one thing I wish I had emphasized differently

There is one point in the book where I think I initially made a stronger formulation before backing into a weaker one, and wish I hadn’t done so.

The point at issue is my criticism that Kant’s famous rationalist/empiricist distinction really just defines two ways of knowing the world, and that a stronger rift in metaphysical terms would be that between occasionalism and empiricism. (Sometimes I’ve said occasionalism and skepticism, but I think occasionalism and empiricism is better stated.)

My claim, as many of you know, is that Hume merely gives us the upside-down version of occasionalism. While occasionalism says that nothing is capable of forming relations except God, Hume says nothing is capable of forming relations except human custom or habit. Both raise one special, pampered entity to the throne, allowing it to be the seat of all relations since nothing else is capable of it. (Another way of putting it is to say that occasionalism believes in isolated substances and initially doesn’t know how they can relate, thereby requiring God to come in and create all the relations. Hume, a great fan of Malebranche incidentally, gives us the relations that always already exist in the form of habit, and merely denies that we can know there are isolated substances with autonomous power outside their being linked through habit.)

Well, here’s what I wish I had done a little bit differently… In recent lectures I’ve been saying that Kant doesn’t give a balanced compromise between the two extreme positions, as he and others sometimes claim. I’ve been saying that he really sides with Hume over the occasionalists.

However, there is one point in Prince of Networks where I initially put it differently, and I think more accurately, saying that Kant actually combines the worst of occasionalism with the worst of empiricism.

It’s the worst of occasionalism insofar as there are things-in-themselves that don’t relate to one another or (effectively) to us. And it’s the worst of empiricism for reasons that hardly need to be spelled out. I wish I had stuck with that formulation throughout the book, if only for provocation’s sake, rather than softening it later by putting Hume and Kant on the same side of the fence against occasionalism (which may be the most underrated position in the history of philosophy, the most meritorious philosophy that is regularly mocked by freshmen with the full encouragement of their professors).

And as a historical sidelight, until occasionalism is appreciated once more for its radicalism, it will be hard for Islamic philosophy to receive its full due in European circles. In the future I will claim even more forcefully that Islamic occasionalism provides most of the DNA for modern European philosophy. The Copernican Revolution of Kant has Iraqi roots, in fact, even more than Augustinian ones. It would be wonderfully perverse to trace European modernity (at least in philosophy) back to Basra, but beyond the enjoyable perversity of it, I also happen to think it’s true. People forget too easily that Islamic philosophy is by no means “non-Western.” It’s simply an alternate strand of the Judaeo-Greek intellectual tradition.