PRELIMINARY REMARKS

Kant's views on the nature of causation and substance do not depend on any compromise between or any combination of rationalism and empiricism, but on what he calls a “third thing,” the pure intuition of time, which is completely missing in both rationalism and empiricism.

For Kant the empiricist position on causation fails to establish the necessary connection between events, that one event “arises out of” or “emerges” from another. Besides constant conjunction in experience, Kant grants the empiricist “empirical” universality through induction (Pure Reason, A 91/B 124), or completely universal generalization. This universality, however, implies only that all events of a certain type are followed by events of a second type - but not that any particular event of the first type forces, produces, or necessarily yields an event of the second type. The regularity theory that defines causation in terms of subsumption under inductively allowable universal generalization simply fails to account for the connection in singular causation. For Kant the rationalist position on causation is that the causal connection is a connection of inference in the intellect, namely, that the existence of a second event can be inferred or deduced from a first event (A 243/B 301). But now for Kant this idea of inferring existence makes no sense apart from causation (one event's producing or yielding another) and so cannot explain it.