Plato is often presented as an enemy of science on the ground that he was bitterly opposed to Empiricism and because he said that, if there was ever to be progress in astronomy, the actual appearances of the starry heavens must be disregarded. He understood by Empiricism, however, the uncritical acceptance of apparent facts, with the attempt to trace regularities in them; it is an attitude that, in his view, is marked by the absence of thought. As for the starry heavens, it is certainly difficult to take Plato quite literally when he compares their function in astronomy to that of a well-drawn diagram in geometry. Yet he was not wrong to suggest that no progress could be made in astronomical inquiries until appearances were seen to be what they were and not taken for absolute realities. The subsequent progress of astronomy has shown this view to be entirely correct.
There are respects in which Plato’s attitude to phenomena was precisely the same as that of the modern scientist. The fact remains, nevertheless, that he believed in a realm of unseen realities, and he is of course far from being the only metaphysician to do so. Many, if not quite all, metaphysicians are committed to claiming knowledge of the supersensible, in some degree at least; even Materialists are alleged to make this claim when they say that behind the familiar world of everyday experience there lies material substance that is not accessible to the senses. It has been a commonplace among critics of metaphysics since the early 18th century that no such claims can be justified; the supersensible cannot be known about, or even known of, whether directly or by inference. Specific criticisms Hume
An early but powerful statement of these criticisms is to be found in the writings of David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40) and An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748). Hume argued first that every simple idea was derived from some simple impression and that every complex idea was made up of simple ideas; innate ideas, supposed to be native to the mind, were nonexistent. There were eccentricities in Hume’s conception of idea (and for that matter in his conception of impression), but these did not destroy the force of his argument that the senses provide the materials from which basic concepts are abstracted. A being that lacked sense experience could not have concepts in the normal sense of the term. Next, Hume proceeded to make a sharp distinction between two types of proposition, one knowable by the pure intellect, the other dependent on the occurrence of sense experiences. Propositions concerning matters of fact and existence answer the latter description; they either record what is immediately experienced through the senses or state what is taken to be the case on the basis of such immediate experiences. Such statements about matters of fact and existence are one and all contingent; their contradictories might have been true, though, as a matter of fact, they are not. By contrast, propositions of Hume’s other type, which concern relations of ideas, are one and all necessary; reflection on the concepts they contain is enough to show that they must, in logic, be true. Though, in a sense, knowledge of these propositions is arrived at by the exercise of pure reason, no real significance attaches to this fact. It is not the case of some special insight into the nature of things; the truth is rather that these propositions simply make explicit what is implicit in the definitions of the terms they contain. They are thus what Kant was to call analytic propositions, and it is an important part of Hume’s case that the only truths to which pure reason can attain are truths of this nature.
David Hume, oil painting by Allan Ramsay, 1766; in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh.Courtesy of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery
Finally, Hume sought to block the argument that, even if the supersensible could not be known directly, or through pure intellectual concepts, its characteristics could, nevertheless, be inferred. His analysis of causality had this as one of its aims. According to Hume, the only means by which men can go beyond the impressions of the memory and the senses and know what lies outside their immediate experience is by employing causal reasoning. Examination of the causal relation, however, shows that it is, among other things, always a relation of types of events in time, one of which invariably precedes the other. Causality is not, as Descartes and others supposed, an intelligible relation involving an internal tie between cause and effect; it is a matter of purely factual connection and reduces on its objective side to nothing more than regular precedence and succession. The importance of this for the present inquiry lies in the consequence that causal relations can hold only between items, or possible items, of experience. According to Hume, if the temporal element is removed from causality, nothing concrete is left; if it is kept, it becomes impossible to argue that one can proceed by causal reasoning from the sensible to the supersensible. Yet it was precisely this that Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and Locke had all attempted.
Hume’s own explicit pronouncements about metaphysics are ambivalent. There is a famous passage in which he urged men to consign volumes of divinity and “school metaphysics” to the flames, “as containing nothing but sophistry and illusion,” but in at least one other place he spoke of the need to “cultivate true metaphysics with some care, in order to destroy the false and adulterate.” “True metaphysics,” in this connection, meant critical philosophical reflection. Kant
Hume’s successor Kant made a sharper distinction between metaphysics and critical philosophy. Much of Kant’s philosophical effort was devoted to arguing that metaphysics, understood as knowledge of things supersensible, is an impossibility. Yet metaphysics, as a study of the presuppositions of experience, could be put on “the sure path of science”; it was also possible, and indeed necessary, to hold certain beliefs about God, freedom, and immortality. But however well founded these beliefs might be, they in no sense amounted to knowledge: to know about the intelligible world was entirely beyond human capacity. Kant employed substantially the same arguments as had Hume in seeking to demonstrate this conclusion but introduced interesting variations of his own. One point in his case that is especially important is his distinction between sensibility as a faculty of intuitions and understanding as a faculty of concepts. According to Kant, knowledge demanded both that there be acquaintance with particulars and that these be brought under general descriptions. Acquaintance with particulars was always a matter of the exercise of the senses; only the senses could supply intuitions. Intuitions without concepts, nevertheless, were blind; one could make nothing of particulars unless one could say what they were, and this involved the exercise of a very different faculty, the understanding. Equally, however, the concepts of the understanding were empty when considered in themselves; they were mere forms waiting to be brought to bear on particulars. Kant emphasized that this result held even for what he called “pure” concepts such as cause and substance; the fact that these had a different role in the search for knowledge from the concepts discovered in experience did not give them any intuitive content. In their case, as in that of all other concepts, there could be no valid inference from universal to particulars; to know what particulars there were in the world, it was necessary to do something other than think. Thus is revealed the futility of trying to say what there is on the basis of pure reason alone.