INTRODUCTION

Now that we have a comprehensive and detailed description of Kant's views on causality, we can turn to consider how they are related to the views of others. Since Kant repeatedly relates his views on causality to Hume's, it is natural to begin with the historical question of what Kant's reply to Hume is in light of the account of causality attributed to Kant in the previous chapters. While it is commonly assumed (especially in the context of the Second Analogy of Experience) that Kant's reply to Hume is (at least supposed to be) a direct refutation of Hume's position, I argue for three contrary theses in the first half of this chapter. First, when the reception of Hume in Germany is taken into account, we see that Kant would have been justified in assuming that the majority of his readers (especially those interested in what “pure reason” can establish) would not have thought that a refutation of Hume's views on causality was at all necessary. Second, Kant's explicit references to Hume in the first and second editions of the Critique suggest that Hume's views on causality were important to him not primarily in their own right, but rather as an illuminating illustration of Hume's more general skeptical approach, which, due to its inherent instability, should be replaced with his own Critical methodology. Finally, when Kant's and Hume's models of causality are compared, one can see that they are so radically different that they do not share enough assumptions for a refutation to be possible. Instead, one should view Kant as attempting to develop an alternative account of causality, one that competes against rather than refutes Hume's views.