Tag Archives: Kant

The Sources of Normativity, and the Paradox of Self-Legislation: Kant

For the Philosopher’s Clearinghouse It is the mark of a great philosopher that he or she is referred to often, and that his or her work provides seminal insights for students of a later time.  In that respect, Immanuel Kant must command a level of reverence reserved for few other human thinkers; for his workContinue reading “The Sources of Normativity, and the Paradox of Self-Legislation: Kant”

Robinson: a Lecture on Kant’s CPR (01)

Summarized and paraphrased for the Philosopher’s Clearinghouse Kant’s task was to develop a systematic metaphysics, it seemed obvious to him, that even as one ignores or denies the existence of metaphysics, one generally uses it. He said: “The human mind should prefer to give up breathing altogether, to avoid inhaling impure air, rather than beContinue reading “Robinson: a Lecture on Kant’s CPR (01)”

The Hegelian Spirit

Earlier it was discussed that Kant’s philosophy had a large impact. To be fair, not everything in it’s aftermath is a reaction to Kant’s noumenal skepticism, dualism, and incomplete system. Moreover, there were rich and interesting issues raised by Kant, and much of German philosophy in this period. A major focus was around three majorContinue reading “The Hegelian Spirit”

An Overview of Kant

One of the most famous of Kant’s remarks, was that what Copernicus did for astronomy, Kant wanted to do with the science of thought. As Copernicus had moved to a new center for the planets from the earth to the sun, so Kant proposed to establish a new center for knowledge. This new center for objective reality, was to circle around the human mind itself.

A Reaction to Kant

In defending his synthetic “a priori” knowledge, it was still not clear whether humankind actually had real knowledge of external things, or only just a second-rate knowledge of the appearance of external things. Further, the choice of using a dialectic as method for philosophy appeared to his critics as a dogmatic assertion, an example of the very thing that Kant had elsewhere rejected as unsuitable for philosophical inquiry. Others thought Kant had not gone far enough with his skepticism, and that he had merely catalogued the psychological workings of the human mind in a way that could not hope to apprehend the remote objects of the external world one was attempting to study.

Kant and the Kantians

In 1781, Immanuel Kant published “The Critique of Pure Reason”, a volume now recognized as one of the most important works in philosophy. In it, Kant noted there were important questions about reality that could not be answered by an “a priori” appeal to reason alone. Questions like the existence of God, the immortality of the soul, the nature of the human mind, and others were beyond the reach of our rational thinking faculty alone. We could not know, as Kant put it, “things as they are”.