(a) "Precepts without concepts are blind and concepts without precepts are empty." In the light of this statement discuss how…

(a) Kant's reconciliation of rationalism and empiricism

Kant's own wording is "thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind" (A51/B75). Concepts of the understanding, the categories, give no knowledge unless applied to the sensory manifold given in intuition; a manifold of intuition, in turn, is not an object of experience until concepts unify it. Empiricism is right that all knowledge begins with sensibility, which supplies the matter. Rationalism is right that the understanding supplies necessary and universal forms. The Transcendental Aesthetic gives space and time as forms of intuition, and the Transcendental Analytic, through the transcendental deduction, shows that the categories are the conditions of any possible experience. So knowledge needs both, and reason is limited to possible experience. The categories are not copied from experience, so Hume's scepticism about necessity is answered; and they are not applied to things-in-themselves, so the rationalist's pure metaphysics is rejected.

(b) Hegel's dialectical approach to history

For Hegel, history is the self-development of Spirit (Geist) in time, whose essence is freedom, and not a chronicle of events (Philosophy of History). Its change is dialectical: each form of consciousness contains a contradiction, is negated, and is then sublated (Aufhebung) into a richer unity that preserves what was true in it. The popular thesis-antithesis-synthesis formula is not Hegel's own wording; the movement is immanent, not imposed from outside. Freedom is realised in stages: in the Oriental world one is free, in the Greek and Roman world some are free, and in the Germanic world all are free as human beings. The French Revolution shows the dialectic: the claim of abstract freedom turned into the Terror and was sublated in the modern constitutional state. The "cunning of reason" shows great individuals serving the World Spirit (Weltgeist) while pursuing their own passions. The approach gives history meaning, but critics find it Eurocentric and teleological, and it can justify existing power as necessary.

(c) Spinoza on freedom and determinism

In Ethics I, Definition 7, Spinoza calls a thing free that exists from the necessity of its own nature alone and is determined to act by itself; a thing is compelled when determined by others to exist and act in a fixed way. Only God or Nature (Deus sive Natura) is absolutely free in this sense. Since all things follow from divine nature by necessity (I P29, there is no contingency), human beings are not free in the libertarian sense. The feeling of free will arises because we are conscious of our desires and ignorant of their causes (I Appendix). Freedom for a human being is therefore a matter of degree. Each thing strives to persist in its being, the conatus (III P6). Passions are inadequate ideas, caused from outside, and make us passive; adequate ideas make us active and self-determined (Parts IV and V). The highest state is the intellectual love of God. So freedom is not exemption from necessity but understanding of it, and Spinoza is a determinist who is also a compatibilist.

(d) Kierkegaard against Hegel's universal spirit

Hegel makes the individual a moment of universal Spirit and truth a rational system. Kierkegaard replies that an existing individual cannot stand at the end of history, and that a finished system leaves out existence, the single individual (den Enkelte) who must choose. In the Concluding Unscientific Postscript he says that subjectivity is truth: what counts is the passion with which one relates to what is truth for oneself, not objective knowledge. Spirit is the self relating to itself and to God, under anxiety and choice, passing through the aesthetic, ethical and religious stages. In Fear and Trembling the knight of faith, Abraham, makes a leap of faith that suspends the ethical universal, which Hegel's ethical life could not accommodate. Strengths: he restores existence, choice and responsibility, and influenced existentialism. Weaknesses: the leap risks arbitrariness and irrationalism, social and ethical life is underrated, and Hegel could reply that individuality is mediated by community.

(e) Kant's arguments for synthetic a priori judgments

An analytic judgment only unpacks the subject concept, and a synthetic one adds to it; an a priori judgment is necessary and independent of experience. The question of the Critique (B19) is how synthetic a priori judgments are possible, since they are claimed in mathematics, physics and metaphysics. Kant's answer is the Copernican revolution: objects must conform to the forms of our knowing, not the reverse. We can know a priori the conditions under which things appear, namely space and time and the categories, though not things in themselves. Mathematics: 7 + 5 = 12 is synthetic, because 12 is not contained in the concept of the sum, but is known a priori by construction in pure intuition; geometry rests on space. Physics: "every event has a cause" is synthetic a priori because the category of causality is a condition of experience of events in time (Second Analogy). Metaphysics is possible only as a critique limited to experience; claims about God, soul and world as a whole are illusions of reason.