ABSTRACT
The universal character of philosophy is connected with the same point. According to Plato, arithmetic assumes the notions of odd and even number, geometry that of three kinds of angle, and neither makes any attempt to justify or examine its assumption. I. Kant was convinced that Plato was right to recognize the existence of a world of unseen or intelligible entities lying behind the appearances of sense; without that assumption morality would not make sense. Kant directed his attention, with a sure instinct for the crucial point, to the nature of human knowledge, and cut the ground from beneath Platonism by demonstrating that the human intellect is in no sense a faculty of intuition. Kant reinforced these arguments when he asked his celebrated question, ‘How are synthetic a priori judgments possible?’ The position Kant himself takes up is that metaphysical pronouncements purport to be synthetic but are in fact analytic. They are, that is to say, verbal rather than real.
