Conclusion: - Kant’s Empiricism

Summary

The concluding chapter sketches a portrait of Kant the empiricist and highlights what is of broader philosophical interest in it. Kant has a keen understanding that empirical knowledge is gradually acquired through a process of revision and refinement. Empirical knowledge is not an epistemic state but a process – not a possession but an ongoing pursuit. This follows from making a regulative assumption a necessary condition of empirical experience and knowledge. Furthermore, only the complete but unattainable determination of the sensibly given by a complete system of causally explanatory concepts can ground the objectivity and truth science seeks. Empirical truth too is ultimately an end we continuously pursue. Our claims to knowledge and our attempts at scientific explanation lay claim to being objectively true. But they are in principle open to revision, refinement or outright rejection. The chapter further claims that Kant’s conception of the aesthetic purposiveness of nature is an account of the acquisition of our most fundamental empirical concepts of observation, which also explains the fact that what we most fundamentally perceive are unchanging simple objects and their salient sensible properties. Finally, it shows that the aesthetic condition of experience does not prey to the "myth of the given."