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.The difficulty here will lie in specifying the determination of even thesupposedly lawful actions and events.Unless we can be confident that every action and event is causallydetermined, we have no way of knowing whether the many that appear to be so determined really are.In other words, if we cannot rule out chance occurrences in the empirical world, then we cannot beconfident that ice, which always melts above 0æ%C, does so according to law or always just by chance.acting in two worlds 107time.Nor can we think about a prior time without imagining somethinghappening in it.We cannot think of an empty time (cf.Pure Reason,A191 2/B236 7).Kant took this to mean that all events, including oureveryday actions, not only occur in time, but must also be connected withevents in prior time.The alternative to this idea is to think of events oractions as if what preceded them is unrelated, and makes no differenceto their occurrence.But to think this way, Kant supposed, would be tothink of events as changes in things in themselves.³ And that would makeit impossible to discover how any such things could be connected as causesand effects.Here we have in mind a view of events in time that can be attributedto Hume.He argued that no object, A, considered just in itself, couldstand in any   necessary connection  with any subsequent object, B.Thatis, considering A just in itself, the later occurrence of B is neither calledfor, nor do we have any reason to expect it.So considering them as thingsin themselves, B could have occurred in the world in exactly the sameway even if A had not occurred.As Hume saw it, when we recognizecause-effect connections between things, we are not recognizing anythingabout the things in themselves.We are noticing instead nothing other thanconnections between them in ourselves.We are noticing only connectionsin our own thinking, which are made possible through repeated experienceand habituation.This means that from Hume s point of view we arefortunate that there are so many regular, habituating sequences of objects inour experience.Because there have been so many objectively unconnectedevents occurring in recognizable sequences, we have formed the habit ofexpecting every event to have a cause.This, according to Hume, is   Whya Cause is Always Necessary.  t Without so much recognizable regularitywe might have been able to see only very few things as connected in causalrelations.And then we would have had almost no disposition to believethat events happening in our experience are always caused.Kant s transcendental distinction between appearances and things inthemselves allows us to see connections between things in the world³ Kant himself would not think of events or objects in time as things in themselves, because heunderstood time in such a way that events or objects in time can be nothing other than appearances.But those who mistake appearances for things in themselves do see things occurring in time as things inthemselves.t Treatise, 1.4.3; see also Lorne Falkenstein,   Hume s Answer to Kant,  Noûs 32 (1998): 331 60.108 acting in two worldsdifferently.For he thought a cause would be necessary for every event,even if human beings were not able to recognize so much regularity inthe world.His view was that the way human understanding works, weare required to understand each event in the worlds as causally determinedby some prior event, in accordance with a law.This holds for humanactions as well, deeds included.We are required to understand everythingthat happens in the world as causally connected with a prior event becausethere is no other way to see their sequence as belonging to the same courseof time, and so to the same world.Suppose, for instance, that what we imagine to be an earlier state of aperson, A, could be followed immediately by an action, B, but not throughany causal connection.Assume that the person s action, B, was uncaused, sothat it could have been otherwise, even though its immediately precedingcondition, A, had remained exactly the same.If this were so, then A andB could belong to, and might well have to belong to, different worlds.During the interval we imagine between A and B, the world in which Aoccurred could have been annihilated, and replaced by a world that beginswith B.u A could have been the last event in the time-series of one world,and B the first event in the time-series of some other world.To this point it might be objected that there simply can be no endingsor beginnings in time-series.Therefore, if states A and B of an object or aperson are events, they must belong to the same series of time, even if theymay lack any causal connection.So it is ridiculous to think, it may be said,that the occurrence of an action, B, that is not causally necessitated by aprior condition of the agent, A, could entail the end of one world and thebeginning of another.There is something right about this objection, but we can respond toit here with an explanation similar to the one provided above.We canreplace events A and B with the different moments in time at whichthey occur.Supposing that tA and tB are different moments, what couldpossibly join them in the same series of time? What third thing couldrequire us to take tA and tB as parts of one series? The only answer wecan have for this question, as Kant saw it, is that this third thing is thelaw-governed, causal connection between events A and B occurring at tAu I say   the interval we imagine between A and B,  because without assuming the continuity ofthe same time-series in which both occur, there could be no interval of time between them (cf.PureReason, A201/B246).acting in two worlds 109and tB.Connection by causal laws is the common element that accountsfor the continuity even of the time-series in which moments tA and tBoccur.Hence, it also accounts for the temporal continuity of the world inwhich they occur [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]