ABSTRACT
The scholastic philosophy with its talk of substance and accident was in his opinion mere play with words, the very notion of substance being ‘an unintelligible chimera’ when not taken as the collective name of a set of empirical properties. Causality was a different matter, since it was only by causal arguments that people could proceed beyond what was immediately given in experience. In discussing causality, the chapter emphasizes the theoretical background presupposed in much of the actual causal diagnosis, and argued that a Humean analysis of the causal relation was no longer tenable when the feature was taken into account. Hume’s attempt to demonstrate that causal reasoning is not an act of the understanding is as untenable as it is paradoxical. It was against the estimate of the possibilities of knowledge of the supersensible that Hume and Kant directed their main attacks.
