Kant, in various parts of his treatment of causality, refers to determinism or the principle of sufficient reason as an inescapable
principle. In fact, in the
Second Analogy we find the elements to reconstruct a purely phenomenal determinism as a logical and tautological truth. I endeavour in this
article to gather these elements into an organic theory of phenomenal causality and then show, in the third section, with
a specific argument which I call the “paradox of phenomenal observation”, that this phenomenal determinism is the only rational
approach to causality because any logico-reductivistic approach, such as the Humean one, would destroy the temporal order
and so the very possibility to talk of a causal relation. I also believe that, all things said, Kant did not achieve a much
greater comprehension of the problem than Hume did, in his theory of causality, for he did not free a phenomenal approach
from the impasse of reductivism as his reflections on “simultaneous causation” and “vanishing quantities” indeed show, and
this I will argue in Sect. 4 of this article.
Keywords Causality - Kant - Simultaneous causation - Paradox of phenomenal observation - Cause and effect - Hume secret powers