Page 506 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Key Figures
on the Mental Development of Mankind, with an intro- duction by H Aarsleff. Cambridge University Press, Cam- bridge, 1988)
Humboldt W von 1903-36 Gesammelte Schriften, 17 vols. Koniglich Akademie der Wissenschaften, Berlin
Koerner E F K 1990 Wilhelm von Humboldt and North
American ethnolinguistics: Boas (1894) to Hymes (1961).
HL 17(1-2): 111-28
Manchester M L 1985 The Philosophical Foundations of
Humboldt's Linguistic Doctrines. Benjamins, Amsterdam Sweet P R 1978-80 Wilhelm von Humboldt: A Biography, 2
vols. Ohio State UniversityPress, Columbus, OH
Immanuel Karit was born on April 22,1724 in Konigs- berg, East Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia), where he spent his whole life, becoming Professor of Logic and Metaphysics in 1770 and eventually Rector of the University. In his lifetime he achieved a revolution in German philosophical thought, opening the way to the idealism of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. Elsewhere his influence was felt more slowly (though Coleridge was an early admirer), but its effect was again profound. He died on February 12, 1804.
1. Transcendental Idealism
The Critique of Pure Reason (1781) is concerned with how knowledge is possible. The rationalist tradition (then dominant in Germany) held that we possess certain concepts innately, and can recognize as self- evident certain truths from which can be deduced sub- stantial knowledge about the world. The empiricists, in contrast, held that concepts and knowledge of the world could only be derived from experience, though Hume—the most consistent of them—argued that the only way of deriving from experience the concepts of cause and physical object showed them to be inherently confused. Kant believes they are not confused, and not derived from experience. He also holds that we have substantial knowledgewhich could not have been derived from experience: in his ter- minology, synthetic a priori knowledge. It includes mathematical truths, and truths like 'Every event has a cause.'
We can know these truths, Kant thinks, only because we ourselves make them true: i.e., read them into the world. Mathematics he takes to be about space and time, which however are not real inde- pendently of us, but forms which our mind imposes upon data it receives. Similarly concepts like those of cause and object are so read in by us as to guarantee they will apply within the world as we experience it, and in such a way that principles like 'Every event has
a cause' will be true within that world. The world of 'appearances' or 'phenomena' is thus partly the product of our minds' activity. Yet truth in that world (the familiar world of space, time, and causality) is not just a matter of what we happen to believe. The concepts and principles which we ourselves supply provide standards for distinguishing true from false beliefs, and allow us to assign to physical objects a reality distinct from our perceptions of them. Because he treats objects in this way, and not (like Berkeley) as sets of perceptions, Kant calls himself an empirical realist; he calls himself also a transcendental idealist, because the phenomenal world as a whole is partly the product of our minds.
Kant does not simply postulate that our minds sup- ply these elements to the world. He argues that they must, for experience would be impossible otherwise. Perhaps other beings could impose forms different from space and time, but some such forms are required for any experience of sensible particulars. Twelve fun- damental concepts or 'categories' he argues to be indispensable, including that of cause, and he claims that principles like 'Every event has a cause' must hold for spatio-temporal experience to be possible. Arguments of this kind, that something must be so if experience is to be possible, are often called tran- scendental arguments.
The phenomenal world is only partly the product of our minds. Minds work on data supplied by things as they are in themselves (or 'noumena'). Things in themselves are wholly independent of us, and about them we can know nothing. We can know nothing about them empirically, since we do not experience them, nor a priori, for a priori knowledge is possible only in virtue of what we read into what is known. The failure to realize these limits to knowledge leads, Kant holds, to the errors of metaphysicians, and to natural mistakes in our thinking about the self, the world as a totality, and God—though the tendencies that lead to these natural mistakes have great heuristic value.
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