Single Review on past events

Some philosophers think that there is a kind of knowledge that can be known or justified independent of experience, i.e. a priori knowledge. Andrea Lailach-Hennrich is one of them. She argues that we should accept the possibility of a priori knowledge, and what’s more, we should also accept the possibility of synthetic a priori knowledge. What the term “a priori” means and why philosophers are concerned with a priori knowledge or a priori justification at all she explained in her Jour Fix presentation. One reason why philosophers are interested in a priority might be that philosophy itself could be considered as an a priori inquiry, because philosophers “think, reflect and argue from the armchair. For this kind of reasoning they do not have to rely on experience, i.e. they do not have to discover their environment or carry out experiments. Instead they argue for the truth of their beliefs by relying on (pure) reason or thought alone.” Hence philosophical knowledge seems to be the outcome of a priori reasoning. Based on Kant’s definition of a priori knowledge as “knowledge that is independent of experience and even of all impressions of the senses (…)”Andrea Lailach-Hennrich elucidated on the one hand how one could understand the expression “independent of experience”, on the other she shortly discussed two main conceptions of a priority, namely metaphysical and epistemological conceptions.

Apart from such required conceptual clarification Andrea Lailach-Hennrich’s research project is focused on the question of whether the possibility of synthetic a priori judgments is defendable. Usually, synthetic a priori judgments are determined as true judgments about some non-mental facts (i.e. facts of the external world) that are justified independent of experience. Hence science from the armchair seems to be a possibility if synthetic a priori judgments are possible.

From a Kantian point of view though, synthetic a priori judgments tell us something about the necessary features of empirical objects by means of identifying the general conditions of experience and knowledge. It is precisely this understanding of synthetic a priori judgments as presenting the necessary conditions for the knowledge that Andrea Lailach-Hennrich wants to investigate in her research project. In order to do so, she has to answer several objections raised against the possibility of synthetic a priori knowledge. Among them Kant’s claim that we can only understand the possibility of synthetic a priori judgments if we buy into his doctrine of transcendental idealism. The aim of Andrea Lailach-Hennrich’s project is to present an account of synthetic a priori judgments that, whilst strongly relying on Kant’s transcendental analyses, is not committed to the controversial doctrine of transcendental idealism or any other strong metaphysical assumption.