Immanuel Kant/David Hume Philosophy short essay questions

Description

There are two parts to this assignment, the first part is 10 questions about 1 sentence answer for each. The second part is 2 short essay questions with a 1-page answer for each. For a total of 3 pages

PART1:

1. What problem does the ‘missing shade of blue’ pose for Hume?
2. What are the relations of ideas (Hume)? Provide an example.
3. What is an inductive argument? Provide an example.
4. Why can’t the principle of the uniformity of nature be inferred by demonstrative reasoning, according to Hume?
5. What does Kant mean by the ‘universal validity of a judgment?’ Provide an example of a universally valid judgment.
6. Write one difference between concepts and intuitions, according to Kant.
7. What is a synthetic a priori judgment? Provide an example.
8. What does Kant mean by saying ‘thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind’ (A51/B75)?
9. How does Kant distinguish the Humean ‘censorship’ of reason from his own ‘critique’ of reason?
10. What is Kant’s indirect (or ‘reductio’) proof of transcendental idealism?

PART2:

1. What is distinctive of Kant’s ‘idealism’, according to the following passage? How does Kant think that the mind contributes to the constitution of objects of experience?

“For what I called idealism did not concern the existence of things (the doubting of which, however, properly constitutes idealism according to the received meaning), for it never came into my mind to doubt that, but only the sensory representation of things, to which space and time above all belong; and about these last, hence in general about all appearances, I have only shown: that they are not things (but mere modes of representation), nor are they determinations that belong to things in themselves” (4:293-4).

2. Kant maintains that traditional philosophers who found themselves on one side of the third antinomy (concerning freedom and necessity) falsely presupposed that thesis and antithesis are contradictory: “on the contrary the assertions, which are set in opposition to one another through mere misunderstanding, can both be true” (4:343). Why did philosophers make this false presupposition? What is the source of the illusion that led them astray? And how does Kant argue that we can avoid their mistake in the following passage?

“All actions of rational beings, insofar as they are appearances (are encountered in some experience or other), are subject to natural necessity; but the very same actions, with respect only to the rational subject and its faculty of acting in accordance with bare reason, are free. […] [F]reedom does not impede the natural law of appearances, any more than this law interferes with the freedom of the practical use of reason, a use that stands in connection with things in themselves as determining grounds” (4:346).