Causality and Objectivity: The Arguments in Kant’s Second Analogy

Of the philosophical problems that Kant sets out to resolve in the Critique of Pure Reason, one of the foremost is how to justify the principle that, necessarily and universally, all events in the world occur because of an antecedent cause. This problem was, after all, the focal point of Kant’s intellectual engagement with Hume, and it served as an impetus for his transcendental idealist system. But while the importance of the problem of causality in the Critique is widely acknowledged, there is little agreement over either what the main threads of Kant’s arguments on causality are or how successful they are. In this paper, I will address both of these questions. I will first exposit and then critically examine the arguments for the objectivity of causality that Kant employs in the Second Analogy of Experience, the section of the Critique of Pure Reason in which he gives his most thorough and explicit treatment of causality. Two distinct lines of argument in the Second Analogy will serve as the focus of this inquiry, and I will explicate each in turn. In the first argument, Kant contends that any notion of objective perception presupposes objective causality. Although this argument has the advantage of resting on only minimal presuppositions, I will show that its premises nevertheless underdetermine its conclusion. Having explored this first argument, I will then turn to the second, which holds that, to account for the features of our ordinary understanding of causality, causality must be a priori, universal, and necessary—that is, it must be objective. But while this argument has