Kant's View of Synthetic A Priori Knowledge

The purpose of this research is to examine Kant's view of synthetic a priori knowledge. The plan of the research will be to discuss how Kant arrives at his definition in his Critique of Pure Reason, by way of his discussion of the difference between a priori and a posteriori judgments, as well as the contrast between analytic judgments and synthetic judgments.

Kant's Critique of Pure Reason makes a case for intuition, which may or may not be confirmed by experience, as a valid category and determinant of human knowledge. The human impulse toward extension of knowledge becomes a species of knowledge in itself, irrespective of whether the truth of the extension can be confirmed. Kant uses the category a priori to refer to what cannot be categorized as empirical or experiential (i.e., a posteriori, confirmed by experience and explanation). An a priori judgment, then, is one that is made either prior to or altogether apart from sense experience. What is an a priori judgment comprises the "empirical intuition," or "extension and figure," which cannot be parsed, which are left over after all that can be parsed by sense experience has been withdrawn, and which indeed are "independent of experience and even of all impressions of the senses" (Kant 42). Now even though Kant refers to empirical intuition, it does not refer to what can be confirmed experimentally but to an attribute of human consciousness that is its own experimental justification. If it makes logical sense, that is b

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Category: Philosophy - K