ANTINOMY (ἀντί, against; νόμος, law), the opposition of one law or rule to another law or rule.
| In Kant’s philosophy, it designates the conflict or self-contradiction (held by Kant to be inevitable) which emerges when the Reason deals with problems concerning the universe. It arises, according co Kant, from the attempt of Understanding to solve the problems of Reason, from the attempt to construct, by aid of the categories of the former, objects adequate to the ideas of the latter (Critique of Pure Reason, Transcendental Dialectic, bk. II. ch. II.; Meiklejohn’s Translation, p. 266; Max Müller, II. 351). |
The following are his antinomies in cosmology:—
Thesis. I. Antithesis.
The world has an origin in time, The world has no beginning and and is quoad space shut up in boundaries. no bounds.
II.
Every compound substance in the No composite consists of simple world consists of simple parts; and parts; and there exists no what simple there is nothing but the simple, or in the world. that which is compounded from it
III.
It is requisite to assume a Free There is no Freedom. Everything causality to explain the phenomena in the world happens according to of the world. the laws of nature.
IV.
To the world there belongs some- There exists no absolutely neces- what which, either as its part or its sary Being, neither in the world cause, is an absolutely necessary nor out of the world, as its cause. being.
Semple (Introd. to Metaphysic of Ethics, 1st ed., p. 95), says: —At the bottom of the two first antinomies lies the absurdity of «transferring to the world in itself predicates which can be applied only to a world of phenomena.» We get rid of the difficulty by declaring that both thesis and antithesis are false. With regard to the third, an act may be in respect of the causality of reason «a first beginning,» while yet, in respect of the sequences of phenomena, it is no more than «a subordinate commencement,» and so be, in the first respect, free; but in the second, as mere phenomena, fettered by the law of the causal nexus. «The fourth antinomy is explained in the same manner; for when the cause qua phenomenon is contradistinguished from the cause of the phenomena, so far forth as this last may be a thing in itself, then both propositions may consist together.»
