Synthesis

This article is about the philosophical concept. For the magazine, see Synthesis (Magazine).

Synthesis (from the ancient Greek σύνθεσις, σύν (with) and θεσις (placing)), is commonly understood to be an integration of two or more pre-existing elements which results in a new creation. The term is found is a wide variety of contexts, but it has had two central roles in philosophy: describing a certain type of resolution to a argumentative conflict, and describing a mental process that combines representations. The latter usage stems primarily from the work of the great German philosopher Immanuel Kant. These uses are only loosly related, and will be discussed in turn.

Synthesis As The Resolution A Conflict

The 'thesis, antithesis, synthesis' terminology is often associated with the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, though Hegel himself never employs these terms (their origin is largely in Kant's discussions of 'antinomies'). In his notoriously difficult Science of Logic (1812-16), Hegel describes a process whereby certain nearly-contradictory claims (the thesis and antithesis) somehow lead towards a more advanced truth that incorporates them both (synthesis). Though it is a matter of great interpretive debate as to what sort of process Hegel is describing (historical, logical, psychological, etc.), his 'dialectical method' was a source of great inspiration for Marx and Engels.

Outside of Hegel, the same terminology is used in a less radical setting to describe the rhetorical structure of a debate or argument. For instance, one person might assert that cake is good, while another holds that cake is bad. These claims might be 'synthesized' once a way is found to incorporate the truth about each - such as in the claim that cake is good tasting but bad for one's health.

Synthesis As A Mental Process

In Kant's extremely nuanced picture of the mind (whose central presentation is the Critique of Pure Reason of 1781), 'synthesis' is defined as "the action of putting different representations together with each other and comprehending their manifoldness in one cognition" (A77/B103, Guyer/Wood Translation). On Kant's view, our minds are constantly receiving bits of representational input ('intuitions') that must be combined in some way before they can play any significant rational role in our cognitive lives. How intuitions are synthesized can vary depending on the rules that guide the synthesis (Kant calls these rules 'concepts'). The resulting 'synthesized' representations can in turn be synthesized in more complex ways.

For instance, at the lowest level, some sets of our intuitions might be synthesized into representations of black squares, while others are synthesized into representations of white squares. All these might in turn be synthesized into a representation of a checkerboard.

Sir Peter Strawson, in his influential work on Kant, The Bounds of Sense, claimed that the notion of sythesis was part of an unfortunate aspect of Kant's philosophy which Strawson referred to as "the imaginary subject of transcendental psychology" (Strawson 1966, 32). Strawson believed that the value of Kant's theoretical project ley merely in his philosophical analysis of certain concepts (most importantly, that of experience), but that Kant's descriptions of mental processes and mechanisms were unjustifed, uninformative, and best pruned from Kant's analyses. Although Strawson himself was quite clear that his project was more philosophical than interpretive, his view on the matter shaped Kant scholarship in the English-speaking world for several decades.

In more recent years, interpreters of Kant (including Henry Allison and Patricia Kitcher) have shown renewed interest in the more psychological aspects of his project. The general opinion is that notions like 'synthesis' in Kant must be understood if we are to have a clear view of his overall project, and moreover may not be as mis-guided as Strawson had claimed.

External links

• Analysis and Synthesis: On Scientific Method based on a study by Bernhard Riemann From the Swedish Morphological Society.

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