Chapter 1 Introduction

§ 1. The Method.

Plato and Kant tell us two laws to serve as the method of all philosophy and science: the law of homogeneity and the law of specification.

Inspired by Kant and Plato, who regarded the world as being more amenable to reason, Schopenhauer’s philosophy emphasized that in the face of a world filled with endless strife, we ought to minimize our natural desires for the sake of achieving a more tranquil frame of mind and a disposition towards universal beneficence.

In this article, Quine tries to refute two dogmas in modern empiricism. One is a belief in some fundamental cleavage between truths which are analytic, or grounded in meanings independently of matters of fact and truths which are synthetic, or grounded in fact. The other dogma is reductionism: the belief that each meaningful statement is equivalent to some logical construct upon terms which refer to immediate experience. The effects of abandoning them are (1). a blurring of the supposed boundary between speculative metaphysics and natural science (2). a shift toward pragmatism.

According to Kant’s own retrospective account of the situation in the Critique of Practical Reason, he First Critique establishes the possibility of transcendental freedom through the resolution of the Third Antinomy, while the Second Critique establishes its reality by showing its necessary connection with the moral law, which itself has the status of a “fact of reason”. The moral law thus becomes the ratio cognoscendi of freedom, since it is through the consciousness of this law that one becomes aware of one’s freedom.

The Refutation of Idealism contained in the Second Edition of the Critique is frequently regarded as the appendage to the Transcendental Deduction. The goal of the argument is to refute the skeptic by demonstrating that the reality of “objective experience”, or the applicability of the concept of an object in the “weighty” sense is a necessary condition of the consciousness of one’s identity through time as a subject of experience.