Espela, Jochen Karl C.

CA1A2 – 2

Apan, Carl Jhon Paul M.

Immanuel Kant
 Origin
Immanuel Kant German: 22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804) was a German philosopher who is a
central figure in modern philosophy. In his doctrine of transcendental idealism, he argued
that space, time and causation are mere sensibilities; "things-in-themselves" exist, but their nature
is unknowable. In his view, the mind shapes and structures experience, with all human experience
sharing certain structural features. He drew a parallel to the Copernican revolution in his
proposition that worldly objects can be intuited a priori ("beforehand"), and that intuition is
therefore independent from objective reality. Kant believed that reason is the source of morality,
and that aesthetics arise from a faculty of disinterested judgment. Kant's views continue to have a
major influence on contemporary philosophy, especially the fields of epistemology, ethics, political
theory, and post-modern aesthetics.

In one of Kant's major works, the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), he attempted to explain the
relationship between reason and human experience and to move beyond the failures of traditional
philosophy and metaphysics. Kant wanted to put an end to an era of futile and speculative theories
of human experience, while resisting the skepticism of thinkers such as David Hume. Kant regarded
himself as showing the way past the impasse between rationalists and empiricists which
philosophy had led to, and is widely held to have synthesized both traditions in his thought.

Kant was an exponent of the idea that perpetual peace could be secured through
universal democracy and international cooperation. He believed that this would be the eventual
outcome of universal history, although it is not rationally planned. The nature of Kant's religious
ideas continues to be the subject of philosophical dispute, with viewpoints ranging from the
impression that he was an initial advocate of atheism who at some point developed an ontological
argument for God, to more critical treatments epitomized by Nietzsche, who claimed that Kant had
"theologian blood and was merely a sophisticated apologist for traditional Christian faith.

Kant published other important works on ethics, religion, law, aesthetics, astronomy, and history.
These include the Universal Natural History (1755), the Critique of Practical Reason (1788),
the Metaphysics of Morals (1797), and the Critique of Judgment (1790), which looks at aesthetics
and teleology.
 History
Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher during the Enlightenment era of the late 18th century.
His best known work is the Critique of Pure Reason.

Synopsis

Immanuel Kant was born on April 22, 1724, in Konigsberg, Prussia, or what is now Kaliningrad,
Russia. While tutoring, he published science papers, including "General Natural History and Theory
of the Heavens" in 1755. He spent the next 15 years as a metaphysics lecturer. In 1781, he
published the first part of Critique of Pure Reason. He published more critiques in the years
preceding his death on February 12, 1804, in the city of his birth.

Early Life

Immanuel Kant was the fourth of nine children born to Johann Georg Cant, a harness maker, and
Anna Regina Cant. Later in his life, Immanuel changed the spelling of his name to Kantto to adhere
to German spelling practices. Both parents were devout followers of Pietism, an 18th-century
branch of the Lutheran Church. Seeing the potential in the young man, a local pastor arranged for
the young Kant's education. While at school, Kant gained a deep appreciation for the Latin classics.

In 1740, Kant enrolled at the University of Konigsberg as a theology student, but was soon attracted
to mathematics and physics. In 1746, his father died and he was forced to leave the university to
help his family. For a decade, he worked as a private tutor for the wealthy. During this time he
published several papers dealing with scientific questions exploring the middle ground between
rationalism and empiricism.

Full-Fledged Scholar and Philosopher

In 1755, Immanuel Kant returned to the University of Konigsberg to continue his education. That
same year he received his doctorate of philosophy. For the next 15 years, he worked as a lecturer
and tutor and wrote major works on philosophy. In 1770, he became a full professor at the
University of Konigsberg, teaching metaphysics and logic.

In 1781, Immanuel Kant published the Critique of Pure Reason, an enormous work and one of the
most important on Western thought. He attempted to explain how reason and experiences interact
with thought and understanding. This revolutionary proposal explained how an individual’s mind
organizes experiences into understanding the way the world works.

Kant focused on ethics, the philosophical study of moral actions. He proposed a moral law called the
“categorical imperative,” stating that morality is derived from rationality and all moral judgments
are rationally supported. What is right is right and what is wrong is wrong; there is no grey area.
Human beings are obligated to follow this imperative unconditionally if they are to claim to be
moral.
 Later Years

Though the Critique of Pure Reason received little attention at the time, Kant continued to refine his
theories in a series of essays that comprised the Critique of Practical Reason and Critique of
Judgement. Kant continued to write on philosophy until shortly before his death. In his last years,
he became embittered due to his loss of memory. He died in 1804 at age 80.
 Main philosophy
Immanuel Kant: Metaphysics

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) is one of the most influential philosophers in the history of Western
philosophy. His contributions to metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics have had a
profound impact on almost every philosophical movement that followed him. This article focuses
on his metaphysics and epistemology in one of his most important works, The Critique of Pure
Reason. A large part of Kant’s work addresses the question “What can we know?” The answer, if it
can be stated simply, is that our knowledge is constrained to mathematics and the science of the
natural, empirical world. It is impossible, Kant argues, to extend knowledge to the supersensible
realm of speculative metaphysics. The reason that knowledge has these constraints, Kant argues, is
that the mind plays an active role in constituting the features of experience and limiting the mind’s
access only to the empirical realm of space and time.

Kant responded to his predecessors by arguing against the Empiricists that the mind is not a blank
slate that is written upon by the empirical world, and by rejecting the Rationalists’ notion that
pure, a priori knowledge of a mind-independent world was possible. Reason itself is structured
with forms of experience and categories that give a phenomenal and logical structure to any
possible object of empirical experience. These categories cannot be circumvented to get at a mind-
independent world, but they are necessary for experience of spatio-temporal objects with their
causal behavior and logical properties. These two theses constitute Kant’s famous transcendental
idealism and empirical realism.

Kant’s contributions to ethics have been just as substantial, if not more so, than his work in
metaphysics and epistemology. He is the most important proponent in philosophical history of
deontological, or duty based, ethics. In Kant’s view, the sole feature that gives an action moral worth
is not the outcome that is achieved by the action, but the motive that is behind the action. And the
only motive that can endow an act with moral value, he argues, is one that arises from universal
principles discovered by reason. The categorical imperative is Kant’s famous statement of this
duty: “Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should
become a universal law.”
 Concept of self
Some commentators believe that Kant's views on the mind are dependent on his idealism (he called
it transcendental idealism). For the most part, that is not so. At worst, most of what he said about
the mind and consciousness can be detached from his idealism. Though often viewed as a
quintessentially German philosopher, Kant is said to have been one-quarter Scottish. Some
philosophers (often Scottish) hold that ‘Kant’ is a Germanization of the Scottish name ‘Candt’,
though many scholars now reject the idea. It is noteworthy, however, that his work on
epistemology, which led him to his ideas about the mind, was a response to Hume as much as to any
other philosopher.

In general structure, Kant's model of the mind was the dominant model in the empirical psychology
that flowed from his work and then again, after a hiatus during which behaviourism reigned
supreme (roughly 1910 to 1965), toward the end of the 20th century, especially in cognitive
science. Central elements of the models of the mind of thinkers otherwise as different as Sigmund
Freud and Jerry Fodor are broadly Kantian, for example.

Three ideas define the basic shape (‘cognitive architecture’) of Kant's model and one its dominant
method. They have all become part of the foundation of cognitive science.

The mind is a complex set of abilities (functions). (As Meerbote 1989 and many others have
observed, Kant held a functionalist view of the mind almost 200 years before functionalism was
officially articulated in the 1960s by Hilary Putnam and others.)

The functions crucial for mental, knowledge-generating activity are spatio-temporal processing of,
and application of concepts to, sensory inputs. Cognition requires concepts as well as percepts.
These functions are forms of what Kant called synthesis. Synthesis (and the unity in consciousness
required for synthesis) are central to cognition.

These three ideas are fundamental to most thinking about cognition now. Kant's most important
method, the transcendental method, is also at the heart of contemporary cognitive science.

To study the mind, infer the conditions necessary for experience. Arguments having this structure
are called transcendental arguments.

Translated into contemporary terms, the core of this method is inference to the best explanation,
the method of postulating unobservable mental mechanisms in order to explain observed
behaviour.

To be sure, Kant thought that he could get more out of his transcendental arguments than just ‘best
explanations’. He thought that he could get a priori (experience independent) knowledge out of
them. Kant had a tripartite doctrine of the a priori. He held that some features of the mind and its
knowledge had a priori origins, i.e., must be in the mind prior to experience (because using them is
necessary to have experience). That mind and knowledge have these features are a priori truths,
i.e., necessary and universal. And we can come to know these truths, or that they are a priori at any
rate, only by using a priori methods, i.e., we cannot learn these things from experience (B3) (Brook
1993). Kant thought that transcendental arguments were a priori or yielded the a priori in all three
ways. Nonetheless, at the heart of this method is inference to the best explanation. When
introspection fell out of favour about 100 years ago, the alternative approach adopted was exactly
this approach. Its nonempirical roots in Kant notwithstanding, it is now the major method used by
experimental cognitive scientists.

Other things equally central to Kant's approach to the mind have not been taken up by cognitive
science, as we will see near the end, a key part of his doctrine of synthesis and most of what he had
to say about consciousness of self in particular. Far from his model having been superseded by
cognitive science, some important things have not even been assimilated by it.