Immanuel Kant, Title Thumbnail, source: pinterest.com (Painted portrait, c.1790), access date: Apr.11, 2024; Hero Image, source: lifeder.com, access date: Apr.11, 2024.
D05. Immanuel Kant01.
First revision: Apr.01, 2024
Last change: Apr.27, 2024
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Immanuel Kant lived between 22 April 1724 - 12 February 1804 and was a German philosopher. His birth anniversary recently marked 300 years.
Background: Immanuel Kant.
Kant was a German philosopher (a native of the Kingdom of Prussia) and one of the central Enlightenment thinkers. Born in Königsberg, Kant's comprehensive and systematic works in epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics have made him one of the most influential figures in modern Western philosophy. Kant argued space and time are mere “forms of intuition“ that structure all experience and that the objects of experience are mere “appearances“ (Doctrine of Transcendental Idealism, the nature of things as they are in themselves are unknowable). Kant wrote the Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787), his most well-known work to counter the philosophical doctrine of skepticism.
Kant drew a parallel to the Copernican revolution in his proposal to think of the objects of experience as conforming to our spatial and temporal forms of intuition and the categories of our understanding so that we have a priori cognition of those objects. Kant believed that reason is the source of morality and that aesthetics arises from a faculty of disinterested judgment. Kant's religious views were deeply connected to his moral theory. Their exact nature, however, remains in dispute. He hoped that perpetual peace could be secured through universal democracy and international cooperation. His cosmopolitan reputation, however, is stained by his promulgation of scientific racism for much of his career, even though he denounced those views in the last decade of his life. Kant's theory of mind from the view of formal logic and computer science has gained renewed interest in the 21st century. Because of the thoroughness of Kant's paradigm shift, his influence extends well beyond this to thinkers who neither specifically refer to his work nor use his terminology. Kant's work on mathematics and synthetic a priori knowledge is also cited by theoretical physicist Albert Einstein as an early influence on his intellectual development, though one which he later criticized and rejected.
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“He is generally considered the greatest of modern philosophers. I cannot myself agree with this estimate, but it would be foolish not to recognize his great importance.“
— Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (1945)
In the below excerpt, Russell illustrates the famous Kantian question:
Is knowledge or justification that is independent of experience, i.e., a priori knowledge, possible?
“Kant most important book is The Critique of Pure Reason (1st edition 1781; 2nd edition 1787). This work aims to prove that, although none of our knowledge can transcend experience, it is nevertheless in part a priori and not inferred inductively from experience. According to him, the part of our knowledge which is a priori embraces not only logic, but much that cannot be included in logic or deduced from it. He separates two distinctions which, in Leibniz, are confounded. On the one hand there is the distinction between “analytic“ and “synthetic“ propositions; on the other hand, the distinction between “a priori“ and “empirical“ propositions. Something must be said about each of these distinctions.
An “analytic“ proposition is one in which the predicate is part of the subject; for instance, “a tall man is a man,“ or “an equilateral triangle is a triangle.“ Such propositions follow from the law of contradiction; maintaining that a tall man is not a man would be self-contradictory. A “synthetic“ proposition is one that is not analytic. All the propositions that we know only through experience are synthetic. We cannot, by a mere analysis of concepts, discover such truths as “Tuesday was a wet day“ or “Napoleon was a great general.“ But Kant, unlike Leibniz and all other previous philosophers, will not admit the converse, that all synthetic propositions are only known through experience. This brings us to the second of the above distinctions.
An “empirical“ proposition is one which we cannot know except by the help of sense-perception, either our own or that of some one else whose testimony we accept. The facts of history and geography are of this sort; so are the laws of science, whenever our knowledge of their truth depends on observational data. On the other hand, an “a priori“ proposition is one which, though it may be elicited by experience, is seen, when known, to have a basis other than experience. A child learning arithmetic may be helped by experiencing two marbles and two other marbles and observing that he is experiencing four marbles altogether. But when he has grasped the general proposition “two and two are four“ he no longer requires confirmation by instances; the proposition has a certainty which induction can never give to a general law. All the propositions of pure mathematics are in this sense a prior.
Hume had proved that the law of causality is not analytic and had inferred that we could not be certain of its truth. Kant accepted the view that it is synthetic but maintained that it is known a priori. He maintained that arithmetic and geometry are synthetic but are likewise a priori. He was thus led to formulate his problem in these terms:
How are synthetic judgments a priori possible?
The answer to this question, with its consequences, constitutes the main theme of The Critique of Pure Reason.“
— Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (1945), Book Three. Modern Philosophy, Part II. From Rousseau to the Present Day, Ch. XX: Outline of Kant's Philosophy, pp. 705-6
Terminology, description, and origin:
01. From. Facebook page "Bertrand Russell" via: arts.su.ac.th/depart/depart_philosophy/depart.html, access date: Apr.23, 2024.
