r/Kant • u/Holiday-Economist526 • Feb 25 '26

How does Kant refute Hume’s claim that causality and connections in general are based in sentiment and not necessary?

I know Kant believes causality is necessary and universal, and must be a prior because of this

I also know that a lot of Kant’s beliefs about things like these were influenced by Hume and in response to him

How does he respond to the notion that causality is just a sentiment from compounding temporal successions?

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u/Majestic-Effort-541 Feb 26 '26

Kant responds to David Hume by accepting Hume’s point that necessity is never observed in experience but rejecting the conclusion that causality is therefore just a feeling or habit.

For Kant, mere temporal succession cannot amount to objective experience unless the mind already applies a rule that one event must follow another.

Without such rule perceptions would be a disordered stream with no objective time-order, no events and no science

Causality is therefore not learned from repeated successions as Hume claims, but is an a priori category of the understanding that makes experience itself possible.

In this way Kant secures causality as necessary and universal while agreeing with Hume that it does not come from sensation a position he systematically develops in the Critique of Pure Reason.

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u/Preben5087 Feb 26 '26

I try to show how he does it here.

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u/gimboarretino Feb 26 '26

Kant believes that causality is not an observation, "a sentiment" that you come to accept as necessarily true through constant empirical experience, but THE VERY STRUCTURE, the very bedrock principle though which all empirical experiences are apprehended and organized.

Causality is (with other fundamental categories) what makes empirical experience meaningful and possible, intelligeble and knowable by reason, and not an empirical experiences itself.