Abstract:

The problem of causality has been placed at the centre of the philosophy of science and has been handled in various ways by different philosophers in the history of philosophy. The English empiricist David Hume and German philosopher Immanuel Kant have approached the problem of causality with respect to the possibility of knowledge. In An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Hume questions our knowledge of the world in terms of the concept of causality and the cause-effect relationship. When Hume proposed that causal reasoning is the ground for empirical knowledge, he also arrived at the idea that the necessity of cause-effect relationship is not a rational one. At this point, Hume’s septic look at the empirical knowledge was enlightened by Kant. Kant argued the possibility of empirical knowledge by proposing the concepts of apriori and aposteriori to ground for knowledge. The present study investigates Hume’s and Kant’s view of the problem of causality in terms of the problem of the possibility of knowledge.  

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