Skepticism and the Skeptical Method: Sources of Ancient and Modern Skepticism in Kant

Kant’s relationship to the skeptical tradition has often been identified with his refutation of the main strands of skepticism in the Transcendental Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason (KrV) – Humean skepticism on causality, Cartesian or “problematic” idealism, and Pyrrhonian or Baylean skepticism. In more recent decades, however, commentators have begun to acknowledged that Kant not only sought to refute the skeptics but also made use of what he called a “skeptical method” to undermine the illegitimate pretensions of traditional metaphysics. In this chapter, I seek to offer a general picture of the ancient and modern sources of Kant’s skeptical method. I begin by describing the main features of this method, in order to identify them in possible ancient and modern sources. In discussing these sources, I observe, first, Kant’s attitude towards Pyrrhonism in the Lectures on Logic (VL), and survey the modern sources that may have informed Kant’s knowledge of this ancient tradition. Among them, I include the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century debates on Zeno of Elea’s paradoxes regarding the infinite divisibility of space, time, and matter, particularly in Bayle’s formulation (Smith, 2008, pp. 467–477). After this, I turn to Kant’s contact with Cicero’s works and examine his comments about Academic skepticism in the Lectures on Logic. In doing so, I note his negative assessment of Academic skepticism and his observations about suspension of judgment, which, paradoxically, are more aligned with Carneades’s teachings than his comments on Academic skepticism would have us expect. Finally, I explore the role that Hume’s skepticism played in the evolution of Kant’s critical thought, especially in his conception of the Antinomies of Pure Reason. To make this connection clearer, I examine the scholarly debate on whether Hume or the antinomical problems produced Kant’s “awakening from his dogmatic slumber”—i.e., his turn from traditional metaphysics to critical philosophy. I conclude that Kant’s skeptical method involves important features of Academic skepticism, which may come from his reading of Hume’s discussion of the cosmological problems in the Enquiry on Human Understanding. Among these discussions, Hume’s treatment of the question of freedom – influenced, in turn, by Cicero’s De Fato – is, in my view, a notorious link between Kant and Academic skepticism.