Immanual Kant

Immanual Kant

Biography
1. (1724-1804). Was born on 22 April 1724 in the city of Königsberg (then the capital of Prussia, now modern-day Kaliningrad, Russia)
2. He was raised in a Pietist household
  1. a strict Lutheran sect that stressed intense religious devotion, personal humility and a literal interpretation of the Bible
  2. Did this influence his phiosophy?
3. He received a strict, punitive and disciplinary education that favoured Latin and religious instruction over mathematics and science.
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  2. Kant's elementary education was undertaken at Saint George's Hospital School, after which he was educated at the Pietist Collegium Fredericianum, where he remained from 1732 until 1740, and where he studied theology and excelled in the classics. Kant showed great application to study early in his life, and was enrolled in the University of Königsberg in 1740, at the age of 16.
    1. There, under the influence of a young instructor, Martin Knutzen, Kant became interested in philosophy, mathematics, and the natural sciences
      1. He grew familiar with the Rationalist philosophy of Gottfied Leibniz and Christian Wolff (1679 - 1754), as well as the natural philosophy and new mathematical physics of Sir Isaac Newton (1643 - 1727)
      2. Knutzen dissuaded the young scholar from traditional Idealism (i.e. the idea that reality is purely mental), which was negatively regarded by the whole philosophy of the 18th Century
        A chance reading of David Hume also raised his suspicions against Rationalism and he was soon to move away from his early Rationalist beliefs. He later admitted that reading Hume was what "first interrupted my dogmatic slumber".
4. 1749, three years after the death of his father, Kant published the first of his philosophic works.
  1. In 1755, he presented a Latin treatise, "On Fire", to qualify for his doctoral degree, and he spent the next 15 years as a non-salaried lecturer at the University of Königsberg (dependent on fees from the students who attended his lectures). He lectured on Metaphysics, Logic, mathematics, physics and physical geography, and, despite a large teaching burden, continued to publish papers on various topics, including "Der einzig mögliche Beweisgrund zu einer Demonstration des Daseins Gottes" ("The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God") in 1763 and other works on Logic and Aesthetics.
    1. He finally achieved a professorship of Logic and Metaphysics at Königsberg in 1770, at the age of 46, an established scholar and an increasingly influential philosopher.
  2. For a decade, he published nothing but studied the Philosophy of Mind, to find a resolution to the contradictions of perception and conception; two polar schools of thought explained by the Rationalists and Empiricists
    1. The result was his "Critique of Pure Reason" (1781), now widely regarded one of the most important and difficult books in Western philosophical thought.
      1. It was only as a result of a series of widely read public letters on the Kantian philosophy published by Karl Reinhold in 1786, as a response to the the Pantheism Dispute (a central intellectual controversy of the time), that Kant's reputation spread, making him the most famous philosopher of his era.
      2. Was largely ignored upon publication
5. By the 1790s, there were several journals devoted solely to defending and criticizing the Kantian philosophy. But, despite his success, philosophical trends were moving in another direction, and many of Kant's most important disciples (including Karl Reinhold, Jakob Sigismund Beck and Johann Gottlieb Fichte) transformed the Kantian position into increasingly radical forms of Idealism, marking the emergence of the German Idealism movement. Kant opposed these developments and even publicly denounced Fichte in an open letter in 1799.
  1. Critiques remain the real sources of his influence
Theory
1. Kant’s philosophy is often described as the golden middle between rationalism and empiricism. He didn’t accept either of both views but he gave credit to both. While rationalists argue that knowledge is a product of reason, empiricists claim that all knowledge comes from experience. Kant rejected yet adopted both, arguing that experience is purely subjective if not first processed by pure reason. Using reason while excluding experience would according to Kant produce theoretical illusion.
  1. Priori knowledge (which comes purely from reasoning, independent of experience, and typically applies to analytic propositions)
    1. Rationalism
      1. It is the theory that the origin of all knowledge is sense experience. It emphasizes the role of experience and evidence, especially sensory perception, in the formation of ideas, and argues that the only knowledge humans can have is a posteriori (i.e. based on experience).
  2. Posteriori knowledge (which comes from experience alone, and typically applies to synthetic propositions).
    1. Empiricism
      1. It is any view appealing to intellectual and deductive reason (as opposed to sensory experience or any religious teachings) as the source of knowledge or justification.
        The personality test: INTJ (me). The "N" or "F" refer to this philosophy.
  3. He argued that knowledge comes from a synthesis of experience and concepts: without the senses, we would not become aware of any object, but without understanding and reason we would not be able to form any conception of it.
    1. He maintained that, although space and time are given to us as a priori pure intuitions, we grasp reality and make sense of the world through a basic conceptual apparatus, which involves several categories of thought. He divided these categories into four groups of three: quantity (unity, plurality, totality); quality (reality, negation, limitation); relation (substance, cause, community) and modality (possibility, existence, necessity).
2. Perhaps Kant's most original contribution to philosophy was the idea that it is the representation that makes the object possible, rather than the object that makes the representation possible. This introduced the human mind as an active originator of experience rather than just a passive recipient of perception, and placed the role of the human subject or knower at the centre of inquiry into our knowledge.
  1. This influences modern science
3. However, he also set limits to knowledge. He distinguished between appearance (the world of phenomena) and reality (the world of noumena). Although our senses tell us that things exist outside of ourselves, the actual real substance of an object (what he called the "ding-an-sich" or thing-in-itself") was essentially unknowable. Thus, there may exist many things in the universe which we do not have the sensory or intellectual capacity to apprehend, and, although these things are real in themselves, they are not real "for us". We have certain predispositions as to what exists, and only those things that fit into these predispositons can be said to exist for us. This was something of a radical and revolutionary idea which does not seem to have occurred to anyone before Kant.
Others
1. While reason can be a helpful tool, it must be properly controlled so that we do not unreflectively accept things for which we have no evidence, and often encouraged people to give up those things, namely religious practice.
  1. God was non-empirical

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