as an extended question of 'what is it like to be a bat?'
---------<https://fivebooks.com/best-books/david-hume-simon-blackburn/>--------------------------
Q. why the Critique of Pure Reason?
A. It’s an illuminating way to think of the Critique, as a kind of prolonged wrestling match with Hume. Kant recognizes the challenge Hume poses to human reason, and he tries to show that reason can meet that challenge, that there are proper ways of thinking, correct ways of thinking, there are correct categories of thought, and these have a kind of logical or a priori command over any thought, not just human thought. So instead of human nature, we’re going to get unalterable structures which any reasoning creature would have to be following. For example, in Hume, if, let’s say, human beings came across Martians, there’d be no particular reason to expect the Martians to think in the same way that we do. For Kant, there would. If the Martians think of themselves as individuals inhabiting an extended spatial and temporal world, they’ll have to think like that. They will share a lot of common categories with us: categories like causation, substance, space, time and so on.
Q. Hume’s empiricism involves him assuming that experience is what gives us most of our information about the world. Is it fair to say that, in contrast, Kant is saying that from an analysis of the way we organize the world, it follows that there must be this logical structure to our thought?
A. That’s right, that’s basically the element that Kant wheels out to try to diminish the scepticism about reason that we’ve been talking about, and to put in its place a kind of guarantee: first of all that there will be uniformity in nature and secondly that we’re right to think of nature in terms of causation, space, time and whatever other structures he can dig out.
