What Can and Kant Be Done

While reading the introduction to Kant's Critique of Pure one of the first thoughts that entered my mind was what was his aim, or rather, what would this work seek to explore. Essentially, Kant is going to attempt to reconcile the ideas of knowledge through experience alone (empiricism) and the thought that human understanding can come from things that are not empirically experienced (rationalism). Kant states early on in the work that he believes, "There can be no doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience" (Kant 41). From this statement it is clear to see that Kant believes that knowledge and experience are linked. However, he doesn't believe that experience is the end all of knowing. In fact, he believes that there are other forms of thought that occur over and above empirical knowing. His thoughts about this revolve around the analytic and synthetic "a priori". Essentially, a priori is the concept of knowledge that comes before particular experience or experience as a whole. An example of analytical a priori seem to revolve around definitions, such as the statement "all single men are bachelors". This is known to be true due to the fact that we have the analytical ability to know that single men are bachelors and thus can apply this as a general truth for the opposite (no single men are bachelors) makes little since. Now, synthetic a priori are different. These occur outside empirical thought and an example of this is the idea of "causality". Kant believes that causality is essential to forming experience. For, if we didn't think of a concept of causality there would be no way to garnish experience from events that happen around us. Causality acts as a middle man between an event and our empirical knowledge of the event. If we had no middleman, no way to frame empirical occurrences then gaining knowledge from experienced would prove convoluted as would whatever event happened that was unable to be framed within reason.