The Skeptical Roots of Critique

"It was the objection of David Hume," Kant says, "that first interrupted my dogmatic slumber;" "it was the fourfold Antinomy," he later says, "that first woke me from dogmatic slumber." The first statement has been taken to mean that the Critique of Pure Reason is a refutation of Hume's skepticism. The Antinomy, however, like ancient skepticism, uses skeptical method to attack dogmatism. Is the Critique a refutation of skepticism or its heir? In The Skeptical Roots of Critique, Abraham Anderson shows that Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is the heir to Hume's skepticism about metaphysics. In showing that the Antinomy flows from Hume's skepticism, this work connects Kant with the skeptical tradition reaching back to the ancients.

In his Enquiry, Hume hints that both Samuel Clarke's theism and the dogmatic materialism he seeks to refute are underwritten by the rationalist causal principle that nothing comes from nothing, and that the clash between the two issues in a skeptical antithetic. In his Émile, Rousseau too saw Clarke's refutation as issuing in an antithetic. These works inspired the first version of Kant's Antinomy, the Dreams of a Spirit Seer; fifteen years later, Hume's Dialogues inspired the mature Antinomy of the Critique. Like Hume's Enquiry and Dialogues and Rousseau's Émile, the Critique is part of the battle for Enlightenment, the struggle against the 'despotic' reign of theological dogmatism.