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Laurence Bonjour and Defense of Pure Reason By Rawaa Mahmoud Hussain Bonjour, in his defense of pure reason, begins with the problem of a priori justification, indicating that the most pervasive conviction within epistemological tradition is that in order for a person’s belief to constitute knowledge it is necessary that it be justified or warranted or rationally grounded, that the person has an adequate reason for accepting it. Moreover, this justifying reason must be of the right sort; though one might accept a belief for religious or moral or pragmatic reasons or reasons of some still further sort and be thereby in a sense justified, such reasons cannot satisfy the requirements for knowledge. The latter requires instead that the belief in question be justified or rational in a way that is internally connected to the defining goal of the cognitive enterprise, that is, that there be a reason that enhances, to an appropriate degree, the chances that the belief is true. Justification of this distinctive, truth-conducive sort will be here referred to as epistemic justification (Bonjour, In Defense of Pure Reason, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 1). The attempt of Bonjour reminds us with the philosophical project of Kant in his book: “Critique of Pure Reason.” Kant’s main idea is the idea of a particular science, which may be called the Critique of Pure Reason. It is the faculty which contains the principles of cognizing anything absolutely a priori. An organ of pure reason would be a compendium of those principles according to which alone all pure cognitions a priori can be obtained. The completely extended application of such an organon would afford us a system of pure reason. It could be regarded a science of the mere criticism of pure reason, its sources and limits, as the propaedeutic to a system of pure reason. The science must be called only a science of critique of pure reason. Kant applies the term transcendental to all knowledge which is not so much occupied with objects as with the mode of our cognition is a possible a priori. A system of such conceptions would be called transcendental philosophy (Kant: Critique of Pure Reason, London: Bell & Daldy, 1872, p. 16). Constantin Antonopoulos indicates that “Kant’s initial problem of the Transcendental Deduction is to show how logically separable entities can still be subjected to (what we might call) an “organic” connection though not in an organic context. As if the connected items were somehow meant for each other, like the notes of a melody. The pressure he was under was bequeathed to him by Hume’s analysis of causality [Hume, 1968: pp. 78-81], which just about tended to imply that cause and effect were almost foreign to one another. Kant was too quick to accept the analysis, but not that quick to accept the foreignness. This is what gave rise to the idea of synthetic a priori judgments. The causal connection was synthetic, just as Hume had shown, but necessary none the less. The thing to do, then, was to show that there can be “organic” connection even between logically unconnected entities” (Constantin Antonopoulos, Passive Knowledge: How to Make Sense of Kant’s A Priori Or How Not to Be “Too Busily Subsuming”: Open Journal of Philosophy, 2011, p. 43). Bonjour argues that the perceived sort of rejoinder has been greatly enhanced in modern times by the apparent collapse of the appeal to a priori justification in the case that would for a very long time have been cited as the most obvious example of all: that of Euclidean geometry. Since it had been taken for centuries to be the very paradigm of a priori knowledge, the advent of non-Euclidean geometries and the apparent discovery that Euclidean geometry, far from being unchallengeably justified and indeed certain on a priori basis, was in fact false- indeed that this could seemingly be shown empirically- led quite naturally to a massive loss of confidence in alleged a priori justifications. He has spoken so far as though the object of epistemic justification in general and a priori justification in particular is always a belief that some thesis or propositions, something capable of being neither true or false, is true (Bonjour: Ibid, p. 3-4). Finally, the revelation, for me, is the principle of human knowledge because it provides the human reason with the necessary concepts towards the God, human and universe. These concepts help the mind in formation of a comprehensive knowledge of what is certain to correct the error and modify the curriculum.
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