Stephen Downes

This is a really nice account of the distinction between Hume and Kant. The distinction between a quaestio facti ("question of fact") and a quaestio juris ("question of law") isn't really necessary to grasp Kant's major argument, and most (introductory) accounts elide it, but Emily Fitton makes a nice use of it to underline the force or the argument from 'conditions for the possibility of perception'. "A successful transcendental argument establishes that the concept in question applies to objects in the physical world because it's somehow intrinsic to this framework of knower and objective world to be known... existence or objective reality is already necessarily governed by the concepts and principles that make the distinction between inner and outer sense - subjective experience and an objective world - possible at all." But that move isn't really Hume's at all - it's Descartes's, and Hume is criticizing it. And I think you can read Hume - as I do - without requiring that distinction at all.