Can We Know Anything Beyond Experience?

In this opening lecture, Reed Winegar lays out Kant's three questions that will structure the course: What can I know? What should I do? What may I hope for? Winegar explains how Kant arrived at his famous claim that we must restrict knowledge to make room for faith, tracing the intellectual pressures that drove him to this position. The lecture walks through the cycle of dogmatists, skeptics, and indifferentists that Kant sought to break, and examines Hume's challenge to causal knowledge as a key catalyst. Winegar introduces essential vocabulary for understanding Kant, including the distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments and the concept of synthetic a priori knowledge. At the end of the lecture, Winegar explains Kant's conclusion that we cannot have knowledge of the soul, the world as a whole, or God. These limits, Kant argued, are not failures of philosophy but built into the very structure of human reason.