Why the Cosmos Breaks Reason

Reed Winegar walks through one of the most thought-provoking arguments in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason: the antinomy of pure reason. Kant shows that we can construct equally compelling proofs for contradictory claims about the world. Is the world infinitely old, or does it have a beginning in time? Is it infinitely large, or finite in size? Each option leads to absurdity. Winegar reconstructs why an infinitely old world seems impossible, why a world with a beginning in time also seems impossible, and why the same pattern holds for the world's spatial extent. The lecture then turns to Kant's proposed solution: transcendental idealism. By distinguishing between appearances and things in themselves, and by reinterpreting the world's extent as indefinite rather than actually infinite, Kant claims to dissolve the contradiction. Winegar closes by examining whether this resolution comes at a cost: what, if anything, we can know about things in themselves?