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What can we really know—and where must reason recognise its limits?

In the second episode of our Kant series, Samuel Woodall and Jack Thomson explore the Critique of Pure Reason: Hume’s challenge, synthetic a priori knowledge, Kant’s Copernican turn, space and time, phenomena and things in themselves, and the antinomies of reason. We finish by asking how the limits of theoretical knowledge lead towards freedom and moral responsibility.

Kant · Episode 2 of 3
Next: freedom, moral duty and the Critique of Practical Reason.

CHAPTERS
00:00 Introduction
00:25 Science and the crisis of metaphysics
01:27 Synthetic a priori knowledge and Hume
05:09 Kant’s Copernican turn
06:35 Concepts, intuitions and the soul
10:17 Appearances, things in themselves and antinomies
18:19 The limits of reason and moral freedom
20:07 Next: freedom and moral duty

READING
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (1781; revised 1787), especially the second-edition Preface and A51/B75.
Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (1783).
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant/
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-hume-causality/
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-transcendental-idealism/

EDITORIAL CLARIFICATIONS
Kant’s appearances are empirically real, rather than false pictures hiding reality. The discussion’s wording at that point is a slip: the distinction concerns objects as experienced and considered independently of our mode of cognition. Hume’s problem of causal necessity is distinct from the is–ought problem in moral reasoning. See the reading links above.

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