This is philosophy bites with me David Edmonds and me Nigel Warburton.

Philosophy bites is available at www

philosophy bites.com.

As the citizens of Kurnigsburg in the late 18th century,

watched the Professor of Logic and Metaphysics go for his regular daily walk

at precisely the same time each day, they must have wondered what he was thinking about.

Well, one of Emmanuel Kant's preoccupations was whether we could work out things about the world without experience,

without, as it were, leaving the armchair, and substantial truths, not just what

can't call analytic truths.

In other words, not just truths of definition like all bachelors are unmarried men. This apparently arcane

issue is at the heart of Kance investigation of the limits of human knowledge in

his critique of pure reason. Professor Adrian Moore dispenses a wealth of knowledge

from his armchair in St Hughes College, Oxford.

Adrian Moore, welcome to Philosophy Bites.

Thank you very much, Nigel.

We're going to try and explain Kant's metaphysics today,

so I wonder if we could just start by addressing the question,

what is metaphysics?

Metaphysics can be usefully characterized as the most general attempt to try and make sense of things, to try and understand what reality is like, what the basic structure of reality is like.

So it's at the heart of philosophy, this seems to be one of the main drives in philosophy

to understand our relationship to our experience in the world.

Absolutely. I mean, it's in a way the core part of philosophy

...