Apriorism

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In modern times, apriorism is used to describe epistemological positions that assume that certain knowledge can be justified without reference to experience, or in the narrower sense that knowledge is possible entirely without any experience. The truth of statements should be proven by logical deduction from true assumptions. Only those prerequisites come into question, which are to be regarded as necessities of reason for thinking regardless of any experience. Critics accuse apriorism of committing a “ petitio principii ”; d. That is, something is to be proved that is already assumed to be true. Johann August Heinrich Ulrich - contemporary of Kant and philosophy professor in Jena - criticized Kant's apriorism in this sense. Kant maintained that his philosophy was firmly based on the a priori categories and concepts.

Features of apriorism

The apriorism of modern times stands in the tradition of rationalism . Only eternal truths and their consequences come into question as true statements, which have their sufficient reason, for example, in evident axioms or other a priori valid statements and thus find a final justification . In addition to Euclidean geometry , the model for this view was above all the Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant . The latter is seen by many as a response to David Hume's criticism of apriorism.

Among other things, Hume thought causality was a questionable idea. Causality cannot be observed, he said. It is an insinuation that people make out of habit. Philosophically it cannot be decided whether causal connections are true. Kant tried to save the principle of causality through an a priori justification. Causality - he replied - was an a priori, i.e. H. unquestionable category of human thinking that people spontaneously use to recognize causal relationships. Kant oriented himself, among other things, on Newtonian physics, for which causality was a priori in his time. The physics has their theories since then changed again and again, so that Kant's belief is not supported by the state and development of science more in this way.

Ancient and Medieval Apriorism

Plato's doctrine of ideas was shaped a priori. He assumed that human knowledge presupposes objective ideas that are spontaneously remembered and thus enable true knowledge. Philosophy historians refer to this as anamnesis theory . After Plato's conception objective ideas put through participation forth the people at the absolute true knowledge.

The late antique church father Augustine introduced the term abditum mentis ("hiding place of the spirit" or "the secret of the spirit"). With this expression he referred to an area in the depths of the human mind, the content of which is supposed to be an a priori knowledge, which is the basis of thought and all knowledge. According to Augustine's theory, the “more hidden depths of our memory” is the place where people find content that does not come from their stored memories, but that they think for the first time. An insight appears in thinking that comes from an insight that was previously in the memory, but was hidden there.

According to Thomas Aquinas , the human mind is linked to the divine spirit. In this way man comes to knowledge about the order in the world (also about natural laws) that goes beyond experience.

Apriorist positions

At the beginning of the modern era, René Descartes pursued a priori philosophizing. His requirement to start thinking from “clear and definite observations” works when people can start from “clear and clearly definable ideas”. From this comes true knowledge. Another indication of apriorism is the mathematical-geometric character of his thinking. For Descartes, everything that can be deduced from other reliably known things must necessarily be true.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz mentioned "the original beginnings of various concepts and doctrines which external objects only awaken on occasion" in the soul. He called them "intelligible contents of the mind". He agreed with Plato that these universal concepts or the eternal beings have a higher reality than the individual things that can be perceived by the senses. Everything is perfectly true when interpreted correctly.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel postulated the absolute world spirit and an objective logic. They unfold dialectically. Both are given a priori. The world spirit philosophizes through Hegel. Hegel is convinced of that.

Herbert Spencer represented an apriorism of the idea of ​​progress and development . His a priori truths and values ​​denote experiences of the species. They are the engine for the constant further and higher development of people and thus guarantee progress . This can be seen in the cultural or civilizational development.

Apriorism was represented in a more or less explicit form by Neo-Kantianism and from Jakob Friedrich Fries to Husserl , whereby Kant's position, which itself fluctuated between metatheory and psychology , was in part greatly reformulated or weakened.

A relative a priorism is accepted by Marxists . The physical conditions - senses and organs - are the result of a long historical process. Everyone experiences them as something given, in this sense they are a priori. This is also relatively a priori: people grow into a world in which there is already knowledge that the individual has not made himself. Similarly, this is also true of scientific theories. They are found and applied, as it were a priori.

In economics , Ludwig von Mises emerged as a representative of an economic theory which, as a priori science, is on the same level as logic and mathematics. Friedrich August von Hayek, on the other hand, sees empirical statements about knowing and acting individuals as essential in economics alongside the "pure logic of choosing", which only allow ideal-typical causal explanations.

Criticism of a priori positions

Ernst Cassirer , like Karl Popper later, takes account of the criticism of apriorism by reinterpreting the principle of causality into a postulate of methodology : the search for regularities (without a corresponding metaphysical assertion being intended). To free epistemology from a priorism, Hans Albert finally demands to interpret the theory of knowledge as metaphysical and empirical hypotheses.

Friedrich Engels introduced the “Philosophy” section of the Anti-Dühring with the “Apriorism” chapter. The “a priori method” is criticized as “not recognizing the properties of an object from the object itself, but rather deriving them from the concept of the object. First one makes the concept of the object out of the object; then you turn the tables and measure the object against its image, the concept. The concept should not be based on the object, the object should be based on the concept. "

Max Weber criticized Rudolf Stammler for bending the materialistic conception of history to an apriorism in which “laws of nature and logical norms swim into one another,” a scholasticism that falls far behind Kant.

Hans Albert cites anthropological investigations such as those by Arnold Gehlen as an argument against the “strange notion” that human action can be recorded and analyzed by an a priori theory without the aid of empirical knowledge .

Karl Popper stated that advocates of apriorism - Kant and Fries - cannot explain how a non-a priori point of view differs from the a priori one (in relation to the justification of the induction principle). No conclusive evidence is provided. Rather, they proceed from the "dogmatic presupposition" that there is an "a priori valid induction principle". This petitio principii is hidden by the derivation of "certain a priori principles", which already contains the assumption of the induction principle valid a priori. Neither Kant's claim that these a priori prerequisites can be checked "intersubjectively", nor Fries' assertion that they can be grasped by "intellectual intuition" is suitable to provide appropriate evidence.

For fallibilism , the main objection is that this type of justification strategy , in order to justify the absolute truth of statements according to its objective, selects the most weakly tested or testable basis for it.

literature

  • Edmund Abb: Critique of Kant's apriorism from the standpoint of pure empiricism: with special consideration of J. St. Mill and Mach. Leipzig 1906. Digitized Princeton University 2008.
  • Werner Trautner: The apriorism of the forms of knowledge: a study on Max Scheler's sociology of knowledge. Munich 1969.
  • Grigoriĭ Iosifovich Patent, Gottfried Handel, Wilfried Lehrke: Marxism and Apriorism. Epistemological Studies. Berlin 1977.
  • Johann Christoph Gottsched : Selected Works: Smaller Writings, Part One, Volume 10; Volume 12. Berlin 1980.
  • University of Bremen. Center for Philosophical Foundations of the Sciences: On the problem of apriorism in the sciences: a lecture series . University of Bremen press office, 1986.
  • Hans Albert: Critique of the pure epistemology. Mohr: Tübingen 1987. ISBN 3-16-945229-0
  • Renate Wahsner: Epistemological a priorism and modern physics. German Journal for Philosophy 40/1992, pp. 23–35.
  • Karl R. Popper: The two basic problems of epistemology. Based on manuscripts from 1930–1933. Tübingen 2. improve. Edition 1994
  • Ernst Cassirer: Determinism and Indeterminism in Modern Physics. Historical and systematic studies on the causal problem. [Göteborg 1937], new edition: Collected Works, Volume 19, Meiner, Hamburg 2004, ISBN 978-3-7873-1419-5
  • Moritz Schlick : Epistemology and Modern Physics. In: Johannes Friedl & Heiner Rutte: Moritz Schlick. The Vienna period: essays, contributions, reviews 1926–1936. New York / Vienna 2008, pp. 157–174.
  • Emil Sigall: Leibniz-Kantian apriorism and the newer philosophy. Charleston / United States (NABU-Press, Books On Demand) 2011.
  • Benedikt Bärwolf: The “innate ideas” in Plato and Leibniz. Hamburg 2012.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ BonJour, Laurence: In defense of pure reason: a rationalist account of a priori justification . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1998, pp. 1-10 .
  2. ^ Kant: Metaphysical beginnings of the natural sciences. In: Academy edition of Kant's collected works. Volume IV, p. 474/6.
  3. ↑ See David Hume: An Inquiry into the Human Mind. 1748, sections 6-8.
  4. ↑ Immanuel Kant: Critique of Pure Reason. 1787, preface to the 2nd edition. [1]
  5. ↑ Augustine, De trinitate 14,7,915; 21, 40.
  6. ↑ Georg Klaus & Manfred Buhr: Philosophical Dictionary , 12th Edition, Berlin 1987, p. 101 f.
  7. ↑ See Johannes Hirschberger: History of Philosophy. Freiburg i. B. 1980, 11th edition, reprint Heidelberg o. J., Volume II, pp. 95-97.
  8. ↑ Johannes Hirschberger: History of Philosophy. Freiburg i. B. 1980, 11th edition, reprint Heidelberg o. J., Volume II, p. 175 ff.
  9. ↑ Cf. Hegel: Complete Works. H. Glockner (ed.), 1955ff, Volume IV, pp. 40-45.
  10. ↑ Johannes Hirschberger: History of Philosophy. Freiburg i. B. 1980, 11th edition, reprint Heidelberg o. J., Volume II, p. 422.
  11. ↑ Johannes Hirschberger: History of Philosophy. Freiburg i. B. 1980, 11th edition, reprint Heidelberg o. J., Volume II, p. 532 ff.
  12. ↑ Manfred Pascher: Introduction to Neo-Kantianism. Munich 1997, UTB 1962.
  13. ↑ Cf. Georg Klaus & Manfred Buhr: Philosophical Dictionary. West Berlin 1987, reprint of the 12th edition, p. 102.
  14. ↑ Ludwig von Mises: Basic problems of political economy. Jena 1933, p. 12.
  15. ^ FA Hayek: Economic Theory and Knowledge. In: FA Hayek: Individualism and economic order. Eugen Rentsch Verlag Erlenbach-Zurich 1952. P. 66f (Lecture November 10, 1936)
  16. ↑ Hans Albert: Critique of the pure epistemology. Mohr: Tübingen 1987, p. 31.
  17. ↑ Friedrich Engels: Mr. Eugen Dühring's revolution in science ("Anti-Dühring"). Berlin 15th ed. 1970, p. 89.
  18. ↑ Max Weber: R. Stammler's 'Overcoming' the materialistic conception of history. in: Collected essays on science. Tübingen 7th edition 1988. UTB 1492
  19. ^ Hans Albert: Economic Ideology and Political Theory. Göttingen 1972, p. 14. ISBN 3-509-00564-3
  20. ↑ Karl R. Popper: The two basic problems of the theory of knowledge. Tübingen 2010, p. 144.