Kant's transcendental method

I. Kant’s Transcendental Method
From experience to the conditions of its possibility
II. Hume in reverse
Hume goes from experience to what we can know about the world, and gets skeptical results.
Kant goes from knowledge of the world to how we could possibly have that knowledge.
III. Space and time
Most of us are inclined to suppose that space and time are just “out there.” Kant’s claim is that space and time are the “forms of intuition” generated by the mind.
For example, we can imagine a space with no objects, but not objects with no space. Space is one of the mind’s forms of arranging sensations.
Traditionally, God is thought of as being outside of space and time. So, Kant reasoned, space and time are the ways we put the world together, not a feature of reality as it is in itself.
IV. Geometry and Arithmetic
Geometry is the study of space and its relations.
Arithmetic is the science of temporality.
By saying that space and time are mind-dependent, Kant explains the possibility of our having synthetic a priori knowledge of these. Nevertheless it does give us knowledge of the world that science studies.

V. Categories of the Understanding
What concepts do we need to make experiential judgments? Kant thinks there are twelve.

Quantitative categories

Unity
Plurality
Totality

Qualitative Categories
Reality
Negation
Limitation
Relational Categories
Substance
Causality
Community or reciprocity

Modality
Possibility-impossibility
Existence-nonexistence
Necessity-contingency

VI. The Category of Substance
Agrees with Hume: substance isn’t given in experience.
It’s not some metaphysical reality beneath appearance.
But it’s the way our mind puts the flow of experience together.
VII. Causality
Agrees with Hume that it’s not given in experience.
Not just a subjective custom or habit by which we put events together.
But rather the way our mind must put the world together in order to experience it.
VIII. The Kantian view of experience
If we attend to experience to see what is given in experience, we find that it is a jumble of loose and separate entities.
But we view that experience as organized.
Therefore our minds work like “glasses” to organize experience so that we can know it.
IX. Phenomena and Noumena
However, the world as experienced is the world as it appears to us, as our minds must put it together.
However, that doesn’t tell us how the world is in itself, but rather how the world as it appears to us must be.
Kant says that reality as it is in itself causes the world to appear to us in certain ways. This has been criticized because his notion of causation is supposed to relate events within experience.