But though Kant's own introductory account of the scope of the Critique is explicit enough, the body of the work itself as well as other utterances of the author have suggested to many commentators a broader problem than, How are a priori synthetic judgments possible? They see in this formula only a provisional statement of the ultimate problem, How is knowledge in general possible? Or, since all knowledge is composed of synthetic judgments, and the a priori sort is manifestly more perplexing than the a posteriori, they conceive of Kant as asking a test question, which embraces the entire difficulty, as though he would say, "Show me how you get a priori synthetic judgments, and I can understand how the a posteriori are possible." This view makes the fact of synthesis, of which a priori judgments supply a flagrant instance, the central problem of the Critique. Holding Kant's distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments to be essential, it regards as accidental and provisional the division of the latter into a priori and a posteriori, – a division, it maintains, which is transcended by the solution of the very problem in which it appears. This general conception of the critical problem may be rendered still more specific by a few quotations from a well-known British expositor: "Kant does not clearly explain the relation in which a priori and a posteriori synthesis stand to each other ... Hence he does not hesitate, for the present, to speak of empirical synthesis as if it were entirely independent of a priori synthesis ... But if we take such statements as conveying the whole truth of the matter, we make the Critique a sealed book to ourselves ... If the Critique proves anything, it is that there is no experience without a priori synthesis ... It is therefore the aim of the Critique to detect the forms of synthesis which are necessarily implied in experience, and to show that they are so implied ... The object, then, which Kant proposes to himself is a criticism of human knowledge, with the view of determining its nature and limits."[1]
- ↑ Caird's Philosophy of Kant, 218, 206, 219, 200, 189. So Adamson, art. Kant, in Encyclopedia Britannica, XIII, p. 851; Watson, Kant and his English Critics, 11-12; Cohen, Kant's Theorie der Erfahrung, 3; and, after much hesitation, Vaihinger, Commentar zu Kant's Kritik d. r. V., 443 (cf. 186-189, 352-359, 433-443).
