Abstract

It is nowadays a commonplace of Kant-interpretation that Kant's response to Hume in the Analogies of Experience is not strictly speaking a refutation of Hume but in fact only an extended critical response to Hume's skeptical accounts of object-identity and causation, that also accepts many of Hume's working assumptions. But this approach can significantly underestimate the extent to which Kant's conception of the representational mind is radically distinct from Hume's. In particular, Kant's conception of the human mind's innately-specified spontaneous actions as ultimate sources of the veridical representation of both logical and metaphysical necessity in the world of objective experience, if correct, entails a flat-out rejection of Hume's conception of the human mind's merely projectivist abilities and activities. This in turn entails that, to this extent, the Analogies contain not only a critical response to Hume, but also a flat-out refutation of Hume