Thursday, September 24, 2009

Duhem on Kant

Highly skilled at deduction, the German mind is poorly endowed with common sense. It has a limitless confidence in the discursive method, whereas its confused intuition gives it only a weak assurance of the truth. It is consequently peculiarly vulnerable to slipping into skepticism. It has frequently and ponderously fallen into it; Kant vigorously pushed it there.

What is the Critique of Pure Reason? The longest, the most obscure, the most confused, the most pedantic commentary on these words of Pascal: "We have an impotence to prove which cannot be overcome by any dogmatism."


Pierre Duhem, German Science, pp. 16-17.