Hume vs Kant View of causation

heres the instructions i found them for essay two: ESSAY TWO

 

Hume, in “An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding” (p. 41), states the following about the principle of causation:

When we look about us towards external objects, and consider the operation of causes, we are never able, in a single instance, to discover any power or necessary connexion [sic]; any quality, which binds the effect to the cause, and renders the one an infallible consequence of the other. We only find, that the one does actually, in fact, follow the other. The impulse of one billiard-ball is attended with motion in the second. This is the whole that appears to the outward senses. The mind feels no sentiment or inward impression from this succession of objects: Consequently, there is not, in any single, particular instance of cause and effect, anything which can suggest the idea of power or necessary connexion [sic].

 

Kant, in the Critique of Pure Reason (B 5), states the following about the principle of causation:

If an example from the sciences be desired, we have only look to any of the propositions of mathematics; if we seek an example from the understanding in its quite ordinary employment, the proposition, ‘every alteration must have a cause’, will serve our purpose. In the latter case, indeed, the very concept of a cause so manifestly contains the concept of a necessity of connection with an effect and of the strict universality of the rule, that the concept would be altogether lost if we attempted to derive it, as Hume has done, from a repeated association of that which happens with that which precedes, and from a custom of connecting representations, a custom originating in this repeated association, and constituting therefore a merely subjective necessity. Even without appealing to such examples, it is possible to show that pure a priori principles are indispensable for the possibility of experience, and so to prove their existence a priori. For whence could experience derive its certainty, if all the rules, according to which it proceeds, were always themselves empirical, and therefore contingent? Such rules could hardly be regarded as first principles. At present, however, we may be content to have established the fact that our faculty of knowledge does have a pure employment, and to have shown what are the criteria of such an employment.

 

Your essay must address these two issues. One, explain and evaluate the bases of Hume’s critique of the idea of causation. Though you need not limit your discussion to the following points, your response must include a discussion and an evaluation of the four conditions that Hume claims are necessary for a causal event to occur, paying particular attention to the ideas of “constant conjunction” and “necessary connection.”

Two, discuss and evaluate how Kant’s concepts of (a) causation and (b) experience differ from Hume’s. In particular, discuss and evaluate Kant’s claim that experience cannot validate a connection between cause and effect; or, put differently, why the relationship between cause and effect cannot itself be an object of experience.