Ok, Im sure this will seem stupid to most people on here but I havent read much philosophy at all. I JUST started reading the critique and Im only a few pages into it and I already have a question.
Kant defines a priori knowledge as knowledge that is not grounded on experience. ‘Its independent of experience and all impressions of the senses.’ (rough quote) However, a few lines down he says that if an a priori judgment has no empirical basis at all, its called pure. But isnt that the only thing a priori knowledge can be? Can it not only be pure? If it has any empirical basis, it is no longer a priori but empirical.
Also, he defines an absolutely a priori judgment as a judgment dervied only from another a priori judgment. That just doesnt make sense to me. Arent a priori judgments NOT derived from anything? Isnt that the point? That its just known without comparing or deriving it from anything else whatever?
Im sorry if these are stupid questions but Im really quite confused in his using of these terms. Im afraid to read any further because I dont think Ill understand anything else if I cant even get the basic ideas down. Thanks for any help, its greatly appreciated.
As I recall, when he talked about pure vs. impure a priori, he was making a distinction between a priori beliefs that are self evidence (pure), we hear them and we know they are true, vs. belief that require other a priori beliefs (not empirical) to hold.
So,
“I am thinking”
could be said to be pure a priori
“1+6 = 7”
would be impure, since it requires a priori understandings of one and six.*
“That bird has awesome little feet”
is a posteriori- empirical.
*- Some would content that all mathematics are analytic truths, and thus pure a priori. What’s important here is that Kant didn’t think so.
Ok, that makes a lot of sense. So pure a priori is something I know without any experience. While un pure a priori requires me to first notice other a priori judgments and thus be able to notice another? Almost like un pure a priori judgments arent as obvious and we must first discover more obvious ones and then apply one or more of those to discover another? I hope that makes sense.
Haven’t read or studied Kant in quite some time, but let me take a shot at this.
Impure(synthetic) a priori judgements aren’t things that we know from experience, but things that if we didn’t experience we wouldn’t know.
Take for example, space, nothing in experience lets us know space, but if we never experienced, we would never know that something called space mediates experience.
My understanding is pretty basic, but the way I understand it is that if it’s evident just from looking at it, it’s a priori. If you need extra information to make a deduction, it’s not.
