three sides and a triangle having interior angles that sum to 180 degrees are not the same kind of a priori definitional information. It seems like both are just self-contained features of the triangle, by definition. Help!

Ok, help me understand this, _empirical judgements_ are truths, for lack of a better word, that need our sense perception, i.e., it needs some kind of experience prior for it to be considered true. Right? Now it's antonym which is _a priori judgements,_ which need not be dependant on our senses, is true by definition. We don't need to experience it for it to be true. Hope I got this correct so far? And I'm totally satisfied so far when it comes to grasping these concepts. But now when it comes to _analytic judgements_ and _synthetic judgements,_ then the water gets a bit muddy for me. If _analytic judgements_ are also the judgements which are true by definition then why and how they are different from _a priori judgements?_ And if _empirical judgements_ are true because they depend on our senses then similarly why and how _synthetic judgements_ are different from them? Since _synthetic judgements_ would also have to be experienced in some way IMO? Because how can we deduce that a triangle will sum up to be 180° without experiencing/analysing it?! TBH, this _synthetic judgement_ bit is where I am confused I think? Can somebody clear this up for me please?!

"this is the type of knowledge philosophers seek", sure there are mathematical axioms etc. that existed but were unknown at the time Kant wrote his philosophy, but can it really be called "knowledge" if its not yet known? doesn't this negate the metaphysical idea since it does take empirical knowledge of things to understand and even come up with abstract ideas like mathematics.?

This was really good. Thank you

Beautiful explanation.

Well done Mr. Edgar.

that's really was helpful. Thank you so much!

but at one point someone counted and said that 7+5 is 12 now this is empirical evidence that we don't think about anymore since it had been in our practice for so long. my question is if scientific knowledge is analytic how come maths is apriori

you lost me at 9:42. you said metaphysical knowledge is supposed to expand your knowlrdge, and is therefore ampliative. so i went back to look at your definition of ampliative and it seems you define it as something which is not constantly true. A Priori knowledge is always universally true so no 1 piece of information can be both, it would contradict itself. so how is metaphysical knowledge also synthetic knowledge?

Subrb ....best way to understand kant's theory. ...so helpful...Please make some more videos on Hegal, Fichte Grotius etc

Thank you These videos are excellent

Isn't the concept of a triangle a 3 sided shape with angles adding up to 180 degrees? How is that genuinely new info making it synthetic? I think i've gotten myself confused haha

What is the difference between a rose is a rose, and a rose is a flower? The judgement required for each is different in what way? Do they "mean" the same thing? A rose is a rose only has meaning in "comparison" to other things. A rose is a flower is self-referential. The negation of other things doesn't automatically give a thing. A thing in itself (a rose is a rose) says nothing because it defines nothing. Unless the experience or senses are brought up a rose 🌹 cannot be a rose, for there is no universal and necessary rose. Can the subject be contained in the subject? Where is the definition of the number 1? The number one is a number 1? Or is it the number 1 is the number 1? From where do we cognize numbers? If not from the empirical, from where?

Is an anylitylic judgement a tautology?

0:35 what's its nature

All of math is using definitions and axioms to come to conclusions about some object, which is certainly ampliative and necessary knowledge, but also fits the description of analytical knowledge. Kant’s assumption that analytical knowledge can’t be ampliative makes no sense to me and the example of math seems to be a large oversight on the philosophy of math

This video is really amazing

Nice explanation

But doesn't Kripke show that not all a priori knowledge is necessary knowkedge?

Thanks for such an awesome video

Beautifully done.

Meta physics is like flowing water. When we as individuals start to experience the flowing water effect, and also allowing the effects to effect us, in the mind, this is the way to enlightenment.

Why can't people just explain the basic idea without the gobbldiguk?.??

I am not sure that the example of the triangle really works. Since the definition of a triangle is a joined 3 sided figure on a plane and since it is impossible to have a joined 3 sided figure on a plane which is not a triangle, if we say there is a triangle we are actually also saying there is an object whose interior angles add up to 180 degrees, just like when we say there is a bachelor we are also saying there is an unmarried man. That would make the concept that the interior angles of a triangle add up too a 180 degrees an analytic apriori not a synthetic. Thoughts? The fact that we didn't know until we measured what the angles added up too is only new information in the sense that we didn't know the full definition of a triangle, we could also describe a triangle as a three figure object on a plane whose interior angles add up too a 180 degrees.

can i get its transcript?

Clear and simple! Thank you!

I wish you had given an example of synthetic apriori metaphysical knowledge, because nothing in metaphysics seems to be universal and necessary. It's all about convictions and beliefs that are not apriori since they are imposed by culture (God, the soul, etc.).

Kant is simply confusing. Kant says, "Experience is cognition of objects", but cognition of objects is not cognition, because cognition is not experience which is cognition of objects.

wow....that just changed everything

Thank you. Very well done.

Good explanation

I fail to see how saying that the angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees is ampliativ. It seems to me that that is equally part of the inherent definition of a triangle. Just like you can't have a triangle with two sides, you can have a triangle where the sum of the angles is 190 degrees. Both seem analytic/ a priori. Pls help.

Nice video but the empirical observations lead by induction to a general principle that is later found to be true by definition.

Super helpful, thanks!

8:24 but could it not be argued that the concept of a triangle does contain the fact that the internal angles sum up to 180 degrees, but just our label of a triangle doesn't contain that fact?