Immanuel Kant  (1724-1804)

...Was born in Königsberg, the then-capital of the province of East Prussia, which later became part of Germany and is today in Russia, however, he is considered a German philosopher.  Kant never really left, traveling no more than forty or so miles from his birthplace (he turned down teaching positions so not to have to leave).  He was born into a poor family and he lost both his parents while he was still relatively young.  His educational upbringing was by the Pietists, a Protestant (Lutheran) sect that changed the focus from church ritual to personal piety emphasizing strict devotion; it ultimately turned Kant away from any practice of religion (his moral and religious writings were banned for a number of years during his life).  Although, like the religion, his life is also characterized as strict, secluded, and predictable; neighbors were said to set their watches by his daily walk.  Despite being sociable, his life was secluded from worldly exposures (despite his aesthetics being foundational, his actual exposure to artworks was quite limited) and from the fairer sex: he never married and reputedly never engaged in any other comforts of women.  

At ten, he studied theology at the Collegium Fredericianum, and excelled at classics.  At 16, he entered the University of Könisberg to study mathematics and physics; he was introduced to rationalist philosophy and Newtonian physics, influencing his critique of traditional idealism and creation of a “transcendental idealism.”  He became an expert in the physical sciences and mathematics and made impressive contributions to nearly every field of philosophy (from metaphysics to ethics to aesthetics to education to law to history… etc.).  He was employed as a private tutor for nine years then lectures for 15 years as a Privatdozent (a non-salaried instructor).

At 45 years old (1770), he was appointed Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at the University of Königsberg.  He produced a number of early works on diverse topics, a number of them scientific, but none are regarded with much attention today.  Instead, Kant’s invaluable contribution to Western Philosophy is his Critical Project: 

His initial question, in his Critique of Pure Reason (written in 1781 and revised in 1787), is whether metaphysics is possible, which is to ask, are a priori synthetic judgments valid? 

See summation below...

His second work is his Critique of Practical Reason (1788) and represents his application of his examination of reason to the practical realm: ethics. 

His Deontological Meta-ethics: morality is formed from a rational foundation called the “Categorical Imperative,” which is a rational, universal, duty-based demand deducible by the mind alone; morality is obedience to this imperative while immorality violates it and is, thus, irrational.  It is duty-based in that moral content is not chosen by potential consequences (i.e., we are not nice to our siblings in order to get a cookie and avoid being sent to our room; instead, we are nice because it is universally, rationally, morally right, thus, it is our moral duty).  There are three formulations of the Categorical Imperative: 1) Act on the maxim that you will to be a universal law (i.e., act in such a way as if the maxim that guides your action will become a universal law of nature).  2) Act so that you treat all humanity always as an end and never merely as a means.  3) Act as if you were a law-making member of a universal kingdom of ends (i.e., a hypothetical perfect, moral society, and our goal to create).

His Third Critique is his Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), about aesthetics and teleology.

His aesthetics divide the Beautiful from the Sublime; the former is judged by four conditions: disinterest, (subjective yet with) universality, purposiveness without purpose, and necessity.  The Sublime is that experience wherein our ability to intuit is overwhelmed by magnitude or force; we then conquer over the sublime when we can think it.  The second half of the work concerns teleology (the study of ends, goals). 

The hinge of these three works is his metaphysical stance on Reason… his epistemology.

The central battle illustrated all semester is that when we ask epistemological questions, particularly, those questions about the source of our knowledge, we find three answers: authority, reason, and experience.

We have seen how, in the Early Modern era, authority, as the word of the King or God, was unsettled in the light of scientific knowledge.  So, the source of our knowledge was more often debated as being from reason or experience.

This division gave us two schools of thought:

Rationalists: (knowledge is from reason) Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, etc.

Empiricists: (knowledge is from experience) Locke, Berkeley, Hume, etc.

It can be roughly characterized that Hume destroyed mind (destroyed reason as a source of knowledge and science as legitimate) like Berkeley destroyed matter (destroyed outside, objective reality in the world) so that philosophy as Kant finds it, finds itself in ruins.  How can we have knowledge?  What is its source?  How can we do science?

These questions initiated Kant’s project; Hume, he wrote, roused him from his “dogmatic slumbers.”

Kant’s solution is the synthesis of Rationalism and Empiricism: He agrees with Empiricism that knowledge begins with experience (so, there are no innate ideas before experience), BUT he disagrees that all knowledge comes from experience.  So, he argues that knowledge is limited to experience, but attained and processed through innate, rational structures. 

Thus, reason and experience are combined: which is to say, there are a priori synthetic judgments that are prior to experience and make necessary universal connections between events and causes.  Causality is not found in experience, but is the very possibility of experience because it is one of the ways that experience is formed in the mind. 

Science, then, derives laws from human judgment on knowledge, which results from the application of reason to the data of sensibility and understanding.  Thus, accepting that information does some from outside, yet it is not on this outside experience that we know, it is only through the active evaluation of this experiential data brought into play with rational data.

So… Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is an examination of the sources of human knowledge and of the relation of a priori knowledge (innate, rational knowledge) to empirical knowledge (from experience).  A “Critique” of Pure Reason will be an examination of the sources and limits of Pure Reason.  This transcendental critique (one independent of experience) will search for the conditions that underlie and make possible our a priori knowledge of objects.  It will also seek the principles of pure reason, those that help make up the conditions for the possibility of a priori synthetic judgments.