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{{Short description|German philosopher (1724–1804)}} | |||
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{{Redirect|Kant|other uses|Kant (disambiguation)}} | |||
'''Immanuel Kant''' (], ] in ] – ], ]) was a ] ] from ], generally regarded as one of ]'s most influential thinkers and the last major philosopher of the ]. He had a significant impact on the ] and ] philosophies of the ], and his work was the starting point for ] and ]. | |||
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{{Infobox philosopher | |||
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The key doctrine of Kant's philosophy, called ], is that the mind knows objects in the world only by means of sensible forms, space and time, which it produces itself. Without these forms, Kant argues, knowledge would not be possible because the mind would have no way to order or structure the data given to it by the senses. Kant therefore claims that we know objects only as they "appear" in space and time (rather than as "things in themselves"). While the specifics of Kant's account generated immediate and lasting controversy, his thesis that the mind itself makes a constitutive contribution to its knowledge (and that knowledge is therefore subject to limits which cannot be overcome) nevertheless irrevocably reshaped philosophy. Similarly, his argument that human beings are free inasmuch as their power of reason itself dictates a moral law for their actions redefined the terms of philosophical debate about morality. | |||
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==Background== | |||
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| name = Immanuel Kant | |||
| image = Immanuel Kant - Gemaelde 1.jpg | |||
| caption = Portrait of Kant, 1768 | |||
| birth_date = {{birth date|1724|4|22|df=yes}} | |||
| birth_place = ], ] | |||
| death_date = {{nowrap|{{death date and age|df=yes|1804|2|12|1724|4|22}}}} | |||
| death_place = Königsberg, ], Kingdom of Prussia | |||
| education = {{Plain list| | |||
* ] (]; ], 1755; ], 1755; ], 1770) | |||
}} | |||
| institutions = University of Königsberg | |||
| thesis1_title = New Elucidation of the First Principles of Metaphysical Cognition | |||
| thesis1_url = https://korpora.zim.uni-duisburg-essen.de/kant/aa01/385.html | |||
| thesis1_year = September 1755 | |||
| thesis2_title = On the Form and Principles of the Sensible and Intelligible Worlds | |||
| thesis2_url = https://books.google.com/books?id=dNRKAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA123&redir_esc=y | |||
| thesis2_year = August 1770 | |||
| region = ] | |||
| era = ] | |||
| main_interests = ], ], ], ], ] | |||
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| notable_ideas = {{collapsible list|title={{nothing}} | |||
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| signature = Immanuel Kant signature.svg | |||
| signature_alt = Signature written in ink in a flowing script | |||
| academic_advisors = ], ] (M.A. advisor), ] | |||
| notable_students = ], ], ] (epistolary correspondent) | |||
|birth_name=Emanuel Kant}} | |||
{{Immanuel Kant}} | |||
'''<span lang="sje" dir="ltr">Immanuel</span> Kant'''{{efn|{{IPAc-en|UK|k|æ|n|t}},<ref> {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190927133528/https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/kant |date=27 September 2019 }}. '']''.</ref><ref> {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20141023143832/http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/kant |date=23 October 2014 }}. '']''.</ref> {{IPAc-en|US|k|ɑː|n|t}},<ref>{{cite LPD|3}}</ref><ref>{{cite EPD|18}}</ref> {{IPA|de|ɪˈmaːnu̯eːl kant|lang}};<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/Immanuel_maennlicher_Vorname|title=Immanuel|work=]|access-date=20 October 2018|language=de|archive-date=20 December 2020|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20201220055817/https://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/Immanuel_maennlicher_Vorname|url-status=live}}</ref><ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/Kant|title=Kant|work=Duden|access-date=20 October 2018|language=de|archive-date=20 October 2018|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20181020182053/https://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/Kant|url-status=live}}</ref>}} (born '''Emanuel Kant'''; 22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804) was a German<!--"German" is the consensus after intensive talking--> ] and one of the central ] thinkers. Born in ], Kant's comprehensive and systematic works in ], ], ], and ] have made him one of the most influential and controversial figures in modern ]. He has been called the "father of modern ethics",<ref>{{cite journal |last=Jemberie |first=Abraham Tsehay |date=2017 |title=A Critical Analysis of Immanuel Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals |url=https://philarchive.org/rec/JEMACA-2 |journal=International Journal of Research and Review |volume=4 |issue=3 |pages=54–75}}</ref> the "father of modern aesthetics",<ref>{{cite web |last=Grenfell |first=Michael |date=2017 |title=Bourdieu, Kant and Art – Michael Grenfell |url=http://www.michaelgrenfell.co.uk/bourdieu/bourdieu-kant-and-art/ |access-date=22 April 2024 |website=Michael Grenfell}}</ref> and for bringing together rationalism and empiricism, the "father of ]".<ref>{{cite web |last1=Bird |first1=Otto Allen |last2=Duignan |first2=Brian |date=20 July 1998 |title=Immanuel Kant |url=https://www.britannica.com/biography/Immanuel-Kant |access-date=23 April 2024 |website=Encyclopedia Britannica Online }}</ref><ref>{{cite book | url=https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/modern-german-thought-from-kant-to-habermas/immanuel-kant-17241804/148CBBC8FBD283D8E3F199CDDE11CE78 | isbn=9781571137708 | title=Modern German Thought from Kant to Habermas: An Annotated German-Language Reader | chapter=Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) | series=Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture | date=16 August 2023 | pages=21–56 | publisher=Boydell & Brewer }}</ref> | |||
Kant was born, lived and died in ], the capital of ], a city which today is Kaliningrad in the Russian exclave of that name. His parents baptized him as Emanuel Kant, which he later, after learning ], changed to Immanuel. He spent much of his youth as a solid, albeit unspectacular, student. Contrary to the dour image of him promoted by early biographers, Kant as a young man was quite gregarious and enjoyed attending social events about town. He also regularly invited guests over for dinner, insisting that company and laughter were good for his constitution. It was only after befriending the English merchant Joseph Green, who instilled in Kant a respect for living according to strictly observed maxims of behavior, that Kant began living a very regulated life: according to some stories neighbors would set their clocks according to the time Green and Kant finished their daily get-togethers. A biography of Kant by Manfred Kuehn even suggests that Kant was philosophically inspired by Green, who not only introduced him to the philosophy of ], but whose personal habits may have influenced Kant in formulating his idea of the ]. Another influential view about the introduction of the works of Hume to Kant and other German philosophers, which finds its clearest expression in the works of ], is that it was ] (1730-1788) who brought Hume's views to Germany. For the remainder of his life Kant remained unmarried and owned only one piece of art in his household, advocating the absence of passion in favor of logic. He never left Prussia and rarely stepped outside his own home town. He was a respected and competent university professor for most of his life, although he was in his late fifties before he did anything that would bring him historical repute. | |||
In his doctrine of ], Kant argued that ] and ] are mere "forms of intuition" that structure all ], and that the objects of experience are mere "appearances". The nature of things as they are in themselves is unknowable to us. Nonetheless, in an attempt to counter the philosophical doctrine of ], he wrote the '']'' (1781/1787), his best-known work. Kant drew a parallel to the ] in his proposal to think of the objects of experience as conforming to our spatial and temporal forms of ] and the ] of our understanding, so that we have ''a priori'' cognition of those objects. These claims have proved especially influential in the social sciences, particularly sociology and anthropology, which regard human activities as pre-oriented by cultural norms.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Khan |first1=Naveeda |date=25 March 2021 |title=Kant and Anthropology |url=https://d1wqtxts1xzle7.cloudfront.net/66103774/KhanKantandAnthropology-libre.pdf |journal=Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Anthropology |volume= |issue= |pages= |doi=10.1093/acrefore/9780190854584.013.311 |isbn=978-0-19-085458-4 |url-access=subscription |access-date=9 November 2023}}</ref> | |||
He entered the local university in 1740, and studied the philosophy of ] and ] under Martin Knutsen, a follower of Wolff. He also studied the new mathematics of ] and, in 1746, wrote a paper on measurement, reflecting Leibniz's influence. In 1755, he became a private lecturer at the University, and while there published "Inquiry into the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morals", where he examined the problem of having a logical system of philosophy that connected with the world of natural philosophy, a concern typical of the ]. In this paper, he proposed what later become known as the Kant-Laplace theory of planetary formation, wherein the planets formed from rotating protoplanetary disks of gas. Kant was also the first recorded scholar to postulate (as is true) that some of the faint ]e one can see with a small telescope (or in one case, with the naked eye) were external ] or, as he called them, ''island universes.'' | |||
Kant believed that ] is the source of ], and that aesthetics arises from a faculty of disinterested judgment. Kant's religious views were deeply connected to his moral theory. Their exact nature remains in dispute. He hoped that perpetual peace could be secured through an international federation of ] states and ]. His ] reputation is called into question by his promulgation of ] for much of his career, although he altered his views on the subject in the last decade of his life. | |||
In 1763, he wrote ''The Only Possible Ground of Proof for a Demonstration of God's Existence'', which questioned the ] for God put forward by Saint ] in the ], namely that the greatest of all possible ideas must include the attribute of existence, because if it does not, it is not the greatest of all possible ideas. Therefore, God, who by definition is the greatest of all possible ideas, must exist. ] put forward a similar argument in the Fifth Meditation. Despite questioning this argument however, Kant in this piece defends a modified form of rational theology, which he subsequently rejected in his Critical work. | |||
==Biography== | |||
In 1766, he was appointed Second Librarian of the Royal Library, a prestigious government position. In 1770, he became a full professor at Königsberg. It was after this time that Hume's works began to have serious impact on his understanding of metaphysics though there is considerable evidence he had read Hume earlier and that it was only the breakdown of an early attempt at constructing a rationalist metaphysics that led him to see Hume's contribution to philosophy as decisive. Hume was fiercely empirical, scorned all metaphysics, and systematically debunked great quantities of it. His most famous thesis is that nothing in our experience can justify the assumption that there are "causal powers" inherent in things — that, for example, when one billiard ball strikes another, the second must move. Kant found Hume's conclusions unacceptable. "I wilfully admit that it was David Hume that woke me from my dogmatic slumber", he would later write. | |||
Immanuel Kant was born on 22 April 1724 into a ]n German family of ] faith in ], East Prussia. His mother, Anna Regina Reuter (1697–1737), was born in Königsberg to a father from ].<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.koenigsberg-is-dead.de/I_Cosmopolis.html |title=Cosmopolis |publisher=Koenigsberg-is-dead.de |date=23 April 2001 |access-date=24 July 2009 |archive-date=22 March 2009 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090322094741/http://www.koenigsberg-is-dead.de/I_Cosmopolis.html |url-status=live}}</ref> Her surname is sometimes erroneously given as Porter. Kant's father, Johann Georg Kant (1682–1746), was a German harness-maker from ],{{sfn|Kuehn|2001|p=26}} at the time Prussia's most northeastern city (now ], ]). It is possible that the Kants got their name from the village of Kantvainiai (German: ''Kantwaggen'' – today part of ]) and were of ] origin.<ref>R.K. Murray, "The Origin of Immanuel Kant's Family Name", ''Kantian Review'' '''13'''(1), March 2008, pp. 190–193.</ref><ref>Rosa Kohlheim, Volker Kohlheim, ''Duden – Familiennamen: Herkunft und Bedeutung von 20.000 Nachnamen'', Bibliographisches Institut & F.A. Brockhaus AG, Mannheim 2005, p. 365.</ref> | |||
Kant was baptized as Emanuel and later changed the spelling of his name to Immanuel after learning ].{{sfn|Kuehn|2001|p=26}} He was the fourth of nine children (six of whom reached adulthood).<ref>{{cite web |last=Haupt |first=Viktor |title=Rede des Bohnenkönigs – Von Petersburg bis Panama – Die Genealogie der Familie Kant |url=https://www.freunde-kants.com/kopie-von-kant-war-ostpreusse-1 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150925124214/http://www.freunde-kants.com/attachments/article/137/Bohnenrede%202015%20%28de%29.pdf |archive-date=25 September 2015 |website=freunde-kants.com |page=7 |language=de}}</ref> The Kant household stressed the ] values of religious devotion, humility, and a literal interpretation of the ].<ref>{{Cite encyclopedia |last1=Pasternack |first1=Lawrence |title=Kant's Philosophy of Religion |date=2020 |url=https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2020/entries/kant-religion/ |encyclopedia=The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy |editor-last=Zalta |editor-first=Edward N. |edition=Spring 2020 |publisher=Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University |access-date=25 February 2021 |last2=Fugate |first2=Courtney}}</ref> The young Immanuel's education was strict, punitive and disciplinary, and focused on Latin and religious instruction over mathematics and science.<ref>Kuehn 2001, p. 47.</ref> In his later years, Kant lived a strictly ordered life. It was said that neighbors would set their clocks by his daily walks. He never married but seems to have had a rewarding social life; he was a popular teacher as well as a modestly successful author, even before starting on his major philosophical works.{{sfn|Kuehn|2001|p=169}} | |||
For the next 10 years, he worked on the architecture of his own philosophy. In ], he released the '']'', one of the most influential, widely cited, and widely disputed works in Western philosophy. He followed this with '']'', then in 1788, the '']'' and in 1790, the '']''. The effect was immediate in the German-speaking world, with readership including ] and ]. But the attention was far from universally approving: on the contrary, almost every aspect of his writing was attacked and criticized fiercely, particularly his ideas on categories, the place of free will and determinism, and whether we can have knowledge of external reality. His early critics included ], ] and ]. Pistorius' criticisms were particularly influential and are still cited today. | |||
], ]]] | |||
The ''Critique of Practical Reason'' dealt with morality, or action, in the same way that the first Critique dealt with knowledge, and the ''Critique of Judgement'' dealt with the various uses of our mental powers that neither confer factual knowledge nor determine us to action, such as aesthetic judgement, for example of the beautiful and sublime, and teleological judgment, that is, construing things as having "purposes". As Kant understood them, aesthetic and teleological judgment connected our moral and empirical judgments to one another, unifying his system. Two shorter works, the '']'' and the '']'' treated the same matter as the first and second critiques respectively, in a more cursory form — assuming the answer and working backward, so to speak. They serve as his introductions to the critical system. | |||
===Young scholar=== | |||
The epistemological material of the first Critique was put into application in the ''Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science''; the ethical dictums of the second were put into practice in ''Metaphysics of Morals''. His work on moral philosophy is best known for its formulation of a basic tenet of ], sometimes falsely assumed to be an extension of the ], which Kant called the categorical imperative: "Act only on that maxim whereby thou canst at the same time will that it should become a universal law." | |||
Kant showed a great aptitude for study at an early age. He first attended the ], from which he graduated at the end of the summer of 1740. In 1740, aged 16, he enrolled at the ], where he would later remain for the rest of his professional life.<ref>''The American International Encyclopedia'' (New York: J.J. Little & Ives, 1954), Vol. IX.</ref> He studied the philosophy of ] and ] under ] (Associate Professor of Logic and Metaphysics from 1734 until he died in 1751), a ] who was also familiar with developments in British philosophy and science and introduced Kant to the new mathematical physics of ]. Knutzen dissuaded Kant from the theory of ], which he regarded as "the pillow for the lazy mind".<ref>{{cite book|title=What the Tortoise Taught Us: The Story of Philosophy|url=https://archive.org/details/whattortoisetaug00port|url-access=limited|last=Porter|first=Burton|publisher=Rowman & Littlefield Publishers|year=2010|page=}}</ref> He also dissuaded Kant from ], the idea that reality is purely mental, which most philosophers in the 18th century regarded negatively. The theory of ] that Kant later included in the '']'' was developed partially in opposition to traditional idealism. Kant had contacts with students, colleagues, friends and diners who frequented the local ].<ref>{{cite web|url=https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/id/9c2c6b4d-7481-4e73-b443-bf29054680c2/497779.pdf|title=Die Freimaurer im Alten Preußen 1738–1806|language=de|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20201119104900/https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/id/9c2c6b4d-7481-4e73-b443-bf29054680c2/497779.pdf|archive-date=19 November 2020|url-status=live}}</ref> | |||
His father's stroke and subsequent death in 1746 interrupted his studies. Kant left Königsberg shortly after August 1748;{{sfn|Kuehn|2001|p=94}} he would return there in August 1754.{{sfn|Kuehn|2001|p=98}} He became a private tutor in the towns surrounding Königsberg, but continued his scholarly research. In 1749, he published his first philosophical work, '']'' (written in 1745–1747).<ref>Eric Watkins (ed.), ''Immanuel Kant: Natural Science'', Cambridge University Press, 2012: {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160307213516/http://assets.cambridge.org/97805213/63945/excerpt/9780521363945_excerpt.pdf |date=7 March 2016 }}.</ref> | |||
Kant also wrote a number of semi-popular essays on history, politics, and the application of philosophy to life. When he died in ], he was working on an incomplete manuscript that has been published as '']''. | |||
===Early work=== | |||
His tomb and its pillared enclosure outside the cathedral in Königsberg is one of the few artifacts of German times preserved by the Soviets after they conquered East Prussia in 1945. A replica of a statue of Kant that stood in front of the university was donated by a German entity in 1991 and placed on the original pediment. The inscription near his tomb, in German and Russian, reads: | |||
] Kant is best known for his work in the philosophy of ethics and metaphysics, but he made significant contributions to other disciplines. In 1754, while contemplating on a prize question by the ] about the problem of Earth's rotation, he argued that the Moon's gravity would slow down Earth's spin and he also put forth the argument that gravity would eventually cause the Moon's ] to ] with the Earth's rotation.{{efn|Kant himself seems to have found his contribution not significant enough that he published his arguments in a newspaper commentary on the prize question and did not submit them to the Academy: {{cite book|chapter-url=https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.54018/page/n113/mode/2up|chapter=Whether the Earth has Undergone an Alteration of its Axial Rotation|title=Kant's Cosmogony|translator-last=Hastie|translator-first=William|location=Glasgow|publisher=James Maclehose|orig-date=1754|year=1900|pages=1–11|access-date=29 March 2022}}. The prize was instead awarded in 1756 to P. Frisi, who incorrectly argued against the slowing down of the spin.<ref>{{cite book |last=Schönfeld |first=Martin |title=The Philosophy of the Young Kant: The Precritical Project |publisher=Oxford University Press |page=84 |isbn=978-0-19-513218-2 |year=2000 }}</ref>}}<ref name="nebulous">{{cite book|last=Brush|first=Stephen G.|title=A History of Modern Planetary Physics: Nebulous Earth|year=2014|isbn=978-0-521-44171-1|page=|publisher=Cambridge University Press |url=https://archive.org/details/historyofmodernp0000brus/page/7}}</ref> The next year, he expanded this reasoning to the ] in his '']''.<ref name="nebulous"/> In 1755, Kant received a license to lecture in the University of Königsberg and began lecturing on a variety of topics including mathematics, physics, logic, and metaphysics. In his 1756 essay on the theory of winds, Kant laid out an original insight into the ]. | |||
In 1756, Kant also published three papers on the ].<ref>See: | |||
:''Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and perseveringly my thinking engages itself with them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.'' | |||
* Kant, I. (1756a) In: Königlich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences), ed.s (1902) ''Kant's gesammelte Schriften'' (in German) Berlin, Germany: G. Reimer. vol. 1, pp. 417–427. | |||
* Kant, I. (1756b) , ibid. pp. 429–461. | |||
* Kant, I. (1756c) , ibid. pp. 463–472. | |||
* Amador, Filomena (2004) "The causes of 1755 Lisbon earthquake on Kant" In: Escribano Benito, J.J.; Español González, L.; Martínez García, M.A., ed.s. ''Actas VIII Congreso de la Sociedad Española de Historia de las Ciencias y de las Técnicas'' (in English) Logroño, Spain: Sociedad Española de Historia de las Ciencias y de las Técnicas (Universidad de la Rioja), vol. 2, pp. 485–495.</ref> Kant's theory, which involved shifts in huge caverns filled with hot gases, though inaccurate, was one of the first systematic attempts to explain earthquakes in natural rather than supernatural terms. In 1757, Kant began lecturing on geography making him one of the first lecturers to explicitly teach geography as its own subject.<ref name="Richards-1974">{{Cite journal|last=Richards|first=Paul|date=1974|title=Kant's Geography and Mental Maps|journal=Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers|issue=61|pages=1–16|doi=10.2307/621596|jstor=621596| issn=0020-2754 }}</ref><ref>{{Cite journal|last=Elden|first=Stuart|date=2009|title=Reassessing Kant's geography|journal=Journal of Historical Geography|language=en|volume=35|issue=1|pages=3–25|doi=10.1016/j.jhg.2008.06.001|url=http://dro.dur.ac.uk/6836/1/6836.pdf|access-date=27 September 2019|archive-date=1 August 2020|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200801205430/http://dro.dur.ac.uk/6836/1/6836.pdf|url-status=live}}</ref> Geography was one of Kant's most popular lecturing topics and, in 1802, a compilation by Friedrich Theodor Rink of Kant's lecturing notes, ''Physical Geography'', was released. After Kant became a professor in 1770, he expanded the topics of his lectures to include lectures on natural law, ethics, and anthropology, along with other topics.<ref name="Richards-1974" /> | |||
] | |||
==The Critique of Pure Reason== | |||
In the ''Universal Natural History'', Kant laid out the ], in which he deduced that the ] had formed from a large cloud of gas, a ]. Kant also correctly deduced that the ] was a ], which he theorized formed from a much larger spinning gas cloud. He further suggested that other distant "nebulae" might be other galaxies. These postulations opened new horizons for astronomy, for the first time extending it beyond the solar system to galactic and intergalactic realms.<ref>{{cite book|last=Gamow|first=George|title=One Two Three... Infinity|location=New York|publisher=Viking P.|date=1947|pages=300ff|title-link=One Two Three... Infinity}}</ref> | |||
Kant's most widely read and most influential book is '']'' (]) - his attempt to work past what he saw as the unacceptable conclusions of ]. Kant wanted to find the limitations of Reason, and its application to such important philosophical questions as whether there is a God, the immortality of the soul, and freedom. | |||
From then on, Kant turned increasingly to philosophical issues, although he continued to write on the sciences throughout his life. In the early 1760s, Kant produced a series of important works in philosophy. '']'', a work in logic, was published in 1762. Two more works appeared the following year: ''Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy'' and '']''. By 1764, Kant had become a notable popular author, and wrote '']''; he was second to ] in a Berlin Academy prize competition with his ''Inquiry Concerning the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morality'' (often referred to as "The Prize Essay"). In 1766 Kant wrote a critical piece on ]'s ''Dreams of a Spirit-Seer''. | |||
Hume's conclusions, Kant realized, rested on the premise that knowledge is empirical at its root. The problem that Hume identified was that basic principles like cause and effect cannot be empirically derived. Kant's goal, then, was to find some way to derive cause and effect without relying on empirical knowledge. Kant rejects analytical methods for this, arguing that analytic reasoning can't tell you anything that isn't already self-evident. Instead, Kant argued that we would need to use synthetic reasoning. But this posed a new problem - how can one have synthetic knowledge that is not based on empirical observation - that is, how can we have synthetic ] truths. Kant's famous quote from the first third of the book is, “thoughts without content empty, and intuitions without concepts blind.” | |||
] | |||
Kant did not have any trouble showing that we do have synthetic a priori truths. After all, he reasoned, geometry and Newtonian physics are synthetic a priori knowledges and are fundamentally true. The issue was showing how one could ground synthetic a priori knowledge for a study of metaphysics. This led to his most influential contribution to metaphysics - the abandonment of the quest to try to know the world in itself, instead acknowledging that there is no way to determine whether something is experienced the way it is because that's the way it is, or because the faculties we have with which to perceive and experience are constructed such that we experience it in a given way. He demonstrated this with a ], showing that we cannot meaningfully conceive of an object that exists outside of time and has no spatial components. Although we cannot conceive of such an object, Kant argues, there is no way of showing that such an object does not exist. Therefore, Kant says, metaphysics must not try to talk about what exists, but instead about what is perceived, and how it is perceived. | |||
In 1770, Kant was appointed Full Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at the University of Königsberg. In defense of this appointment, Kant wrote his ] ''On the Form and Principles of the Sensible and the Intelligible World''{{efn|Since he had written his last ] 14 years earlier, a new habilitation thesis was required (see S.J. McGrath, Joseph Carew (eds.), ''Rethinking German Idealism'', Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, p. 24).}} This work saw the emergence of several central themes of his mature work, including the distinction between the faculties of intellectual thought and sensible receptivity. To miss this distinction would mean to commit the error of ], and, as he says in the last chapter of the dissertation, only in avoiding this error does metaphysics flourish. | |||
This insight allows Kant to set up a distinction between ] and ] - phenomena being that about a thing which can be experienced by the senses (including ]), and noumena being that about a thing that we can think about without sensing - things in themselves, which human beings can never intuit. The phenomenon is only the representation of the object/noumenon that a person receives through their sensibilities. The noumenon exists as the horizon of our experience of a thing, a horizon that can only be circumscribed with philosophical concepts. Kant's whole metaphysical system, which is based on the operations of cognitive faculties, was meant to describe the world <i>as we perceive it</i> - a much more modest task than describing the world as it is beyond our experience of it. | |||
It is often claimed that Kant was a late developer, that he only became an important philosopher in his mid-50s after rejecting his earlier views. While it is true that Kant wrote his greatest works relatively late in life, there is a tendency to underestimate the value of his earlier works. Recent Kant scholarship has devoted more attention to these "pre-critical" writings and has recognized a degree of continuity with his mature work.<ref>Cf., for example, Susan Shell, ''The Embodiment of Reason'' (Chicago, 1996)</ref> | |||
Kant termed his critical philosophy "]." While the exact interpretation of this phrase is contentious, one way to start to understand it is through Kant's comparison in the second preface to the "Critique of Pure Reason" of his critical philosophy to ] revolution in astronomy. Kant writes: "Hitherto it has been assumed that all our knowledge must conform to objects. But all attempts to extend our knowledge of objects by establishing something in regard to them a priori, by means of concepts, have, on this assumption, ended in failure. We must therefore make trial whether we may not have more success in the tasks of metaphysics, if we suppose that objects must conform to our knowledge" . Just as Copernicus revolutionized astronomy by changing the point of view, Kant's critical philosophy asks what the a priori conditions for our knowledge of objects in the world might be. Transcendental idealism describes this method of seeking the conditions of the possibility of our knowledge of the world. | |||
===Publication of the ''Critique of Pure Reason''=== | |||
Kant's "transcendental idealism" should be distinguished from idealistic systems such as ]. While Kant claimed that phenomena depend upon the conditions of sensibility, space and time, this thesis is not equivalent to mind-dependence in the sense of ]. For Berkeley, something is an object only if it can be perceived. For Kant, on the other hand, perception does not provide the criterion for the existence of objects. Rather, the conditions of sensibility - space and time - provide the "epistemic conditions", to borrow a phrase from Henry Allison, required for us to know objects in the phenomenal world. | |||
{{Main|Critique of Pure Reason}} | |||
]]] | |||
At age 46, Kant was an established scholar and an increasingly influential philosopher, and much was expected of him. In correspondence with his ex-student and friend ], Kant admitted that, in the inaugural dissertation, he had failed to account for the relation between our sensible and intellectual faculties.<ref>{{Cite book|last=Watkins|first=Erik|title=Kant's Critique of Pure Reason: Background Source Materials|publisher=Cambridge University Press|year=2009|isbn=978-0-521-78162-6|location=Cambridge, UK|pages=276}}</ref> He needed to explain how we combine what is known as sensory knowledge with the other type of knowledge—that is, reasoned knowledge—these two being related but having very different processes. Kant also credited ] with awakening him from a "dogmatic slumber" in which he had unquestioningly accepted the tenets of both religion and ].<ref name="Smith-1952">{{cite book|last=Smith|first=Homer W.|url=https://archive.org/details/manhisgods00smit|title=Man and His Gods|publisher=]|year=1952|location=New York|page=|author-link=Homer W. Smith|url-access=registration}}</ref><ref>Kant, ''PFM'' 4:260</ref> Hume, in his 1739 '']'', had argued that we only know the mind through a subjective, essentially illusory series of perceptions. Ideas such as ], ], and ] are not evident in experience, so their reality may be questioned. Kant felt that reason could remove this skepticism, and he set himself to solving these problems. Although fond of company and conversation with others, Kant isolated himself, and resisted friends' attempts to bring him out of his isolation.{{efn|It has been noted that in 1778, in response to one of these offers by a former pupil, Kant wrote, "Any change makes me apprehensive, even if it offers the greatest promise of improving my condition, and I am persuaded by this natural instinct of mine that I must take heed if I wish that the threads which the Fates spin so thin and weak in my case to be spun to any length. My great thanks, to my well-wishers and friends, who think so kindly of me as to undertake my welfare, but at the same time a most humble request to protect me in my current condition from any disturbance."<ref>Christopher Kul-Want and Andrzej Klimowski, ''Introducing Kant'' (Cambridge: Icon Books, 2005).{{page needed|date=October 2011}} {{ISBN|978-1-84046-664-5}}</ref>}} When Kant emerged from his silence in 1781, the result was the ''Critique of Pure Reason'', printed by ]. Kant countered Hume's ] by claiming that some knowledge exists inherently in the mind, independent of experience.<ref name="Smith-1952" /> He drew a parallel to the ] in his proposal that worldly objects can be intuited '']'', and that ] is consequently distinct from ]. Perhaps the most direct contested matter was Hume's argument against any necessary connection between causal events, which Hume characterized as the "cement of the universe." In the ''Critique of Pure Reason'', Kant argues for what he takes to be the ''a priori'' justification of such necessary connection.<ref>Kant, ''CPuR'' A188-211/B233-56</ref> | |||
] | |||
===Kant's Refutation of Idealism=== | |||
Although now recognized as one of the greatest works in the history of philosophy, the ''Critique'' disappointed Kant's readers upon its initial publication.<ref>{{Cite book|last=Dorrien|first=Gary|title=Kantian Reason and Hegelian Spirit: The Idealistic Logic of Modern Theology|publisher=John Wiley & Sons|year=2012|isbn=978-0-470-67331-7|location=Malden, MA|pages=37}}</ref> The book was long, over 800 pages in the original German edition, and written in a convoluted style. Kant was quite upset with its reception.{{sfn|Kuehn|2001|pp=250–254}} His former student, ] criticized it for placing reason as an entity worthy of criticism by itself instead of considering the process of reasoning within the context of language and one's entire personality.<ref>] (2003). ''The Enlightenment: Voltaire to Kant''. p. 146.</ref> Similarly to ] and ], he rejected Kant's position that space and time possess a form that can be analyzed. Garve and Feder also faulted the ''Critique'' for not explaining differences in perception of sensations.<ref>Sassen, Brigitte. ''Kant's Early Critics: The Empiricist Critique of the Theoretical Philosophy''. 2000.</ref> Its density made it, as Herder said in a letter to ], a "tough nut to crack", obscured by "all this heavy gossamer".<ref>''Ein Jahrhundert deutscher Literaturkritik'', vol. III, ''Der Aufstieg zur Klassik in der Kritik der Zeit'' (Berlin, 1959), p. 315; as quoted in Gulyga, Arsenij. ''Immanuel Kant: His Life and Thought''. Trans. Marijan Despaltović. Boston: Birkhäuser, 1987.</ref> Its reception stood in stark contrast to the praise Kant had received for earlier works, such as his ''Prize Essay'' and shorter works that preceded the first ''Critique''. Recognizing the need to clarify the original treatise, Kant wrote the '']'' in 1783 as a summary of its main views. Shortly thereafter, Kant's friend Johann Friedrich Schultz (1739–1805), a professor of mathematics, published ''Explanations of Professor Kant's Critique of Pure Reason'' (Königsberg, 1784), which was a brief but very accurate commentary on Kant's ''Critique of Pure Reason''.{{sfn|Kuehn|2001|pp=268–269}} | |||
In order to answer criticisms of the ] that transcendental idealism denied the reality of external objects, Kant added a section to the second edition (1787) entitled "The Refutation of Idealism" that turns the "game" of idealism against itself by arguing that self-consciousness presupposes external objects in space. Defining self-consciousness as a determination of the self in time, Kant argues that all determinations of time presuppose something permanent in perception and that this permanent cannot be in the self, since it is only through the permanent that one's existence in time can itself be determined. This argument inverted the supposed priority of inner over outer experience that had dominated philosophies of mind and knowledge since Descartes. | |||
Kant's reputation gradually rose through the latter portion of the 1780s, sparked by a series of important works: the 1784 essay, "]"; 1785's '']'' (his first work on moral philosophy); and '']'' from 1786. Kant's fame ultimately arrived from an unexpected source. In 1786, ] published a series of public letters on Kantian philosophy. In these letters, Reinhold framed Kant's philosophy as a response to the central intellectual controversy of the era: the ]. ] had accused the recently deceased ] (a distinguished dramatist and philosophical essayist) of ]. Such a charge, tantamount to an accusation of atheism, was vigorously denied by Lessing's friend ], leading to a bitter public dispute among partisans. The controversy gradually escalated into a debate about the values of the Enlightenment and the value of reason. Reinhold maintained in his letters that Kant's ''Critique of Pure Reason'' could settle this dispute by defending the authority and bounds of reason. Reinhold's ] were widely read and made Kant the most famous philosopher of his era.<ref>{{Cite book|last=Guyer|first=Paul|title=The Cambridge Companion to Kant and Modern Philosophy|publisher=Cambridge University Press|year=2006|isbn=978-0-521-82303-6|location=Cambridge, UK|pages=631}}</ref> | |||
==Kant's moral philosophy== | |||
===Later work=== | |||
Kant developed his moral philosophy in three works: '']'' (]), '']'' (]), and ''Metaphysics of Morals'' (]). | |||
Kant published a second edition of the ''Critique of Pure Reason'' in 1787, heavily revising the first parts of the book. Most of his subsequent work focused on other areas of philosophy. He continued to develop his moral philosophy, notably in 1788's '']'' (known as the second ''Critique''), and 1797's '']''. The 1790 '']'' (the third ''Critique'') applied the Kantian system to aesthetics and ]. In 1792, Kant's attempt to publish the Second of the four Pieces of '']'',<ref name="KReligion">Werner S. Pluhar, '' {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200304020309/https://books.google.com/books?id=da8RrM-qkiwC&pg=PR7 |date=4 March 2020 }}''. 2009. {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200201192948/https://books.google.com/books/about/Religion_Within_the_Bounds_of_Bare_Reaso.html%3Fid%3Dda8RrM-qkiwC |date=1 February 2020 }} & With an {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200803085237/https://books.google.com/books?id=da8RrM-qkiwC&pg=PR15 |date=3 August 2020 }} by Stephen Palmquist. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company,</ref> in the journal ''Berlinische Monatsschrift'', met with opposition from the King's ] commission, which had been established that same year in the context of the ].<ref name="DerridaKantCensorship"/> Kant then arranged to have all four pieces published as a book, routing it through the philosophy department at the University of Jena to avoid the need for theological censorship.<ref name="DerridaKantCensorship">Derrida, ''Vacant Chair'' p. 44.</ref> This insubordination earned him a now-famous reprimand from the King.<ref name="DerridaKantCensorship"/> When he nevertheless published a second edition in 1794, the censor was so irate that he arranged for a royal order that required Kant never to publish or even speak publicly about religion.<ref name="DerridaKantCensorship"/> Kant then published his response to the King's reprimand and explained himself in the preface of ''The Conflict of the Faculties''.<ref name="DerridaKantCensorship"/> | |||
], ], ], and ]]] | |||
Kant is known for his theory that there is a single moral obligation, which he called the ], from which all other moral obligations are generated. He believed that the moral law must be a principle of ] itself, and could not be based on contingent facts about the world (e.g., what would make us happy). Accordingly, he believed that moral obligation applies to all and only rational agents. | |||
He also wrote a number of semi-popular essays on history, religion, politics, and other topics. These works were well received by Kant's contemporaries and confirmed his preeminent status in eighteenth-century philosophy. There were several journals devoted solely to defending and criticizing Kantian philosophy. Despite his success, philosophical trends were moving in another direction. Many of Kant's most important disciples and followers (including ], ], and ]) transformed the Kantian position. The progressive stages of revision of Kant's teachings marked the emergence of ]. In what was one of his final acts expounding a stance on philosophical questions, Kant opposed these developments and publicly denounced Fichte in an open letter in 1799.<ref name="Fichte">{{cite web|url=http://www.korpora.org/Kant/aa12/370.html|title=Open letter by Kant denouncing Fichte's Philosophy|language=de|website=Korpora.org|access-date=24 July 2009|archive-date=19 July 2011|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110719150635/http://www.korpora.org/Kant/aa12/370.html|url-status=live}}</ref> | |||
In 1800, a student of Kant named Gottlob Benjamin Jäsche (1762–1842) published a manual of logic for teachers called ''Logik'', which he had prepared at Kant's request. Jäsche prepared the ''Logik'' using a copy of a textbook in logic by ] entitled ''Excerpt from the Doctrine of Reason'', in which Kant had written copious notes and annotations. The ''Logik'' has been considered of fundamental importance to Kant's philosophy, and the understanding of it. The great 19th-century logician ] remarked, in an incomplete review of ]'s English translation of the introduction to ''Logik'', that "Kant's whole philosophy turns upon his logic."<ref>Peirce, C.S., ''Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce'', v. 1, (HUP, 1960), 'Kant and his Refutation of Idealism' p. 15 | |||
A categorical imperative is an unconditional obligation; that is, it has the force of an obligation regardless of our will or desires. (Contrast this with ].) Kant's categorical imperative was formulated in three ways, which he believed to be roughly equivalent (although many commentators do not): | |||
</ref> Also, ] and Wolfgang Schwarz wrote in the translators' introduction to their English translation of the ''Logik'', "Its importance lies not only in its significance for the ''Critique of Pure Reason'', the second part of which is a restatement of fundamental tenets of the ''Logic'', but in its position within the whole of Kant's work."<ref>Kant, Immanuel, ''Logic'', G.B. Jäsche (ed), R.S. Hartman, W. Schwarz (translators), Indianapolis, 1984, p. xv.</ref> | |||
===Death and burial=== | |||
*The first formulation (Formula of Universal Law) says: "Act as if the maxim of thy action were to become by thy will a universal law of nature." | |||
Kant's health, long poor, worsened. He died at Königsberg on 12 February 1804, uttering ''Es ist gut'' ("It is good") before his death.<ref>Karl Vorländer, ''Immanuel Kant: Der Mann und das Werk'', Hamburg: Meiner, 1992, p. II 332.</ref> His unfinished final work was published as '']''. Kant always cut a curious figure in his lifetime for his modest, rigorously scheduled habits, which have been referred to as clocklike. ] observed the magnitude of "his destructive, world-crushing thoughts" and considered him a sort of philosophical "executioner", comparing him to ] with the observation that both men "represented in the highest the type of provincial bourgeois. Nature had destined them to weigh coffee and sugar, but Fate determined that they should weigh other things and placed on the scales of the one a king, on the scales of the other a god."<ref>{{cite web |url=http://philosophy.uchicago.edu/resources/files/On%20Kant.pdf |title=Heine on Immanuel Kant |access-date=10 July 2015 |archive-date=23 November 2015 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20151123060538/http://philosophy.uchicago.edu/resources/files/On%20Kant.pdf |url-status=live }}</ref> | |||
When his body was transferred to a new burial spot, his skull was measured during the exhumation and found to be larger than the average German male's with a "high and broad" forehead.<ref>''Examined Lives, From Socrates to Nietzsche'', James Miller p. 284</ref> His forehead has been an object of interest ever since it became well known through his portraits: "In Döbler's portrait and in Kiefer's faithful if expressionistic reproduction of it—as well as in many of the other late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century portraits of Kant—the forehead is remarkably large and decidedly retreating."<ref>Immanuel Kant and the Bo(a)rders of Art History Mark Cheetham, in ''The Subjects of Art History: Historical Objects in Contemporary Perspectives'', p. 16</ref> | |||
*The second formulation (Formula of Humanity) says: "Act that you use humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means." | |||
], Russia]] | |||
*The third formulation (Formula of Autonomy) is a synthesis of the first two. It says that we should so act that we may think of ourselves as legislating universal laws through our maxims. We may think of ourselves as such autonomous legislators only insofar as we follow our own laws. | |||
Kant's ] adjoins the northeast corner of ] in ], Russia. The mausoleum was constructed by the architect ] and was finished in 1924, in time for the bicentenary of Kant's birth. Originally, Kant was buried inside the cathedral, but in 1880 his remains were moved to a ] chapel adjoining the northeast corner of the cathedral. Over the years, the chapel became dilapidated and was demolished to make way for the mausoleum, which was built on the same location. The tomb and its mausoleum are among the few artifacts of German times preserved by the ] after they captured the city.<ref>{{Cite news|url=http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/architectural-competition-held-to-rebuild-koenigsberg-city-center-a-980260.html|title=Resurrecting Königsberg: Russian City Looks to German Roots|last=Beyer|first=Susanne|date=25 July 2014|work=Spiegel Online|access-date=3 February 2018|archive-date=4 February 2018|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180204192755/http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/architectural-competition-held-to-rebuild-koenigsberg-city-center-a-980260.html|url-status=live}}</ref> | |||
Into the 21st century, many newlyweds bring flowers to the mausoleum. Artifacts previously owned by Kant, known as ''Kantiana'', were included in the ]; however, the museum was destroyed during ]. A replica of the statue of Kant that in German times stood in front of the main ] building was donated by a German entity in the early 1990s and placed in the same grounds. After ] of ]'s German population at the end of ], the University of Königsberg where Kant taught was replaced by the Russian-language Kaliningrad State University, which appropriated the campus and surviving buildings. In 2005, the university was renamed Immanuel Kant State University of Russia.<ref>{{cite journal |last=Zieliński |first=Miłosz J. |date=2018 |title=Kant's Future: Debates about the Identity of Kaliningrad Oblast |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/26644305 |journal=Slavic Review |volume=77 |issue=4 |pages=937–956 |doi=10.1017/slr.2018.291 |jstor=26644305 |issn=0037-6779}}</ref> The name change, which was considered a politically-charged issue due to the residents having mixed feelings about its German past,<ref>{{cite news |date=2 July 2005 |title=Kaliningrad Struggles With German Legacy |url=https://www.dw.com/en/kaliningrad-struggles-with-german-legacy/a-1635700 |access-date=23 April 2024 |work=DW News }}</ref> was announced at a ceremony attended by Russian president ] and German chancellor ],<!--http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/33684/photos--><ref>{{cite news |last=Dempsey |first=Judy |date=1 July 2005 |title=Russian enclave lands in diplomatic donnybrook |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/01/world/europe/russian-enclave-lands-in-diplomatic-donnybrook.html |access-date=23 April 2024 |work=The New York Times |issn=0362-4331}}</ref><ref>{{cite news |date=3 July 2005 |title=Iran the Topic in Baltic Sea Meeting |url=https://www.dw.com/en/iran-the-topic-in-baltic-sea-meeting/a-1637921 |access-date=23 April 2024 |agency=Agence-France Press|via=DW News}}</ref><ref>{{cite news |last=Ypi |first=Lea |date=20 April 2024 |title=Kant and the case for peace |url=https://www.ft.com/content/c7432bdc-3449-421e-8045-701ac16a3d07 |access-date=23 April 2024 |website=Financial Times |issn=0307-1766}}</ref> and the university formed a Kant Society, dedicated to the study of ]. In 2010, the university was again renamed to ].<ref>{{cite web |date=13 October 2010 |title=Executive order on establishing Immanuel Kant University |url=http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/9234<!--http://eng.kremlin.ru/news/1131--> |access-date=23 April 2024 |website=President of Russia}}</ref> | |||
===Example of the first formulation:=== | |||
The most popular interpretation of the first formulation is called the "universalizability test." An agent's maxim, according to Kant, is his "subjective principle of volition" — that is, what the agent believes is his reason to act. The universalizability test has five steps: | |||
==Philosophy== | |||
# Find the agent's maxim. | |||
], 1798]] | |||
# Imagine a possible world in which everyone in a similar position to the real-world agent followed that maxim. | |||
Like many of his contemporaries, Kant was greatly impressed with the scientific advances made by ] and others. This new evidence of the power of human reason called into question for many the traditional authority of politics and religion. In particular, the modern mechanistic view of the world called into question the very possibility of morality; for, if there is no agency, there cannot be any responsibility.<ref>Kant ''CPuR'' Bxxviii–Bxxx</ref>{{sfn|di Giovanni|2005}} | |||
# Decide whether any contradictions, or irrationalities, arise in the possible world as a result of following the maxim. | |||
# If a contradiction or irrationality arises, acting on that maxim is not allowed in the real world. | |||
# If there is no contradiction, then acting on that maxim is permissible, and in some instances required. | |||
The aim of Kant's critical project is to secure human autonomy, the basis of religion and morality, from this threat of mechanism—and to do so in a way that preserves the advances of modern science.{{sfn|Rohlf|2020|loc = §2.1}} In the ''Critique of Pure Reason'', Kant summarizes his philosophical concerns in the following three questions: | |||
There are two types of contradiction that Kant thinks may arise with impermissible maxims. The first type he calls "contradictions in conception." Kant uses the example of a false promise to illustrate this. His imagined agent has the maxim: "I am going to lie so that someone will lend me money, because I am in need." Kant argues that universalizing this maxim would lead to a contradiction — that is, if everyone were to follow this maxim, and were to lie whenever in need, promises would mean nothing. So it would be contradictory or irrational in the possible world to make a false promise to secure money, since your promise would simply be laughed at. Thus, acting on such a maxim in the real world is impermissible, which means we have a duty not to make false promises just to satisfy our needs. Incidentally, Kant believed that any maxim involving lying would lead to a contradiction, leading to his commitment to the view that we have a perfect (i.e. inviolable) duty not to lie. | |||
# What can I know? | |||
# What should I do? | |||
# What may I hope?<ref>Kant, ''CPuR'' A804–05/B833</ref> | |||
The '']'' focuses upon the first question and opens a conceptual space for an answer to the second question. It argues that even though we cannot strictly ''know'' that we are free, we can—and for practical purposes, must—''think'' of ourselves as free. In Kant's own words, "I had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith."<ref>Kant, ''CPuR'' Bxxx</ref> Our rational faith in morality is further developed in the '']'' and the '']''.{{sfn|Guyer|2014|pp=7–8}}{{sfn|Jankowiak|2023}} | |||
The '']'' argues we may ''rationally'' hope for the harmonious unity of the theoretical and practical domains treated in the first two ''Critiques'' on the basis, not only of its conceptual possibility, but also on the basis of our affective experience of natural beauty and, more generally, the organization of the natural world.{{sfn|Guyer|2014|pp=6–8}} In '']'', Kant endeavors to complete his answer to this third question.<ref>di Giovanni, George. (1996) "Translator's Introduction", In ''Religion and Rational Theology''. Cambridge University Press. p.49, citing Kant in correspondence with Stäudlin.</ref> | |||
The second type of contradiction Kant calls "contradictions in will," which arise when a universalized maxim would contradict something the agent would have to will as a rational being. Kant's example involves a self-reliant person who thinks everybody should mind their own business, and thus acts on the maxim: "Don't help others." In the imagined world where this is universalized, Kant thinks that this would necessarily contradict something any rational agent must will, namely that if one is in great need and could easily be helped by another, as a rational being he would have to will that the other person help him — but this universalized maxim contradicts that, thus leading to a contradiction in will, and showing that the policy, "Don't help others" is impermissible. | |||
These works all place the active, rational human ] at the center of the cognitive and moral worlds. In brief, Kant argues that the ] itself necessarily makes a constitutive contribution to ], that this contribution is transcendental rather than psychological, and that to act autonomously is to act according to rational moral principles.{{sfn|Rohlf|2020}} | |||
===Example of the second formulation:=== | |||
If I steal a book from you, I am treating you as a means only (to obtain a book). If I ask to have your book, I am respecting your right to say no, and am thereby treating you as an end-in-yourself, not as a means to an end. However, if I only ask you to be perceived by you as a nice person and to induce you to do things for me in the future, then again I am treating you as a means only. | |||
===Kant's critical project=== | |||
Kant applied his categorical imperative to the issue of suicide in ''Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals'', writing that: | |||
{{See also|Critique of Pure Reason}} | |||
] (1758–1836)]] | |||
Kant's 1781 (revised 1787) ''Critique of Pure Reason'' has often been cited as the most significant volume of metaphysics and ] in modern philosophy.<ref>{{Cite web |last=Rohlf |first=Michael |title=Immanuel Kant |url=https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant/ |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20191114014720/https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant/ |archive-date=14 November 2019 |access-date=29 May 2019 |website=]}}</ref> In the first ''Critique'', and later on in other works as well, Kant frames the "general" and "real problem of pure reason" in terms of the following question: "How are synthetic judgments ''a priori'' possible?"<ref>Kant, ''CPuR'' B135</ref>{{sfn|Guyer|2014|p=51}} To understand this claim, it is necessary to define some terms. First, Kant makes a distinction between two sources of knowledge: | |||
<blockquote>f a man is reduced to despair by a series of misfortunes and feels wearied of life, but is still so far in possession of his reason that he can ask himself whether it would not be contrary to his duty to himself to take his own life, he should ask himself a question. He should inquire whether the maxim of his action could become a universal law of nature. His maxim is: From self-love I adopt it as a principle to shorten my life when its longer duration is likely to bring more evil than satisfaction. It is asked then simply whether this principle founded on self-love can become a universal law of nature. Now we see at once that a system of nature of which it should be a law to destroy life by means of the very feeling whose special nature it is to impel to the improvement of life would contradict itself, and therefore could not exist as a system of nature; hence the maxim cannot possibly exist as a universal law of nature, and consequently would be wholly inconsistent with the supreme principle of all duty.</blockquote> | |||
# Cognitions ''a priori'': "cognition independent of all experience and even of all the impressions of the senses". | |||
The theory that we have universal duties, which hold despite one's own inclinations or the desire to pursue one's own happiness instead, is known as '']''. | |||
# Cognitions ''a posteriori'': cognitions that have their sources in experience{{mdash}}that is, which are empirical.<ref>Kant, ''CPuR'' B1–3</ref> | |||
Kant is often cited as the most important source of this strand of ethical theory; in particular, of the ], also known as the theory of obligation. | |||
Second, he makes a distinction in terms of the ''form'' of knowledge: | |||
==Kant, Anthropology, and Racism== | |||
# Analytic judgements: judgements in which the predicate concept is contained in the subject concept; e.g., "All bachelors are unmarried", or "All bodies take up space". These can also be called "judgments of clarification". | |||
Kant's moral philosophy has come under criticism as his lectures on ] have been further examined. The standard account is that Kant's universalism is at times marred by incorrect empirical views of non-whites, rather than by a developed philosophical doctrine of white supremacy. | |||
# Synthetic judgements: judgements in which the predicate concept is not contained in the subject concept; e.g., "All bachelors are alone", "All swans are white", or "All bodies have weight". These can also be called "judgments of amplification".<ref>Kant, ''CPuR'' A6–8/B10–12</ref> | |||
An analytic judgement is true by nature of strictly conceptual relations. All analytic judgements are ''a priori'' since basing an analytic judgement on experience would be absurd.<ref>Kant, ''CPuR'' B11</ref> By contrast, a synthetic judgement is one the content of which includes something new in the sense that it is includes something not already contained in the subject concept. The truth or falsehood of a synthetic statement depends upon something more than what is contained in its concepts. The most obvious form of synthetic judgement is a simple empirical observation.{{sfn|Guyer|2014|pp=52–54}} | |||
Although Kant produced two writings on Anthropology (''Anthropology From a Pragmatic Point of View'', and ''On the Different Races of Man'') this is almost wholly ignored in the modern evaluation of his historical importance and philosophical attitudes. One clear reason for this "voluntary omission" is the racism contained in his writing in this field: | |||
Philosophers such as ] believed that these were the only possible kinds of human reason and investigation, which Hume called "relations of ideas" and "matters of fact".<ref>Hume, David. ''An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding''. Section 4; Part 1.</ref> Establishing the synthetic ''a priori'' as a third mode of knowledge would allow Kant to push back against Hume's skepticism about such matters as causation and metaphysical knowledge more generally. This is because, unlike ''a posteriori'' cognition, ''a priori'' cognition has "true or strict ... universality" and includes a claim of "necessity".<ref>Kant, ''CPuR'' B3–4</ref>{{sfn|Guyer|2014|pp=52–54}} Kant himself regards it as uncontroversial that we do have synthetic ''a priori'' knowledge{{mdash}}most obviously, that of mathematics. That 7 + 5 = 12, he claims, is a result not contained in the concepts of seven, five, and the addition operation.<ref>Kant, ''CPuR'' B14–17</ref> Yet, although he considers the possibility of such knowledge to be obvious, Kant nevertheless assumes the burden of providing a philosophical proof that we have ''a priori'' knowledge in mathematics, the natural sciences, and metaphysics. It is the twofold aim of the ''Critique'' both ''to prove'' and ''to explain'' the possibility of this knowledge.{{sfn|Guyer|2014|p=55}} Kant says "There are two stems of human cognition, which may perhaps arise from a common but to us unknown root, namely sensibility and understanding, through the first of which objects are ''given'' to us, but through the second of which they are ''thought''."<ref>Kant, ''CPuR'' A15/B29, emphases added</ref> | |||
::''The Negroes of Africa do not have a feeling of nature that rises above the mediocre. Mr. Hume invites anyone to quote a single example of a Negro who has exhibited talents. He asserts that among the hundred thousands of blacks who have been seduced away from their own countries, although very many of them have been set free, yet not a single one has ever been found that has performed anything great whether in art or science or in any other laudable subject; but among the whites, people constantly rise up from the lowest rabble and acquire esteem through their superior gifts.'' (see "Akademieausgabe von Immanuel Kants Gesammelten Werken"; Book II: "Precritical Writings II"; 1757-1777; "Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime", page 253, lines 1 to 10; published on http://www.ikp.uni-bonn.de/cgi-bin/Kant/lade.pl?1&/volltext/volltext.htm) | |||
Kant's term for the object of sensibility is intuition, and his term for the object of the understanding is concept. In general terms, the former is a non-discursive representation of a ''particular'' object, and the latter is a discursive (or mediate) representation of a ''general type'' of object.{{sfn|Guyer|2014|pp=32, 61}} The conditions of possible experience require both intuitions and concepts, that is, the affection of the receptive sensibility and the actively synthesizing power of the understanding.{{sfn|Rohlf|2020|loc=§2.12}}{{efn|More technically, Kant puts his general point that all genuine knowledge requires both sensory input and intellectual organization by saying that all knowledge requires both "intuitions" and "concepts" (e.g., A 50 / B 74). Intuitions and concepts are two different species of the genus "representation" (''Vorstellung''), Kant's most general term for any cognitive state (see A 320 / B 376–7). At the outset of the "Transcendental Aesthetic", Kant states that an "intuition" is our most direct or "immediate" kind of representation of objects, in contrast to a "concept" which always represents an object "through a detour (''indirecte'')"{{mdash}}that is, merely by some "mark" or property that the object has (A 19 / B 33). In his logic textbook, Kant defines an intuition as a "''singular'' representation"{{mdash}}that is, one that represents a particular object{{mdash}}while a concept is always a "''universal'' (''repraesentation per notas communes'')", which represents properties common to many objects (''Logic'', §1, 9:91).{{sfn|Guyer|2014|pp=60–61}}}} Thus the statement: "Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind."<ref>Kant, ''CPuR'' A51/B75</ref> Kant's basic strategy in the first half of his book will be to argue that some intuitions and concepts are pure{{mdash}}that is, are contributed entirely by the mind, independent of anything empirical. Knowledge generated on this basis, under certain conditions, can be synthetic ''a priori''. This insight is known as Kant's "Copernican revolution", because, just as Copernicus advanced astronomy by way of a radical shift in perspective, so Kant here claims do the same for metaphysics.<ref>Kant, ''CPuR'' Bxvi–xviii</ref>{{sfn|Rohlf|2020|loc=§2.2}} The second half of the ''Critique'' is the explicitly ''critical'' part. In this "transcendental dialectic", Kant argues that many of the claims of traditional rationalist metaphysics violate the criteria he claims to establish in the first, "constructive" part of his book.{{sfn|Jankowiak|2023|loc=2(g)}}{{sfn|Guyer|2014|loc=ch. 4}} As Kant observes, however, "human reason, without being moved by the mere vanity of knowing it all, inexorably pushes on, driven by its own need to such questions that cannot be answered by any experiential use of reason".<ref>Kant, ''CPuR'' B21</ref> It is the project of "the critique of pure reason" to establish the limits as to just how far reason may legitimately so proceed.<ref>Kant, ''CPuR'' Axi–xii</ref> | |||
==Further reading== | |||
=== Doctrine of transcendental idealism === | |||
Any suggestion of further reading on Kant is doomed by the fact that his work has dominated philosophy like no other figure after him. Nevertheless, several guideposts can be made out. In Germany, the most important contemporary interpreter of Kant and the movement of German Idealism which he began is Dieter Henrich, who has some work available in English. P.F. Strawson's "The Bounds of Sense" (1969) largely determined the contemporary reception of Kant in England and America, but his positions have been challenged by a number of recent thinkers including Henry Allison, Paul Guyer, Robert Pippin, Terry Pinkard, and Béatrice Longuenesse. This body of work has begun to lessen the divide between academic interpretations of Kant in the English speaking world and in Europe. John Rawls' ''Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy,'' is particularly useful in its investigation of Kant's moral philosophy within the vicissitudes of ethical systems from ] to ] to ]. More recently, Gary Banham has published a key interpretation of Kant's practical philosophy that has corrected exclusive focus on the categorical imperative in favour of an inclusive comprehension of right and virtue. John McDowell is perhaps the most important contemporary analytic philosopher who explicitly builds upon Kantian themes. Howard Caygill's dictionary of Kantian terms is an excellent guide to the overall terrain of the influence and nature of Kant's concepts. | |||
{{See also | Transcendental idealism}} | |||
The section of the ''Critique'' entitled "The transcendental aesthetic" introduces Kant's famous metaphysics of ]. Something is "transcendental" if it is a necessary condition for the possibility of experience, and "idealism" denotes some form of mind-dependence that must be further specified. The correct interpretation of Kant's own specification remains controversial.{{sfn|Jankowiak|2023|loc= §2(d)}} The metaphysical thesis then states that human beings only experience and know phenomenal appearances, not independent things-in-themselves, because space and time are nothing but the subjective forms of intuition that we ourselves contribute to experience.{{sfn|Rohlf|2020|loc=§3}}<ref>Kant ''CPuR'' A43/B59–60, A369</ref> Nevertheless, although Kant says that space and time are "transcendentally ideal"—the ''pure forms'' of human sensibility, rather than part of nature or reality as it exists in-itself—he also claims that they are "empirically real", by which he means "that 'everything that can come before us externally as an object' is in both space and time, and that our internal intuitions of ourselves are in time".<ref>Kant ''CPuR'' A28/B44, A34–35/B51–51</ref>{{sfn|Rohlf|2020|loc=§3}} However Kant's doctrine is interpreted, he wished to distinguish his position from the ] of ].{{sfn|Stang|2022|loc=§2.3}} | |||
], although critical of many of Kant's arguments in this section, writes of the "Transcendental Aesthetic" that it "not only lays the first stone in Kant's constructive theory of knowledge; it also lays the foundation for both his critique and his reconstruction of traditional metaphysics. It argues that all genuine knowledge requires a sensory component, and thus that metaphysical claims that transcend the possibility of sensory confirmation can never amount to knowledge."{{sfn|Guyer|2014|p=60}} | |||
Allison, Henry. ''Kant’s Transcendental Idealism.'' Yale University Press, 2004. | |||
====Interpretive disagreements==== | |||
Banham, Gary ''Kant's Practical Philosophy: From Critique to Doctrine'' Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. | |||
One interpretation, known as the "two-world" interpretation, regards Kant's position as a statement of epistemological limitation, meaning that we are not able to transcend the bounds of our own mind, and therefore cannot access the "]". On this particular view, the thing-in-itself is not numerically identical to the phenomenal empirical object.<ref>{{cite book |last=Allison |first=Henry E. |title=Kant's Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense |year=2004 |publisher=Yale University Press |isbn=978-0300102666 |pages=25–28}}</ref> Kant also spoke, however, of the thing-in-itself or ''transcendent object'' as a product of the (human) understanding as it attempts to conceive of objects in abstraction from the conditions of sensibility. Following this line of thought, a different interpretation argues that the thing-in-itself does not represent a separate ontological domain but simply a way of considering objects by means of the understanding alone; this is known as the "two-aspect" view.{{sfn|Rohlf|2020|loc = §§3.1–3.2}}{{sfn|Stang|2022|loc = §§4–5}} On this alternative view, the same objects to which we attribute empirical properties like color, size, and shape are also, when considered as they are in themselves, the things-in-themselves, otherwise inaccessible to human knowledge.<ref>{{cite book |last=Langton |first=Rae |title=Kantian Humility: Our Ignorance of Things in Themselves |year=1998 |publisher=Oxford University Press |isbn=9780199243174|pages=105–107}}</ref> | |||
===Kant's theory of judgment=== | |||
Caygill, Howard ''A Kant Dictionary'' Blackwell, 1995. | |||
{{See also|Category (Kant)}} | |||
], Brazil]] | |||
Following the "Transcendental Analytic" is the "Transcendental Logic". Whereas the former was concerned with the contributions of the sensibility, the latter is concerned, first, with the contributions of the understanding ("Transcendental Analytic") and, second, with the faculty of ''reason'' as the source of both metaphysical errors and genuine regulatory principles ("Transcendental Dialectic"). The "Transcendental Analytic" is further divided into two sections. The first, "Analytic of Concepts", is concerned with establishing the universality and necessity of the ''pure'' concepts of the understanding (i.e., the categories). This section contains Kant's famous "transcendental deduction". The second, "Analytic of Principles", is concerned with the application of those pure concepts in ''empirical'' judgments. This second section is longer than the first and is further divided into many sub-sections.{{sfn|Guyer|Wood|1998|pp=4–13}} | |||
Guyer, Paul. ''The Cambridge Companion to Kant.'' Cambridge University Press, 1992 | |||
====Transcendental deduction of the categories of the understanding==== | |||
Henrich, Dieter. ''The Unity of Reason: Essays on Kant’s Philosophy.'' Harvard University Press, 1994. | |||
The "Analytic of Concepts" argues for the universal and necessary validity of the pure concepts of the understanding, or the categories, for instance, the concepts of substance and causation. These twelve basic categories define what it is to be a ''thing in general''{{mdash}}that is, they articulate the necessary conditions according to which something is a possible object of experience. These, in conjunction with the ''a priori'' forms of intuition, are the basis of all synthetic ''a priori'' cognition. According to ] and ], "Kant's idea is that just as there are certain essential features of all judgments, so there must be certain corresponding ways in which we form the concepts of objects so that judgments may be about objects."{{sfn|Guyer|Wood|1998|p=8}} | |||
Kant provides two central lines of argumentation in support of his claims about the categories. The first, known as the "metaphysical deduction", proceeds analytically from a table of the Aristotelian logical functions of judgment. As Kant was aware, this assumes precisely what the skeptic rejects, namely, the existence of synthetic ''a priori'' cognition. For this reason, Kant also supplies a synthetic argument that does not depend upon the assumption in dispute.{{sfn|Guyer|2014|pp=89–90}} | |||
Kuehn, Manfred. ''Kant: A Biography.'' Cambridge University Press, 2001. | |||
This argument, provided under the heading "Transcendental Deduction of the Pure Concepts of the Understanding", is widely considered to be both the most important and the most difficult of Kant's arguments in the ''Critique''. Kant himself said that it is the one that cost him the most labor.<ref>Kant, ''CPuR'' Axi</ref> Frustrated by its confused reception in the first edition of his book, he rewrote it entirely for the second edition.{{sfn|Jankowiak|2023|loc= §2(e)}}{{sfn|Rohlf|2020|loc = §4}} | |||
Korsgaard, Christine. ''Creating the Kingdom of Ends.'' Cambridge, 1996. | |||
The "Transcendental Deduction" gives Kant's argument that these pure concepts apply universally and necessarily to the objects that are given in experience. According to Guyer and Wood, "He centers his argument on the premise that our experience can be ascribed to a single identical subject, via what he calls the 'transcendental unity of apperception,' only if the elements of experience given in intuition are synthetically combined so as to present us with objects that are thought through the categories."{{sfn|Guyer|Wood|1998|p=9}} | |||
Longuenesse, Béatrice. ''Kant and the Capacity to Judge.'' Princeton University Press, 1998. | |||
Kant's principle of apperception is that "The I think must be able to accompany all my representations; for otherwise something would be represented in me that could not be thought at all, which is as much as to say that the representation would either be impossible or else at least would be nothing for me."<ref>Kant, ''CPuR'' B131-32</ref> The ''necessary'' possibility of the self-ascription of the representations of self-consciousness, identical to itself through time, is an ''a priori'' conceptual truth that cannot be based on experience.{{sfn|Rohlf|2020|loc = §4.1}} This is only a bare sketch of one of the arguments that Kant presents. | |||
McDowell, John. ''Mind and World.'' Harvard University Press, 1994. | |||
====Principles of pure understanding==== | |||
Pippin, Robert. ''Idealism as Modernism.'' Cambridge University Press, 1996. | |||
Kant's deduction of the categories in the "Analytic of Concepts", if successful, demonstrates its claims about the categories only in an abstract way. The task of the "Analytic of Principles" is to show both ''that'' they must universally apply to objects given in actual experience (i.e., manifolds of intuition) and ''how'' it is they do so.{{sfn|Guyer|Wood|1998|pp=9–10}} In the first book<!--????--> of this section<!--????--> on the "]", Kant connects each of the purely logical categories of the understanding to the temporality of intuition to show that, although non-empirical, they do have purchase upon the objects of experience. The second book continues this line of argument in four chapters, each associated with one of the category groupings. In some cases, it adds a connection to the spatial dimension of intuition to the categories it analyzes.{{sfn|Guyer|Wood|1998|pp=10–11}} The fourth chapter of this section, "The Analogies of Experience", marks a shift from "mathematical" to "dynamical" principles, that is, to those that deal with relations among objects. Some commentators consider this the most significant section of the ''Critique''.{{sfn|Guyer|Wood|1998|p=11}} The analogies are three in number: | |||
# ''Principle of persistence of substance'': Kant is here concerned with the general conditions of determining time-relations among the objects of experience. He argues that the unity of time implies that "all change must consist in the alteration of states in an underlying substance, whose existence and quantity must be unchangeable or conserved."<ref>see Kant, ''CPuR'' A182–26/B224–36</ref> | |||
Pinkard, Terry. ''German philosophy, 1760-1860: The Legacy of Idealism.'' Cambridge, 2002. | |||
# ''Principle of temporal succession according to the law of causality'': Here Kant argues that "we can make determinate judgments about the objective succession of events, as contrasted to merely subjective successions of representations, only if every objective alteration follows a necessary rule of succession, or a causal law." This is Kant's most direct rejoinder to ].<ref>see Kant, ''CPuR'' A186–211/B232–56</ref> | |||
# ''Principle of simultaneity according to the law of reciprocity or community'': The final analogy argues that "determinate judgments that objects (or states of substance) in different regions of space exists simultaneously are possible only if such objects stand in mutual causal relation of community or reciprocal interaction." This is Kant's rejoinder to ]'s thesis in the '']''.<ref>see Kant, ''CPuR'' A211-15/B256-62</ref>{{sfn|Guyer|Wood|1998|pp=11–12}} | |||
The fourth section of this chapter, which is not an analogy, deals with the empirical use of the modal categories. That was the end of the chapter in the A edition of the ''Critique''. The B edition includes one more short section, "The Refutation of Idealism". In this section, by analysis of the concept of self-consciousness, Kant argues that his transcendental idealism is a "critical" or "formal" idealism that does not deny the existence of reality apart from our subjective representations.{{sfn|Guyer|Wood|1998|p=12}} The final chapter of "The Analytic of Principles" distinguishes ''phenomena'', of which we can have genuine knowledge, from ''noumena'', a term which refers to objects of pure thought that we cannot know, but to which we may still refer "in a negative sense".{{sfn|Guyer|Wood|1998|pp=12–13}} An Appendix to the section further develops Kant's criticism of Leibnizian-Wolffian rationalism by arguing that its "dogmatic" metaphysics confuses the "mere features of concepts through which we think things ... features of the objects themselves". Against this, Kant reasserts his own insistence upon the necessity of a sensible component in all genuine knowledge.{{sfn|Guyer|Wood|1998|p=13}} | |||
Rawls, John. ''Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy. '' Cambridge, 2000. | |||
===Critique of metaphysics=== | |||
Strawson, P.F. ''The Bounds of Sense: an essay on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.'' Routledge, 1989. | |||
The second of the two Divisions of "The Transcendental Logic", "The Transcendental Dialectic", contains the "negative" portion of Kant's ''Critique'', which builds upon the "positive" arguments of the preceding "Transcendental Analytic" to expose the limits of metaphysical speculation. In particular, it is concerned to demonstrate as spurious the efforts of reason to arrive at knowledge independent of sensibility. This endeavor, Kant argues, is doomed to failure, which he claims to demonstrate by showing that reason, unbounded by sense, is always capable of generating opposing or otherwise incompatible conclusions. Like "the light dove, in free flight cutting through the air, the resistance of which it feels", reason "could get the idea that it could do even better in airless space".<ref>Kant, ''CPuR'' A5/B8</ref> Against this, Kant claims that, absent epistemic friction, there can be no knowledge. Nevertheless, Kant's critique is not entirely destructive. He presents the speculative excesses of traditional metaphysics as inherent in our very capacity of reason. Moreover, he argues that its products are not without some (carefully qualified) ''regulative'' value.<ref>{{cite book |last=Guyer |first=Paul |title=Kant and the Claims of Knowledge |year=1987 |publisher=Cambridge University Press |isbn=978-0521317245 |pages=52–55}}</ref> | |||
====On the concepts of pure reason==== | |||
==Works and links to texts, in English and German== | |||
Kant calls the basic concepts of metaphysics "ideas". They are different from the concepts of understanding in that they are not limited by the critical stricture limiting knowledge to the conditions of possible experience and its objects. "Transcendental illusion" is Kant's term for the tendency of reason to produce such ideas.{{sfn|Jankowiak|2023|loc= §2(g)}} Although reason has a "logical use" of simply drawing inferences from principles, in "The Transcendental Dialectic", Kant is concerned with its purportedly "real use" to arrive at conclusions by way of unchecked regressive syllogistic ratiocination.{{sfn|Guyer|Wood|1998|p=15}} The three categories of ''relation'', pursued without regard to the limits of possible experience, yield the three central ideas of traditional metaphysics: | |||
* (]) ] (''Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie Des Himmels'' ) | |||
* (]) ] | |||
* (]) ] (''Der einzig mögliche Beweisgrund zu einer Demonstration des Daseins Gottes'') | |||
* (]) ] (''Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen'') | |||
* (]) ] (''Kritik der reinen Vernunft'' ) | |||
* (]) ] (''Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?'' ) | |||
* (]) ] (''Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik'') | |||
* (]) ] (''Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht'') | |||
* (]) ] (''Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten'') | |||
* (]) ] (''Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft'') | |||
* (]) ] (''Kritik der praktischen Vernunft'' ) | |||
* (]) ] (''Kritik der Urteilskraft'' ) | |||
* (]) ] | |||
* (]) ] (''Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft'') | |||
* (]) ] (''Zum ewigen Frieden'' ) | |||
* (]) ] (''Metaphysik der Sitten'') | |||
* (]) ] (''Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht'') | |||
* (]) ] (''Der Streit der Fakultäten'' ) | |||
* (]) ] (''Logik'') | |||
* (]) ] (''Über Pädagogik'' ) | |||
* (]) ] | |||
* (More German works at ) | |||
* (More German works at ) | |||
* (More English works at ) | |||
# ''The soul'': the concept of substance as the ultimate subject; | |||
==External links== | |||
# ''The world in its entirety'': the concept of causation as a completed series; and | |||
* (many helpful links!) | |||
# ''God'': the concept of community as the common ground of all possibilities.{{sfn|Guyer|Wood|1998|p=15}} | |||
* | |||
* | |||
* | |||
* | |||
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Although Kant denies that these ideas can be objects of genuine cognition, he argues that they are the result of reason's inherent drive to unify cognition into a systematic whole.{{sfn|Jankowiak|2023|loc= §2(g)}} Leibnizian-Wolffian metaphysics was divided into four parts: ontology, psychology, cosmology, and theology. Kant replaces the first with the positive results of the first part of the ''Critique''. He proposes to replace the following three with his later doctrines of anthropology, the metaphysical foundations of natural science, and the critical postulation of human freedom and morality.{{sfn|Guyer|Wood|1998|p=14}} | |||
==See also== | |||
{{Wikiquotepar|Immanuel Kant}} | |||
====Dialectical inferences of pure reason==== | |||
{{commons|Immanuel Kant}} | |||
In the second of the two Books of "The Transcendental Dialectic", Kant undertakes to demonstrate the contradictory nature of unbounded reason. He does this by developing contradictions in each of the three metaphysical disciplines that he contends are in fact pseudosciences. This section of the ''Critique'' is long and Kant's arguments are extremely detailed. In this context, it not possible to do much more than enumerate the topics of discussion. The first chapter addresses what Kant terms the ''paralogisms''{{mdash}}i.e., false inferences{{mdash}}that pure reason makes in the metaphysical discipline of rational psychology. He argues that one cannot take the mere thought of "I" in the proposition "I think" as the proper cognition of "I" as an object. In this way, he claims to debunk various metaphysical theses about the substantiality, unity, and self-identity of the soul.{{sfn|Jankowiak|2023|loc=§2(g.i)}} The second chapter, which is the longest, takes up the topic Kant calls the '']'' of pure reason{{mdash}}that is, the contradictions of reason with itself{{mdash}}in the metaphysical discipline of rational cosmology. Originally, Kant had thought that all transcendental illusion could be analyzed in antinomic terms.{{sfn|Guyer|Wood|1998|p=16}} He presents four cases in which he claims reason is able to prove opposing theses with equal plausibility: | |||
*] | |||
*] | |||
# That "reason seems to be able to prove that the universe is both finite and infinite in space and time"; | |||
*] | |||
# that "reason seems to be able to prove that matter both is and is not infinitely divisible into ever smaller parts"; | |||
# that "reason seems to be able to prove that free will cannot be a causally efficacious part of the world (because all of nature is deterministic) and yet that it must be such a cause"; and, | |||
# that "reason seems to be able to prove that there is and there is not a necessary being (which some would identify with God)".{{sfn|Jankowiak|2023|loc= §2(g.ii)}}{{sfn|Guyer|Wood|1998|pp=16–17}} | |||
Kant further argues in each case that his doctrine of transcendental idealism is able to resolve the antinomy.{{sfn|Jankowiak|2023|loc= §2(g.ii)}} The third chapter examines fallacious arguments about God in rational theology under the heading of the "Ideal of Pure Reason". (Whereas an ''idea'' is a pure concept generated by reason, an ''ideal'' is the concept of an idea as an ''individual thing''.{{sfn|Guyer|Wood|1998|p=17}}) Here Kant addresses and claims to refute three traditional arguments for the existence of God: the ], the ], and the ] (i.e., the argument from design).{{sfn|Jankowiak|2023|loc=§2(g.iii)}} The results of the transcendental dialectic so far appear to be entirely negative. In an Appendix to this section, Kant rejects such a conclusion. The ideas of pure reason, he argues, have an important ''regulatory'' function in directing and organizing our theoretical and practical inquiry. Kant's later works elaborate upon this function at length and in detail.{{sfn|Guyer|Wood|1998|p=18}} | |||
===Moral thought=== | |||
{{Main|Kantian ethics}} | |||
Kant developed his ethics, or moral philosophy, in three works: '']'' (1785), '']'' (1788), and '']'' (1797). | |||
With regard to ], Kant argued that the source of the ] lies not in anything outside the ] subject, either in ] or given by ], but rather is only the good will itself. A good will is one that acts from duty in accordance with the universal moral law that the autonomous human being freely gives itself. This law obliges one to treat humanity{{mdash}}understood as rational agency, and represented through oneself as well as others{{mdash}}as an ] rather than (merely) as ] to other ends the individual might hold. Kant is known for his theory that all ] is grounded in what he calls the "]", which is derived from the concept of ]. He argues that the moral law is a principle of ] itself, not based on contingent facts about the world, such as what would make us happy; to act on the moral law has no other motive than "worthiness to be happy".<ref>Kant, ''CPuR'' A806/B834</ref> | |||
====Idea of freedom==== | |||
In the ''Critique of Pure Reason'', Kant distinguishes between the transcendental idea of freedom, which as a psychological concept is "mainly empirical" and refers to "whether a faculty of beginning a series of successive things or states from itself is to be assumed",<ref name="Kant, CPuR A448/B467">Kant, ''CPuR'' A448/B467</ref> and the practical concept of freedom as the independence of our will from the "coercion" or "necessitation through sensuous impulses". Kant finds it a source of difficulty that the practical idea of freedom is founded on the transcendental idea of freedom,<ref>Kant, ''CPuR'' A533–34/B561–62</ref> but for the sake of practical interests uses the practical meaning, taking "no account of ... its transcendental meaning", which he feels was properly "disposed of" in the Third Antinomy, and as an element in the question of the freedom of the will is for philosophy "a real stumbling block" that has embarrassed speculative reason.<ref name="Kant, CPuR A448/B467"/> | |||
Kant calls ''practical'' "everything that is possible through freedom"; he calls the pure practical laws that are never given through sensuous conditions, but are held analogously with the universal law of causality, moral laws. Reason can give us only the "pragmatic laws of free action through the senses", but pure practical laws given by reason ''a priori'' dictate "what is to be done".<ref name="Kant, CPuR A448/B467"/><ref>Kant, ''CPuR'' A800–02/B 828–30</ref> Kant's categories of freedom function primarily as conditions for the possibility for actions (i) to be free, (ii) to be understood as free, and (iii) to be morally evaluated. For Kant, although actions as theoretical objects are constituted by means of the theoretical categories, actions as practical objects (objects of practical use of reason, and which can be good or bad) are constituted by means of the categories of freedom. Only in this way can actions, as phenomena, be a consequence of freedom, and be understood and evaluated as such.<ref>], 'Die Kategorien der Freiheit bei Kant', in ''Kant: Analysen, Probleme, Kritik'' Vol. 1, 1988, 193–220.</ref> | |||
====Categorical imperative==== | |||
Kant makes a distinction between categorical and ]s. A ''hypothetical'' imperative is one that we must obey to satisfy contingent desires. A ''categorical'' imperative binds us regardless of our desires: for example, everyone has a duty to respect others as individual ends in themselves, regardless of circumstances, even though it is sometimes in our narrowly selfish interest to not do so. These imperatives are morally binding because of the categorical form of their maxims, rather than contingent facts about an agent.<ref>Driver 2007, p. 83.</ref> Unlike hypothetical imperatives, which bind us insofar as we are part of a group or society which we owe duties to, we cannot opt out of the categorical imperative, because we cannot opt out of being ]s. We owe a duty to rationality by virtue of being rational agents; therefore, rational moral principles apply to all rational agents at all times.{{sfn|Johnson|2008}} Stated in other terms, with all forms of instrumental rationality excluded from morality, "the moral law itself, Kant holds, can only be the form of lawfulness itself, because nothing else is left once all content has been rejected".{{sfn|Schneewind|2010|p=261}} | |||
Kant provides three formulations for the categorical imperative. He claims that these are necessarily equivalent, as all being expressions of the pure universality of the moral law as such;<ref>Kant, ''G''. 4:420–421, 436.</ref> many scholars are not convinced.<ref>Wood, Allen. (2017) ''Formulas of the Moral Law''. Cambridge University Press, pp. 74–78</ref> The formulas are as follows: | |||
* ''Formula of Universal Law'': | |||
**"Act only in accordance with that maxim through which you at the same time can will that it become a universal law";<ref name="Kant, G 4:421">Kant, ''G'' 4:421</ref> alternatively, | |||
***''Formula of the Law of Nature'': "So act, as if the maxim of your action were to become through your will a universal law of nature."<ref name="Kant, G 4:421"/> | |||
* ''Formula of Humanity as End in Itself'': | |||
**"So act that you use humanity, as much in your own person as in the person of every other, always at the same time as an end and never merely as a means".<ref>Kant, ''G'' 4:429</ref> | |||
* ''Formula of Autonomy'': | |||
**"the idea of the will of every rational being as a will giving universal law",<ref>Kant, ''G'' 4:431; cf. 4:432</ref> or "Not to choose otherwise than so that the maxims of one's choice are at the same time comprehended with it in the same volition as universal law";<ref>Kant, ''G'' 4:440; cf. 4:432, 434, 438</ref> alternatively, | |||
***''Formula of the Realm of Ends'': "Act in accordance with maxims of a universally legislative member for a merely possible realm of ends."<ref>Kant, ''G'' 4:439; cf. 4:433, 437–439</ref><ref>Wood, Allen. (2017) ''Formulas of the Moral Law''. Cambridge University Press, p.6</ref> | |||
Kant defines ''maxim'' as a "subjective principle of volition", which is distinguished from an "objective principle or 'practical law.{{'"}} While "the latter is valid for every rational being and is a 'principle according to which they ought to act' a maxim 'contains the practical rule which reason determines in accordance with the conditions of the subject (often their ignorance or inclinations) and is thus the principle according to which the subject does act.{{'"}}<ref>Caygill, Howard. (1995) ''A Kant Dictionary''. Blackwell Publishing, p. 289, citing ''GMM''.</ref> | |||
Maxims fail to qualify as practical laws if they produce a contradiction in conception or a contradiction in the will when universalized. A contradiction in conception happens when, if a maxim were to be universalized, it ceases to make sense, because the "maxim would necessarily destroy itself as soon as it was made a universal law".<ref>Kant, ''G'' 4:403.</ref> For example, if the maxim 'It is permissible to break promises' was universalized, no one would trust any promises made, so the idea of a promise would become meaningless; the maxim would be ] because, when it is universalized, promises cease to be meaningful. The maxim is not moral because it is logically impossible to universalize{{mdash}}that is, we could not conceive of a world where this maxim was universalized.<ref>Driver 2007, p. 88.</ref> A maxim can also be immoral if it creates a contradiction in the will when universalized. This does not mean a logical contradiction, but that universalizing the maxim leads to a state of affairs that no ''rational'' being would desire. | |||
===="The Doctrine of Virtue"==== | |||
As Kant explains in the 1785 '']'' and as its title directly indicates, that text is "nothing more than the search for and establishment of the ''supreme principle of morality''".<ref>Kant, ''GMM'' 4:392.</ref> His promised ''Metaphysics of Morals'' was much delayed and did not appear until its two parts, "The Doctrine of Right" and "The Doctrine of Virtue", were published separately in 1797 and 1798.<ref>Gregor, Mary J. (1996) "Translator's note on the text of The metaphysics of morals". In ''Practical Philosophy''. The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant, p. 355.</ref> The first deals with political philosophy, the second with ethics. "The Doctrine of Virtue" provides "a very different account of ordinary moral reasoning" than the one suggested by the ''Groundwork''.{{sfn|Wood|2006|p=68}} It is concerned with ''duties of virtue'' or "ends that are at the same time duties".<ref>Kant, ''MM''. 6:382–391.</ref> It is here, in the domain of ethics, that the greatest innovation by ''The Metaphysics of Morals'' is to be found. According to Kant's account, "ordinary moral reasoning is fundamentally teleological{{mdash}}it is reasoning about what ends we are constrained by morality to pursue, and the priorities among these ends we are required to observe".{{sfn|Wood|2006|p=69}} | |||
<blockquote>There are two sorts of ends that it is our duty to have: our own perfection and the happiness of others (''MS'' 6:385). "Perfection" includes both our natural perfection (the development of our talents, skills, and capacities of understanding) and moral perfection (our virtuous disposition) (''MS'' 6:387). A person's "happiness" is the greatest rational whole of the ends the person set for the sake of her<!--Kant, Wood????--> own satisfaction (''MS'' 6:387–388).{{sfn|Wood|2006|p=70}}</blockquote> | |||
Kant's elaboration of this teleological doctrine offers up a moral theory very different from the one typically attributed to him on the basis of his foundational works alone. | |||
===Political philosophy=== | |||
{{Main|Political philosophy of Immanuel Kant}} | |||
{{Liberalism sidebar}} | |||
{{republicanism sidebar}} | |||
In ''Towards Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Project'', Kant listed several conditions that he thought necessary for ending wars and creating a lasting peace. They included a world of constitutional republics.<ref>Kant, ''PP'' 8:349–353</ref> His ] theory was extended in the ''Doctrine of Right'', the first part of the '']'' (1797).<ref>Manfred Riedel, ''Between Tradition and Revolution: The Hegelian Transformation of Political Philosophy'', Cambridge 1984</ref> Kant believed that ] leads to the ultimate world of republican states at peace, but his theory was not pragmatic. The process was described in ''Perpetual Peace'' as natural rather than rational: | |||
{{blockquote|What affords this ''guarantee'' (surety) is nothing less than the great artist ''nature'' (''natura daedala rerum'') from whose mechanical course purposiveness shines forth visibly, letting concord arise by means of the discord between human beings even against their will; and for this reason nature, regarded as necessitation by a cause the laws of whose operation are unknown to us, is called ''fate'', but if we consider its purposiveness in the course of the world as the profound wisdom of a higher cause directed to the objective final end of the human race and predetermining this course of the world, it is called ''providence''.<ref>Kant, ''PP'' 8:360–362</ref>}} | |||
Kant's political thought can be summarized as republican government and international organization: "In more characteristically Kantian terms, it is doctrine of the state based upon the law ('']'') and of eternal peace. Indeed, in each of these formulations, both terms express the same idea: that of legal constitution or of 'peace through law.{{'"}}<ref>Hassner, Pierre. "Immanuel Kant", in ''History of Political Philosophy'', edited by Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey, The University of Chicago Press, 1987, pp. 581–582</ref> "Kant's political philosophy, being essentially a legal doctrine, rejects by definition the opposition between moral education and the play of passions as alternate foundations for social life. The state is defined as the union of men under law. The state rightly so called is constituted by laws which are necessary a priori because they flow from the very concept of law. A regime can be judged by no other criteria nor be assigned any other functions, than those proper to the lawful order as such."<ref>Hassner, Pierre. "Immanuel Kant", in ''History of Political Philosophy'', edited by Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey, The University of Chicago Press, 1987, p. 603</ref> | |||
Kant opposed "democracy", which at his time meant ], believing that majority rule posed a threat to individual liberty. He stated that "''democracy'' in the strict sense of the word is necessarily a ''despotism'' because it establishes an executive power in which all decide for and, if need be, against one (who thus does not agree), so that all, who are nevertheless not all, decide; and this is a contradiction of the general will with itself and with freedom."<ref>Kant, ''PP'' 8:352</ref> | |||
As with most writers at the time, Kant distinguished three forms of government{{mdash}}namely, democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy{{mdash}}with ] as the most ideal form of it.<ref>Kant, ''PP'' 8:352</ref> He believed in ]an ideals and forms of governance, and ] brought on by them.<ref>Kant, ''PP'' 8:349-8:353</ref> Although Kant published this as a "popular piece", ] points out that two years later, in ''The Metaphysics of Morals'', Kant claims to demonstrate ''systematically'' that "establishing universal and lasting peace constitutes not merely a part of the doctrine of right, but rather the entire final end of the doctrine of right within the limits of mere reason".<ref>Kant, ''MM'' 6:355</ref><ref>Gregor, Mary J. "Introduction", in ''Practical Philosophy''. Cambridge University Press, p. 313</ref> | |||
''The Doctrine of Right'', published in 1797, contains Kant's most mature and systematic contribution to political philosophy. It addresses duties according to law, which are "concerned only with protecting the external freedom of individuals" and indifferent to incentives. Although there is a moral duty "to limit ourselves to actions that are right, that duty is not part of itself".{{sfn|Wood|2006|p=68}} Its basic political idea is that "each person's entitlement to be his or her own master is only consistent with the entitlements of others if public legal institutions are in place".<ref>Ripstein, Arthur. (2009) ''Force and Freedom: Kant's Legal and Political Philosophy''. Harvard University Press, p. 9.</ref> He formulates the universal principle of right as: | |||
{{Blockquote|text=Any action is ''right'' if it can coexist with everyone's freedom in accordance with a universal law, or if on its maxim the freedom of choice of each can coexist with everyone's freedom in accordance with a universal law. (''MS'' 6:230).{{sfn|Wood|2006|p=68}}}} | |||
===Religious writings=== | |||
{{Main|Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason}} | |||
Starting in the 20th century, commentators tended to see Kant as having a strained relationship with religion, although in the nineteenth century this had not been the prevalent view. ], whose letters helped make Kant famous, wrote: "I believe that I may infer without reservation that the interest of religion, and of Christianity in particular, accords completely with the result of the Critique of Reason."<ref>Karl Leonhard Reinhold, ''Letters on the Kantian Philosophy'' (1786), 3rd Letter</ref> According to ], who wrote one of the first commentaries on Kant: "And does not this system itself cohere most splendidly with the Christian religion? Do not the divinity and beneficence of the latter become all the more evident?"<ref>Johann Schultz, ''Exposition of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason'' (1784), 141.</ref> The reason for these views was Kant's moral theology and the widespread belief that his philosophy was the great antithesis to ], which was widely seen as a form of sophisticated pantheism or even atheism. As Kant's philosophy disregarded the possibility of arguing for God through pure reason alone, for the same reasons it also disregarded the possibility of arguing against God through pure reason alone. | |||
Kant directs his strongest criticisms of the organization and practices of religious organizations at those that encourage what he sees as a religion of counterfeit service to God.<ref>Kant, ''RBMR'' Part IV, First part, First section </ref> Among the major targets of his criticism are external ritual, superstition, and a hierarchical church order. He sees these as efforts to make oneself pleasing to God in ways other than conscientious adherence to the principle of moral rightness in choosing and acting upon one's maxims. Kant's criticisms on these matters, along with his rejection of certain theoretical proofs for the existence of God that were grounded in pure reason (particularly the ]) and his philosophical commentary on some Christian doctrines, have resulted in interpretations that see Kant as hostile to religion in general and to Christianity in particular.<ref>E.g., Walsh, W. H., 1967, "Kant, Immanuel: Philosophy of Religion", ''The Encyclopedia of Philosophy'', Volume Four, Paul Edwards (ed.), New York: Macmillan Publishing Co. Inc. & The Free Press, 322.</ref> Other interpreters, nevertheless, consider that Kant was trying to mark off defensible from indefensible Christian belief.<ref>{{cite encyclopedia|last1=Pasternack|first1=Lawrence|last2=Rossi|first2=Philip|editor-last=Zalta|editor-first=Edward N.|url=http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-religion/|title=Kant's Philosophy of Religion|encyclopedia=Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy|publisher=Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University|edition=Fall 2014|access-date=18 October 2019|archive-date=9 July 2010|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100709212423/http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-religion/|url-status=live}}</ref> | |||
Regarding Kant's conception of religion, some critics have argued that he was sympathetic to deism.<ref>For example Peter Byrne, who wrote about Kant's relationship with deism. Byrne, Peter (2007), ''Kant on God'', London: Ashgate, p. 159.</ref> Other critics have argued that Kant's moral conception moves from deism to theism (as moral theism), for example Allen W. Wood,<ref>Wood, Allen W. (1970), ''Kant's moral religion'', London and Ithaca: Cornell University Press, p. 16.</ref> as well as Merold Westphal.<ref>Westphal, Merold (2010), ''The Emergence of Modern Philosophy of Religion'', in Taliaferro, Charles, Draper, Paul and Quinn, Philip (editors), ''A Companion to Philosophy of Religion'', Oxford: Blackwell, p. 135.</ref> As for Kant's book '']'', it was emphasized that Kant reduced religiosity to rationality, religion to morality, and Christianity to ethics;<ref>Iţu, Mircia (2004), ''Dumnezeu şi religia în concepţia lui Immanuel Kant din Religia în limitele raţiunii'', in Boboc, Alexandru and Mariş, N.I. (editors), ''Studii de istoria filosofiei universale'', volume 12, Bucharest: Romanian Academy.</ref> however, many interpreters, including Wood,<ref>Wood, Allen W. (2020), ''Kant and Religion'', Cambridge University Press, p.2.</ref> alongside Lawrence Pasternack,<ref>See e.g., Lawrence Pasternack, ''Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Kant on Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason'' (New York, Routledge, 2014), pp. 239–240.</ref> now agree with ]'s claim that a better way of reading Kant's ''Religion'' is to see him as raising morality to the status of religion.<ref>Palmquist, Stephen (1992), "Does Kant Reduce Religion to Morality?", ''Kant-Studien'' 83.2, pp. 129–148.</ref> | |||
=== Aesthetics === | |||
{{See also | Kant's teleology}} | |||
] | |||
Kant discusses the subjective nature of aesthetic qualities and experiences in '']'' (1764). Kant's contribution to ] is developed in the '']'' (1790), where he investigates the possibility and logical status of "judgments of taste". In the "Critique of Aesthetic Judgment", the first major division of the ''Critique of the Power of Judgment'', Kant used the term "aesthetic" in a manner that resembles its modern sense.<ref>Critique of Judgment in "Kant, Immanuel", '''', volume 5, Macmillan, 2006, accessed on 16 November 2024</ref> In the ''Critique of Pure Reason'', to note essential differences between judgments of taste, moral judgments, and scientific judgments, Kant abandoned the term "aesthetic" as "designating the critique of taste", noting that judgments of taste could never be "directed" by "laws ''a priori''".<ref>Kant, ''CPuR'' A22/B36</ref> After ], who wrote ''Aesthetica'' (1750–58),{{efn|Beardsley, Monroe. "History of Aesthetics". ''Encyclopedia of Philosophy''. Vol. 1, section on "Toward a unified aesthetics", p. 25, Macmillan 1973. Baumgarten coined the term "aesthetics" and expanded, clarified, and unified Wolffian aesthetic theory, but had left the ''Aesthetica'' unfinished (See also: Tonelli, Giorgio. "Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten". ''Encyclopedia of Philosophy''. Vol. 1, Macmillan 1973). In Bernard's translation of the ''Critique of Judgment'' he indicates in the notes that Kant's reference in § 15 in regard to the identification of perfection and beauty is probably a reference to Baumgarten.}} Kant was one of the first philosophers to develop and integrate aesthetic theory into a unified and comprehensive philosophical system, utilizing ideas that played an integral role throughout his philosophy.<ref>German Idealism in "History of Aesthetics" ''Encyclopedia of Philosophy''. Vol 1. Macmillan, 1973.</ref> In the chapter "Analytic of the Beautiful" in the ''Critique of the Power of Judgment'', Kant states that beauty is not a property of an artwork or natural phenomenon, but is instead consciousness of the pleasure that attends the 'free play' of the imagination and the understanding. Even though it appears that we are using reason to decide what is beautiful, the judgment is not a cognitive judgment,{{efn|Kant's general discussions of the distinction between "cognition" and "conscious of" are also given in the ''Critique of Pure Reason'' (notably A320/B376), and section V and the conclusion of section VIII of his Introduction in ''Logic''.}} "and is consequently not logical, but aesthetical".<ref>Kant, ''CPJ'' §1</ref> | |||
A pure judgement of taste is subjective since it refers to the emotional response of the subject and is based upon nothing but esteem for an object itself: it is a disinterested pleasure, and we feel that pure judgements of taste (i.e., judgements of beauty), lay claim to universal validity.<ref>Kant, ''CPJ'' §§ 20–22</ref> This universal validity is not derived from a determinate concept of beauty but from ''common sense''.<ref>Kant, ''CPJ'' §40</ref> Kant also believed that a judgment of taste shares characteristics with a moral judgment: both are disinterested, and we hold them to be universal.<ref>{{cite book |last=Guyer |first=Paul |title=Kant and the Claims of Taste |year=1997 |publisher=Harvard University Press |isbn=978-0674500358 |pages=15–20}}</ref> In the chapter "Analytic of the Sublime," Kant identifies the ] as an aesthetic quality that, like beauty, is subjective, but unlike beauty, it refers to an indeterminate relationship between the faculties of the imagination and reason. It also shares the character of moral judgments in its engagement with reason.<ref>{{cite book |last=Clewis |first=Robert R. |title=The Kantian Sublime and the Revelation of Freedom |year=2009 |publisher=Cambridge University Press |isbn=978-0521760867 |pages=48–52}}</ref> The feeling of the sublime, divided into two distinct modes (the mathematical and the dynamical sublime),<ref>Kant, ''CPJ'' §24</ref> describes two subjective moments that concern the relationship of the faculty of the imagination to reason. Some commentators argue that Kant's critical philosophy contains a third kind of the sublime, the moral sublime, which is the aesthetic response to the moral law or a representation, and a development of the "noble" sublime in Kant's theory of 1764.<ref>{{cite web |last=Clewis |first=Robert |year=2009 |title=The Kantian Sublime and the Revelation of Freedom |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge University Press |url=http://www.cambridge.org/us/knowledge/isbn/item2326741/?site_locale=en_US |access-date=8 December 2011 |archive-date=20 October 2012 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20121020224616/http://www.cambridge.org/us/knowledge/isbn/item2326741/?site_locale=en_US |url-status=live }}</ref> | |||
The mathematical sublime results from the failure of the imagination to comprehend natural objects that appear boundless and formless, or appear "absolutely great".<ref>Kant, ''CPJ'' §§23–25</ref> This imaginative failure is then recuperated through the pleasure taken in reason's assertion of the concept of infinity. In this move the faculty of reason proves itself superior to our fallible sensible self.<ref>Kant, ''CPJ'' §§25–26</ref> In the dynamical sublime, there is the sense of annihilation of the sensible self as the imagination tries to comprehend a vast might. This power of nature threatens us but through the resistance of reason to such sensible annihilation, the subject feels a pleasure and a sense of the human moral vocation. This appreciation of moral feeling through exposure to the ] helps to develop moral character. Kant developed a theory of ],<ref>Kant, ''CPJ'' §54</ref> which has been interpreted as an "incongruity" theory. He illustrated his theory of humor by telling three narrative jokes in the ''Critique of Judgment''. He thought that the physiological impact of humor is akin to that of music.<ref>{{cite journal|last=Jakobidze-Gitman|first=Alexander|title=Kant's Situated Approach to Musicking and Joking|journal=Journal of Interdisciplinary Music Studies|year=2020|volume=10|pages=17–33|doi=10.25364/24.10:2020.2}}</ref> | |||
Kant developed a distinction between an object of art as a material value subject to the conventions of society and the transcendental condition of the judgment of taste as a "refined" value in his ''Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim'' (1784). In the Fourth and Fifth Theses of that work he identified all art as the "fruits of unsociableness" due to men's "antagonism in society"<ref>Kant, ''UH'' 8:20–22</ref> and, in the Seventh Thesis, asserted that while such material property is indicative of a civilized state, only the ideal of morality and the universalization of refined value through the improvement of the mind "belongs to culture".<ref>Kant, ''UH'' 8:24–26.</ref> | |||
===Anthropology=== | |||
Kant lectured on ], the study of human nature, for twenty-three years.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Wilson |first1=Holly |title=Kant's Pragmatic Anthropology |url=https://archive.org/details/kantspragmatican00wils |url-access=limited |date=2006 |publisher=State University of New York Press |location=Albany |isbn=978-0-7914-6849-4 |page=}}</ref> His '']'' was published in 1798. Transcripts of Kant's lectures on anthropology were published for the first time in 1997 in German.<ref>Thomas Sturm, ''Kant und die Wissenschaften vom Menschen'' (Paderborn: Mentis Verlag, 2009).</ref> Kant was among the first people of his time to introduce anthropology as an intellectual area of study, long before the field gained popularity, and his texts are considered to have advanced the field. His point of view was to influence the works of later philosophers such as ] and ].<ref>{{Cite journal |last1=Piercey |first1=Robert |last2=Philosophy Documentation Center |date=2011 |title=Kant and the Problem of Hermeneutics: Heidegger and Ricoeur on the Transcendental Schematism |url=http://www.pdcnet.org/oom/service?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=&rft.imuse_id=idstudies_2011_0041_0003_0187_0202&svc_id=info:www.pdcnet.org/collection |journal=Idealistic Studies |volume=41 |issue=3 |pages=187–202 |doi=10.5840/idstudies201141315 |issn=0046-8541}}</ref> | |||
Kant was the first to suggest using a dimensionality approach to human diversity. He analyzed the nature of the ]-] ] and plotted in two dimensions "what belongs to a human being's faculty of desire": | |||
"his natural aptitude or natural predisposition" and "his temperament or sensibility".<ref>Kant ''APPV'' 7:285</ref> Cholerics were described as emotional and energetic, phlegmatics as balanced and weak, sanguines as balanced and energetic, and melancholics as emotional and weak. These two dimensions reappeared in all subsequent models of temperament and personality traits. Kant viewed anthropology in two broad categories: (1) the physiological approach, which he referred to as "what nature makes of the human being"; and (2) the pragmatic approach, which explores the things that a human "can and should make of himself".<ref>Kant ''APPV'' 7:119</ref> | |||
====Racism==== | |||
] | |||
Kant's theory of race and his prejudicial beliefs are among the most contentious areas of recent Kant scholarship.<ref name=":0">{{Cite book |title=Kant and the Concept of Race |publisher=State University of New York Press |year=2013 |isbn=978-1438443614 |editor-last=Mikkelsen |editor-first=Jon M. |location=Albany, New York |pages=12–30 |language=English}}</ref><ref name=":1">{{Cite journal |last=Zorn |first=Daniel-Pascal |title=Kant{{mdash}}a Racist? |url=https://public-history-weekly.degruyter.com/?p=17156 |journal=Public History Weekly |year=2020 |volume=2020 |issue=8 |doi=10.1515/phw-2020-17156 |s2cid=225247836 |issn=2197-6376}}</ref>{{sfn|Kleingeld|2007|pp=573–592}}<!-- <ref>{{Cite journal |last=Kleingeld |first=Pauline |date=October 2007 |title=Kant's Second Thoughts on Race |url=https://philarchive.org/rec/KLEKST |journal=Philosophical Quarterly |volume=57 |issue=229 |pages=573–592 |doi=10.1111/j.1467-9213.2007.498.x}}</ref>--> While few, if any, dispute the overt racism and chauvinism present in his work, a more contested question is the degree to which it degrades or invalidates his other contributions. His most severe critics assert that Kant intentionally manipulated science to support chattel slavery and discrimination.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Eze |first=Emmanuel |chapter=The Color of Reason: the Idea of 'Race' in Kant's Anthropology |date=1997 |url=https://philpapers.org/rec/EZETCO |title=Postcolonial African Philosophy: A Critical Reader |pages=103–140 |editor-last=Eze |editor-first=Emmanuel Chukwudi |publisher=Blackwell |access-date=20 April 2023}}</ref><ref>{{Cite journal |last=Serequeberhan |first=T. |date=1996 |title=Eurocentrism in Philosophy: the Case of Immanuel Kant |journal=The Philosophical Forum |s2cid=170547963 |language=en}}</ref><ref name=":0" /> Others acknowledge that he lived in an era of immature science, with many erroneous beliefs, some racist, all appearing decades before evolution, molecular genetics, and other sciences that today are taken for granted.<ref name=":0" /><ref name=":1" /><ref>{{Cite web |title=The Philosophy Junkie: Immanuel Kant's Racism and Sexism with Professors Lucy Allais and Helga Varden on Apple Podcasts |url=https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/immanuel-kants-racism-and-sexism-with-professors/id1512137924?i=1000496715962 |access-date=20 April 2023 |website=Apple Podcasts |language=en-US}}</ref><ref>{{Cite journal |last=Geismann |first=Georg |date=1 January 2022 |title=Why Kant Was Not a 'Racist' |url=https://elibrary.duncker-humblot.com/article/69870/why-kant-was-not-a-racist |journal=Jahrbuch für Recht und Ethik/Annual Review of Law and Ethics |volume=30 |issue=1 |pages=263–357 |doi=10.3790/jre.30.1.263 |s2cid=255676303 |issn=0944-4610}}</ref> Kant was one of the most notable Enlightenment thinkers to defend ]. Philosopher ] is unequivocal: "Kant is also seen as one of the central figures in the birth of modern 'scientific' racism. Whereas other contributors to early racial thought like Carolus Linnaeus and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach had offered only 'empirical' (scare-quotes necessary!) observation, Kant produced a full-blown ''theory'' of race."{{sfn|Mills|2017|pp=91–112|p=95}} | |||
Using the ] of ancient Greece, Kant proposed a hierarchy of racial categories including white Europeans, black Africans, and red Native Americans.<ref name=":2">{{Cite book |last=Kant |first=Immanuel |url=https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/34663347 |chapter=On the Different Races of Man |title=Race and the Enlightenment: a reader |publisher=Blackwell |year=1997 |isbn=0-631-20136-X |editor-last=Eze |editor-first=Emmanuel Chukwudi |location=Cambridge, Mass. |pages=38–49 |oclc=34663347 |orig-date=1775, 1777}}</ref> Although he was a proponent of ] for much of his career, Kant's views on race changed significantly in the last decade of his life, and he ultimately rejected racial hierarchies and European ] in '']'' (1795).{{sfn|Kleingeld|2007|pp=573–592}}{{sfn|Mills|2017|pp=91–112}}<ref name=":2" />{{efn|Kant wrote that " contain all the impulses of nature in affects and passions, all talents, all dispositions to culture and civilization and can as readily obey as govern. They are the only ones who always advance to perfection." He describes South Asians as "educated to the highest degree but only in the arts and not in the sciences". He goes on that Hindustanis can never reach the level of abstract concepts and that a "great hindustani man" is one who has "gone far in the art of deception and has much money". He states that the Hindus always stay the way they are and can never advance. About black Africans, Kant wrote that "they can be educated but only as servants, that is they allow themselves to be trained". To Kant, "the Negro can be disciplined and cultivated, but is never genuinely civilized. He falls of his own accord into savagery." Native Americans, Kant opined, "cannot be educated". He calls them unmotivated, lacking affect, passion and love, and describes them as too weak for labor, unfit for any culture, and too ] for diligence. He said that Native Americans are "far below the Negro, who undoubtedly holds the lowest of all remaining levels by which we designate the different races". Kant stated that "Americans and Blacks cannot govern themselves. They thus serve only for slaves."{{sfn|Mills|2017|pp=169–193}}{{sfn|Bowersox|2016}}}} Kant was an opponent of ], believing that whites would be "degraded" and that "fusing of races" is undesirable, for "not every race adopts the morals and customs of the Europeans". He states that "instead of assimilation, which was intended by the melting together of the various races, nature has here made a law of just the opposite".<ref>Kant ''APPV'' 7:320</ref> Kant was also an anti-Semite, believing that Jews were incapable of transcending material forces, which a moral order required. In this way, Jews are presented as the opposite of autonomous, rational Christians, and therefore incapable of being incorporated into an ethical Christian society. In his "Anthropology", Kant called the Jews "a nation of cheaters" and portrayed them as "a group that has followed not the path of transcendental freedom but that of enslavement to the material world".{{sfn|Shrage|2019}} | |||
Mills wrote that Kant has been "sanitized for public consumption", his racist works conveniently ignored.{{sfn|Mills|2017|pp=95–97}} ] stated that Kant "supplied the first scientific definition of race". ] is credited with bringing Kant's contributions to racism to light in the 1990s among Western philosophers, who he believed often glossed over this part of his life and works.{{sfn|Bouie|2018}} Pauline Kleingeld argues that, while Kant "did defend a racial hierarchy until at least the end of the 1780s", his views on race changed significantly in works published in the last decade of his life. In particular, she argues that Kant rejected past views related to racial hierarchies and the diminished rights or moral status of non-whites in '']'' (1795). This work also saw him providing extended arguments against European ], which he claimed was morally unjust and incompatible with the equal rights held by indigenous populations. Kleingeld argues that this shift in Kant's views later in life has often been forgotten or ignored in the literature on Kant's racist anthropology, and that the shift suggests a belated recognition of the fact that racial hierarchy was incompatible with a universalized moral framework.{{sfn|Kleingeld|2007|pp=573–592}} | |||
While Kant's racist rhetoric is indicative of the state of scholarship and science during the 18th century, German philosopher ] explains the risk of taking period quotations out of context. Many of Kant's most outrageous quotations are from a series of articles from 1777–1788, a public exchange among Kant, Herder, natural scientist ], and other scholars prominent in that period.<ref>{{Cite book |url=https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/861693001 |title=Kant and the Concept of Race: late eighteenth-century writings |date=2013 |others=Jon M. Mikkelsen |isbn=978-1-4619-4312-9 |editor-last=Mikkelsen |editor-first=Jon M. |location=Albany |oclc=861693001 |publisher=State University of New York Press}}</ref>{{sfn|Kuehn|2001|pp=298–301, 343–345}}<ref>cf. Kant, ''DCHR'' 8:91-106</ref> Kant asserts that all races of humankind are of the same species, challenging the position of Forster and others that the races were distinct species. While his commentary is clearly biased at times, certain extreme statements were patterned specifically to paraphrase or counter Forster and other authors.<ref name=":0" /><ref name=":1" /> By considering the full arc of Kant's scholarship, Zorn notes the progression in both his philosophical and his anthropological works, "with which he argues, against the ''zeitgeist'', for the unity of humanity".<ref name=":1" /> | |||
==Influence and legacy== | |||
], 1844. Among others, Kant and ] are honored.]] | |||
Kant's influence on Western thought has been profound.{{efn|Oliver A. Johnson claims, "With the possible exception of Plato's ''Republic'', (''Critique of Pure Reason'') is the most important philosophical book ever written." Article on Kant within the collection ''Great thinkers of the Western World'', Ian P. McGreal, Ed., HarperCollins, 1992.}} Although the basic tenets of Kant's ] (i.e., that space and time are ''a priori'' forms of human perception rather than real properties and the claim that formal logic and transcendental logic coincide) have been claimed to be falsified by modern science and logic,<ref>{{Cite book|last=Strawson|first=Peter|title=Bounds of Sense: Essay on Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason"|id={{ASIN|0415040302|country=uk}}}}</ref><ref>{{Cite web|title=Einstein on Kant|url=https://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/teaching/HPS_0410/chapters/significance_GR_geometry/Einstein_on_Kant.html#:~:text=Einstein%20wrote:,withstand%20the%20test%20of%20time.&text=However,%20if%20one%20does%20not,and%20norms%20of%20Kant%27s%20system.|access-date=2 September 2020|publisher=University of Pittsburgh|archive-date=9 August 2020|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200809030743/https://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/teaching/HPS_0410/chapters/significance_GR_geometry/Einstein_on_Kant.html#:~:text=Einstein%20wrote:,withstand%20the%20test%20of%20time.&text=However,%20if%20one%20does%20not,and%20norms%20of%20Kant%27s%20system.|url-status=live}}</ref><ref>{{Cite journal|last=Perrick|first=Michael|date=1985|title=Kant and Kripke on Necessary Empirical Truths|journal=Mind|volume=94|issue=376|pages=596–598|doi=10.1093/mind/XCIV.376.596|jstor=2254731|issn=0026-4423}}</ref> and no longer set the intellectual agenda of contemporary philosophers, Kant is credited with having innovated the way philosophical inquiry has been carried on at least up to the early nineteenth century.<!--not very long! early twentieth?--> This shift consisted of several closely related innovations that, although highly contentious in themselves, have become important in subsequent philosophy and in the social sciences broadly construed: | |||
* The human subject seen as the center of inquiry into human knowledge, such that it is impossible to philosophize about things as they exist independently of human perception or of how they are "for us";<ref>Stephen Palmquist, "The Architectonic Form of Kant's Copernican Logic", ''Metaphilosophy'' 17:4 (October 1986), pp. 266–288; revised and reprinted as Chapter III of {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120414204136/http://www.hkbu.edu.hk/~ppp/ksp1 |date=14 April 2012 }}: An architectonic interpretation of the Critical philosophy (Lanham: University Press of America, 1993).</ref> | |||
* the notion that is possible to discover and systematically explore the inherent limits of the human ability to know entirely ''a priori''; | |||
* the notion of the "categorical imperative", an assertion that people are naturally endowed with the ability and obligation toward right reason and acting. Perhaps his most famous quote is drawn from the ''Critique of Practical Reason'': "Two things fill my mind with ever new and increasing admiration and reverence ... : ''the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me''";<ref>Kant, ''CPracR'' 5:161</ref> | |||
* the concept of "conditions of possibility", as in his notion of "the conditions of possible experience"; that is, that things, knowledge, and forms of consciousness rest on prior conditions that make them possible, so that, to understand or to know them, several conditions must be understood: | |||
:* the claim that objective experience is actively constituted or constructed by the functioning of the human mind; | |||
:* the concept of moral autonomy as central to humanity; and | |||
:* the assertion of the principle that human beings should be treated as ends rather than as mere means. | |||
Kant's ideas have been incorporated into a variety of schools of thought. These include ],<ref>{{cite book |last=Beiser |first=Frederick C. |author-link=Frederick C. Beiser |title=German Idealism: The Struggle Against Subjectivism, 1781–1801 |publisher=] |date=2002 |isbn=978-0674007703 |pages=Part I}}</ref> ],<ref>{{cite book |last=McLellan |first=David |title=Marxism after Marx |publisher=Palgrave Macmillan |date=1998 |isbn=978-0333738399 |pages=22–25}}</ref> ],<ref>{{cite book |last=Kolakowski |first=Leszek |title=Positivist Philosophy: From Hume to the Vienna Circle |publisher=Penguin Books |date=1972 |isbn=0140212248 |pages=67–69}}</ref> ],<ref>{{cite book |last=Carman |first=Taylor |title=Merleau-Ponty |publisher=Routledge |date=2008 |isbn=978-0415360616 |pages=34–36}}</ref> ],<ref>{{cite book |last=Kaufmann |first=Walter |title=Existentialism: From Dostoevsky to Sartre |publisher=Meridian Books |date=1989 |isbn=978-0452009301 |pages=9–12}}</ref> ],<ref>{{cite book |last=Habermas |first=Jürgen |title=The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures |publisher=MIT Press |date=1987 |isbn=978-0745608303 |pages=109–113}}</ref> ],<ref>{{cite book |last=Dummett |first=Michael |title=Origins of Analytical Philosophy |publisher=Harvard University Press |date=1996 |isbn=978-0674644731 |pages=45–47}}</ref> ],<ref>{{cite book |last=Piaget |first=Jean |title=Structuralism |publisher=Routledge |date=2001 |isbn=978-0415262491 |pages=10–12}}</ref> ],<ref>{{cite book |last=Norris |first=Christopher |title=Deconstruction: Theory and Practice |publisher=Routledge |date=2003 |isbn=978-0415061742 |pages=40–42}}</ref> and ].<ref>{{cite book |last=Culler |first=Jonathan |title=On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism |publisher=Cornell University Press |date=2007 |isbn=978-0801479182 |pages=53–56}}</ref> | |||
===Historical influence=== | |||
], Russia. Replica by {{Interlanguage link|Harald Haacke|de}} of the original by ] was lost in 1945.]] | |||
During his own life, much critical attention was paid to Kant's thought. He influenced ], ], ], ], and ] during the 1780s and 1790s. ] was greatly influenced by Kant and helped to spread awareness of him, and of German Idealism generally, in the UK and the US. In his '']'' (1817), he credits Kant's ideas in coming to believe that the mind is not a passive, but an active agent in the apprehension of reality. Hegel was one of Kant's first major critics. In Hegel's view the entire project of setting a "transcendental subject" (i.e., human consciousness) apart from the living individual as well as from nature, history, and society was fundamentally flawed,<ref>{{Cite book|last=Hegel|first=Georg Wilhelm Friedrich|title=Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline|year=1827|location=Heidelberg|pages=14–15}}</ref> although parts of that very project could be put to good use in a new direction. Similar concerns motivated Hegel's criticisms of Kant's concept of moral autonomy, to which Hegel opposed an ethic focused on the "ethical life" of the community.{{efn|Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, ''Natural Law: The Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Law, Its Place in Moral Philosophy, and Its Relation to the Positive Sciences''. trans. T. M. Knox. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1975. Hegel's mature view and his concept of "ethical life" is elaborated in his ''Philosophy of Right''. Hegel, ''Philosophy of Right''. trans. T. M. Knox. Oxford University Press, 1967.}} In a sense, Hegel's notion of "ethical life" is meant to subsume, rather than replace, ]. And Hegel can be seen as trying to defend Kant's idea of freedom as going beyond finite "desires", by means of reason. Thus, in contrast to later critics like Nietzsche or Russell, Hegel shares some of Kant's concerns.{{efn|Robert Pippin's ''Hegel's Idealism'' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) emphasizes the continuity of Hegel's concerns with Kant's. Robert Wallace, ''Hegel's Philosophy of Reality, Freedom, and God'' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) explains how Hegel's ''Science of Logic'' defends Kant's idea of freedom as going beyond finite "inclinations", contra skeptics such as David Hume.}} | |||
Kant's thinking on religion was used in Britain by philosophers such as ]<ref>{{Cite web |last=Cody |first=David |date= |title=Carlyle: Sources and Influence |url=https://victorianweb.org/authors/carlyle/sources.html |access-date=28 July 2023 |website=The Victorian Web}}</ref> to challenge the nineteenth-century decline in religious faith. British Catholic writers, notably ] and ], followed this approach.<ref>{{cite book |last=Morse |first=David |title=The Age of Virtue: British Culture from the Restoration to Romanticism |year=2000 |publisher=Macmillan |isbn=978-0333913918 |pages=198–200}}</ref> Criticisms of Kant were common in the realist views of the new ] at that time. ] was strongly influenced by Kant's ]. Like ], ], and Fichte before him, Schopenhauer was critical of Kant's theory of the thing-in-itself. Things-in-themselves, they argued, are neither the cause of what we observe, nor are they completely beyond our access. Ever since the ''Critique of Pure Reason'', philosophers have been critical of Kant's theory of the thing-in-itself. Many have argued that, if such a thing exists beyond experience, then one cannot posit that it affects us causally, since that would entail stretching the category "causality" beyond the realm of experience.{{efn|For a review of this problem and the relevant literature see ''The Thing in Itself and the Problem of Affection'' in the revised edition of Henry Allison's ''Kant's Transcendental Idealism''.}} | |||
] stamp honoring Kant, 1926]] | |||
With the success and wide influence of Hegel's writings, Kant's own influence began to wane, but a re-examination of his ideas began in Germany in 1865 with the publication of ''Kant und die Epigonen'' by ], whose motto was "Back to Kant". There proceeded an important revival of Kant's theoretical philosophy, known as ]. Kant's notion of "critique" has been more broadly influential. The early German Romantics, especially ] in his "Athenaeum Fragments", used Kant's reflexive conception of criticism in their Romantic theory of poetry.<ref>Schlegel, Friedrich. "Athenaeum Fragments", in ''Philosophical Fragments''. Trans. Peter Firchow. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1991. See especially fragments Nos. 1, 43, 44.</ref> Also in ], ], in his classic essay "Modernist Painting", uses Kantian criticism, what Greenberg refers to as "immanent criticism", to justify the aims of ], a movement Greenberg saw as aware of the key limitation—flatness—that makes up the medium of painting.<ref>Greenberg, Clement. "Modernist Painting", in ''The Philosophy of Art'', ed. Alex Neill and Aaron Ridley, McGraw-Hill, 1995.</ref> French philosopher ] was also greatly influenced by Kant's notion of "critique" and wrote several pieces on Kant for a re-thinking of the Enlightenment as a form of "critical thought". He went so far as to classify his own philosophy as a "critical history of modernity, rooted in Kant".<ref>See "Essential Works of Foucault: 1954–1984 vol. 2: Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology". Ed. by James Faubion, Trans. Robert Hurley et al. New York City: The New Press, 1998 (2010 reprint). See "Foucault, Michel, 1926 –" entry by Maurice Florence.</ref> | |||
Kant believed that mathematical truths were forms of ] knowledge, which means they are necessary and universal, yet known through the ''a priori'' intuition of space and time, as transcendental preconditions of experience.<ref>For a discussion and qualified defense of this position, see Stephen Palmquist, "A Priori Knowledge in Perspective: (I) Mathematics, Method and Pure Intuition", ''The Review of Metaphysics'' 41:1 (September 1987), pp. 3–22.</ref> Kant's often brief remarks about ] influenced the mathematical school known as ], a movement in ] opposed to ]'s ], and ] and ]'s ].{{efn|], ''The Philosophy of Mathematics'', Dover, 1986. For an analysis of Kant's writings on mathematics see, Friedman, Michael, ''Kant and the Exact Sciences'', Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1992.}} | |||
===Influence on modern thinkers=== | |||
] postage stamp, 1974, commemorating the 250th anniversary of Kant's birth]] | |||
With his ''Perpetual Peace'', Kant is considered to have foreshadowed many of the ideas that have come to form the ], one of the main controversies in ].<ref>{{cite journal|last=Ray|first=James Lee |url=http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/ray.htm |title=Does Democracy Cause Peace?|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080217032515/http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/ray.htm |archive-date=17 February 2008|journal=Annual Review of Political Science|year=1998|volume=1|pages=27–46|doi=10.1146/annurev.polisci.1.1.27|doi-access=free}}</ref> More concretely, constructivist theorist Alexander Wendt proposed that the anarchy of the international system could evolve from the "brutish" Hobbesian anarchy understood by realist theorists, through Lockean anarchy, and ultimately a Kantian anarchy in which states would see their self-interests as inextricably linked to the well being of other states, thus transforming international politics into a far more peaceful form.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Wendt |first=Alexander |title=Social Theory of International Politics |publisher=Cambridge University Press |year=1999 |pages=chapter 6}}</ref> | |||
Prominent recent Kantians include the British philosophers ],{{efn|Strawson, P. F., ''The Bounds of Sense: An Essay on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason''. Routledge: 2004. When first published in 1966, this book forced many Anglo-American philosophers to reconsider Kant's ''Critique of Pure Reason''.}} ],<ref>{{Cite news|url=https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/14/books/onora-oneill-wins-holberg-prize.html|title=Onora O'Neill Wins Holberg Prize for Academic Research|last=Aridi|first=Sara|date=14 March 2017|work=The New York Times|access-date=9 January 2019|archive-date=9 January 2019|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190109111404/https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/14/books/onora-oneill-wins-holberg-prize.html|url-status=live}}</ref> and ],<ref>Cassam, Q. ''The Possibility of Knowledge'' Oxford: 2009</ref> and the American philosophers ]<ref>Sellars, Wilfrid, ''Science and Metaphysics: Variations on Kantian Themes''. Ridgeview Publishing Company, 1967</ref> and ].{{efn|Korsgaard, Christine. ''Creating the Kingdom of Ends''. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996.{{ISBN|978-0-521-49644-5}} ''Not a commentary, but a defense of a broadly Kantian approach to ethics''.}} Due to the influence of Strawson and Sellars, among others, there has been a renewed interest in Kant's view of the mind. Central to many debates in ] and ] is Kant's conception of the unity of consciousness.{{efn|]. ''Kant and the Mind''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. See also, Meerbote, R. "Kant's ]". In: J. C. Smith, ed. ''Historical Foundations of Cognitive Science''. Dordrecht, Holland: Reidel, 1991. Brook has an article on Kant's View of the Mind in the {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100709014732/http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-mind/ |date=9 July 2010 }}}} | |||
] and ] are two significant political and moral philosophers whose work is strongly influenced by Kant's moral philosophy.{{efn|See Habermas, J. ''Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action''. Trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1996. For Rawls see, Rawls, John. ''Theory of Justice'' Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1971. Rawls has a well-known essay on Kant's concept of good. See, Rawls, "Themes in Kant's Moral Philosophy" in ''Kant's Transcendental Deductions''. Ed. Eckart Förster. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989.}} They have argued against relativism,<ref>Habermas, J. (1994): The Unity of Reason in the Diversity of Its Voices. In: Habermas, J. (Ed.): ''Postmetaphysical Thinking. Political Essays'', Cambridge, Massachusetts: 115–148.</ref> supporting the Kantian view that universality is essential to any viable moral philosophy. ]'s study of Kant has been cited as a highly crucial part in the development of Mou's personal philosophy, namely ]. Widely regarded as the most influential Kant scholar in China, Mou's rigorous critique of Kant's philosophy{{mdash}}having translated all three of Kant's ]{{mdash}}served as an ardent attempt to reconcile Chinese and Western philosophy whilst increasing pressure to ] in China.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Palmquist |first1=Stephen |title=Cultivating Personhood: Kant and Asian Philosophy |url=https://archive.org/details/cultivatingperso00palm |url-access=limited |year= 2010 |publisher=De Gruyter, Inc. |location=Hong Kong |isbn=978-3-11-022624-9|page= |edition=}}</ref><ref>{{cite journal |last1=Wing-Cheuk |first1=Chan |title=Mou Zongsan's Transformation of Kant's Philosophy |journal=Journal of Chinese Philosophy |date=21 February 2006 |volume=33 |issue=1 |page=1 |doi=10.1111/j.1540-6253.2006.00340.x }}</ref> | |||
] commemorative coin honoring Kant, 1974]] | |||
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 influence extended to the social, behavioral, and physical sciences{{mdash}}as in the sociology of ], the psychology of ], and ].<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Balanovskiy |first1=Valentin |title=Whether jung was a kantian? |journal=Con-Textos Kantianos |year=2016 |issue=4 |pages=118–126 |doi=10.5281/zenodo.2550828 |url=https://www.researchgate.net/publication/323218719 |access-date=29 May 2020 |archive-date=20 December 2020 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20201220055819/https://www.researchgate.net/publication/323218719_Whether_jung_was_a_kantian |url-status=live }}</ref><ref>{{cite journal |last1=Balanovskiy |first1=Valentin |title=Kant and Jung on the prospects of Scientific Psychology |journal=Estudos Kantianos |year=2017 |volume=5 |issue=1 |pages=357–390 |doi=10.36311/2318-0501.2017.v5n1.26.p375 |url=https://www.researchgate.net/publication/323540339 |doi-access=free |access-date=29 May 2020 |archive-date=20 December 2020 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20201220055820/https://www.researchgate.net/publication/323540339_Kant_and_Jung_on_the_prospects_of_Scientific_Psychology |url-status=live }}</ref> Kant's work on mathematics and synthetic ''a priori'' knowledge is also cited by theoretical physicist ] as an early influence on his intellectual development, although it was one which he later criticized and rejected.<ref>Isaacson, Walter. "Einstein: His Life and Universe". p. 20.</ref> In the 2020s, there was a renewed interest in Kant's theory of mind from the point of view of ] and ].<ref>Theodora Achourioti & Michiel van Lambalgen, 'A Formalization of Kant's Transcendental Logic', ''The Review of Symbolic Logic'', 4 (2011), 254–289.</ref> | |||
==Bibliography== | |||
Unless otherwise noted, all citations are to ''The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant in English Translation'', 16 vols., ed. Guyer, Paul, and Wood, Allen W. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Citations in the article are to individual works per abbreviations in ''List of Major'' works below. | |||
* ''Theoretical Philosophy, 1755-1770''. Ed. and trans. David Walford with Ralf Meerbote. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. | |||
* ''Lectures on Logic''. Ed. and trans. J. Michael Young. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. | |||
* ''Opus postumum''. Ed. Eckart Förster, trans. Eckart Förster and Michael Rosen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993 | |||
* ''Practical Philosophy''. Ed. and trans. Mary J. Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. | |||
* ''Religion and Rational Theology''. Ed. and trans.Allen W. Wood and George di Giovanni. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996 | |||
* ''Lectures on Metaphysics''. Ed. and trans. Karl Ameriks and Steve Naragon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. | |||
* ''Lectures on Ethics''. Ed. Peter Heath and J.B. Schneewind, trans. Peter Heath. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. | |||
* ''Critique of Pure Reason''. Ed. and trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. | |||
* ''Correspondence''. Ed. and trans. Arnulf Zweig. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. | |||
* ''Critique of the Power of Judgment''. Ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. | |||
* ''Theoretical Philosophy after 1781''. Ed. Henry Allison and Peter Heath, trans. Gary Hatfield, Michael Friedman, Henry Allison, and Peter Heath. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. | |||
* ''Notes and Fragments''. Ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Curtis Bowman, Paul Guyer, and Frederick Rauscher. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. | |||
* ''Anthropology, History, and Education'', Ed. Günter Zöller and Robert B. Louden. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. | |||
* ''Lectures on Anthropology'', Ed. Allen W. Wood and Robert B. Louden Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. | |||
* ''Natural Science'', Ed. Eric Watkins. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. | |||
===List of major works=== | |||
Abbreviations used in body of article are boldface in brackets. Unless otherwise noted, pagination is to the critical ''Akademie'' edition, which can be found in the margins of the Cambridge translations. | |||
* 1749: '']'' (''Gedanken von der wahren Schätzung der lebendigen Kräfte'') | |||
* 1755: '']'' ({{lang|de|Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels}}) | |||
* 1755: ''Brief Outline of Certain Meditations on Fire'' (''Meditationum quarundam de igne succinta delineatio'' (] under ]))<ref>The thesis was submitted on 17 April 1755. "The public examination was held four weeks later on 13 May, and the degree was formally awarded on 12 June" (Eric Watkins, ''Kant: Natural Science'', Cambridge University Press, 2012, p. 309).</ref><ref>Eric Watkins (ed.), ''Kant and the Sciences'', Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 27.</ref><ref>Martin Schonfeld, ''The Philosophy of the Young Kant: The Precritical Project'', Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 74.</ref><ref>Available {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160306131152/https://korpora.zim.uni-duisburg-essen.de/kant/aa01/369.html |date=6 March 2016 }}.</ref> | |||
* 1755: ''A New Elucidation of the First Principles of Metaphysical Cognition'' (''Principiorum primorum cognitionis metaphysicae nova dilucidatio'' (]))<ref>The thesis was publicly disputed on 27 September 1755 (Kuehn 2001, p. 100).</ref>{{efn|available {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160306131856/https://korpora.zim.uni-duisburg-essen.de/kant/aa01/385.html |date=6 March 2016 }}.}} | |||
* 1756: ''The Use in Natural Philosophy of Metaphysics Combined with Geometry, Part I: Physical Monadology'' (''Metaphysicae cum geometrica iunctae usus in philosophia naturali, cuius specimen I. continet monadologiam physicam'', abbreviated as ''Monadologia Physica'' (thesis as a prerequisite of associate professorship))<ref>Kant's application for the position was unsuccessful. He defended it on 10 April 1756 (Kuehn 2001, p. 102).</ref> | |||
* 1762: '']'' (''Die falsche Spitzfindigkeit der vier syllogistischen Figuren'') | |||
* 1763: '']'' (''Der einzig mögliche Beweisgrund zu einer Demonstration des Daseins Gottes'') | |||
* 1763: ''Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy'' (''Versuch den Begriff der negativen Größen in die Weltweisheit einzuführen'') | |||
* 1764: '']'' (''Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen'') | |||
* 1764: ''Essay on the Illness of the Head'' (''Über die Krankheit des Kopfes'') | |||
* 1764: ''Inquiry Concerning the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morality'' (the ''Prize Essay'') (''Untersuchungen über die Deutlichkeit der Grundsätze der natürlichen Theologie und der Moral'') | |||
* 1766: ''Dreams of a Spirit-Seer'' (''Träume eines Geistersehers'')<ref>Available .</ref> | |||
* 1768: ''On the Ultimate Ground of the Differentiation of Regions in Space'' (''Von dem ersten Grunde des Unterschiedes der Gegenden im Raume'')<ref>Immanuel Kant, {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180716082315/https://philpapers.org/rec/KANCTU |date=16 July 2018 }}.</ref> | |||
* 1770: ''Dissertation on the Form and Principles of the Sensible and the Intelligible World'' (''De mundi sensibilis atque intelligibilis forma et principiis'' )<ref>The thesis was publicly disputed on 21 August 1770 (Kuehn 2001, p. 189).</ref><ref>Available {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200803105335/https://books.google.com/books?id=dNRKAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA123 |date=3 August 2020 }}.</ref><ref>English translation available ].</ref> | |||
* 1775: ''On the Different Races of Man'' (''Über die verschiedenen Rassen der Menschen'') | |||
* 1781: First edition of the '']'' <ref>{{cite web|author=Immanuel Kant|url=http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/k/kant/immanuel/k16p/|title=The Critique of Pure Reason|publisher=Etext.library.adelaide.edu.au|access-date=24 July 2009|url-status=dead|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20081202072513/http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/k/kant/immanuel/k16p/|archive-date=2 December 2008}}</ref> (''Kritik der reinen Vernunft'')<ref>{{cite web|author=Immanuel Kant|url=http://gutenberg.spiegel.de/kant/krva/krva.htm|title=Immanuel Kant: Kritik der reinen Vernunft – 1. Auflage – Kapitel 1|publisher=Projekt Gutenberg-DE|access-date=24 July 2009|language=de|archive-date=9 June 2007|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070609150201/http://gutenberg.spiegel.de/kant/krva/krva.htm|url-status=live}}</ref> | |||
* 1783: '']'' (''Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik'') | |||
* 1784: "]" ("''Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?''")<ref>{{cite web|author=Frank-Christian Lilienweihs|url=http://www.prometheusonline.de/heureka/philosophie/klassiker/kant/aufklaerung.htm|title=Immanuel Kant: Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklaerung?|publisher=Prometheusonline.de|date=10 June 1999|access-date=24 July 2009|archive-date=1 August 2009|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090801001752/http://www.prometheusonline.de/heureka/philosophie/klassiker/kant/aufklaerung.htm|url-status=live}}</ref> | |||
* 1784: "]" ("''Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht''") | |||
* 1785: "Determination of the Concept of a Human Race" (''Bestimmung des Begriffs einer Menschenrace'') | |||
* 1785: '']'' (''Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten'') | |||
* 1786: '']'' (''Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft'') | |||
* 1786: "" ("''Was heißt: sich im Denken orientieren?''") | |||
* 1786: ''Conjectural Beginning of Human History'' (''Mutmaßlicher Anfang der Menschengeschichte'') | |||
* 1787: Second edition of the '']'' <ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.hkbu.edu.hk/~ppp/cpr/toc.html|title=Critique of Pure Reason|publisher=Hkbu.edu.hk|date=31 October 2003|access-date=24 July 2009|archive-date=27 April 2009|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090427130629/http://www.hkbu.edu.hk/~ppp/cpr/toc.html|url-status=live}}</ref> (''Kritik der reinen Vernunft'')<ref>{{cite web|url=http://gutenberg.spiegel.de/kant/krvb/krvb.htm|title=Immanuel Kant: Kritik der reinen Vernunft – 2. Auflage – Kapitel 1|publisher=Projekt Gutenberg-DE|date=20 July 2009|access-date=24 July 2009|language=de|archive-date=26 December 2005|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20051226212924/http://gutenberg.spiegel.de/kant/krvb/krvb.htm|url-status=live}}</ref> | |||
* 1788: '']'' (''Kritik der praktischen Vernunft'')<ref>{{cite web|author=Immanuel Kant|url=http://gutenberg.spiegel.de/kant/kritikpr/kritikpr.htm|title=Immanuel Kant: Kritik der praktischen Vernunft – Kapitel 1|publisher=Projekt Gutenberg-DE|access-date=24 July 2009|language=de|archive-date=9 June 2007|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070609150443/http://gutenberg.spiegel.de/kant/kritikpr/kritikpr.htm|url-status=live}}</ref> | |||
* 1790: '']'' (''Kritik der Urteilskraft'')<ref>]</ref> | |||
* 1793: '']'' (''Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft'')<ref name="KReligion"/><ref>{{cite web|author=Immanuel Kant|url=http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/ethics/kant/religion/religion-within-reason.htm|title=Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone by Immanuel Kant 1793|publisher=Marxists.org|access-date=24 July 2009|archive-date=1 June 2009|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090601192705/http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/ethics/kant/religion/religion-within-reason.htm|url-status=live}}</ref> | |||
* 1793: ''On the Old Saw: That May be Right in Theory But It Won't Work in Practice'' ''(Über den Gemeinspruch: Das mag in der Theorie richtig sein, taugt aber nicht für die Praxis)'' | |||
* 1795: '']''<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/kant/kant1.htm|title=Immanuel Kant, "Perpetual Peace"|publisher=Mountr Holyoke |access-date=24 July 2009|archive-date=6 April 2019|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190406161945/https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/kant/kant1.htm|url-status=live}}</ref> ("''Zum ewigen Frieden''")<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.uni-kassel.de/fb5/frieden/themen/Theorie/kant.html|title=Immanuel Kant: Zum ewigen Frieden, 12.02.2004 (Friedensratschlag)|publisher=Uni-kassel.de|access-date=24 July 2009|archive-date=23 September 2009|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090923155158/http://www.uni-kassel.de/fb5/frieden/themen/Theorie/kant.html|url-status=live}}</ref> | |||
* 1797: '']'' (''Metaphysik der Sitten''). First part is The Doctrine of Right, which has often been published separately as The Science of Right. | |||
* 1798: '']'' (''Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht'') | |||
* 1798: ''Conflict of Faculties'' <ref>{{cite web|url=http://chnm.gmu.edu/revolution/d/564/|title=Kant, The Contest of Faculties|year=1798|publisher=Chnm.gmu.edu|access-date=24 July 2009|archive-date=4 August 2011|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110804222523/http://chnm.gmu.edu/revolution/d/564/|url-status=live}}</ref> (''Der Streit der Fakultäten'')<ref>{{cite web|author=Immanuel Kant|url=http://gutenberg.spiegel.de/kant/streit/streit.htm|title=Immanuel Kant: Der Streit der Facultäten – Kapitel 1|publisher=Projekt Gutenberg-DE|access-date=24 July 2009|language=de|archive-date=9 June 2007|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070609150025/http://gutenberg.spiegel.de/kant/streit/streit.htm|url-status=live}}</ref> | |||
* 1800: ''Logic'' (''Logik'') | |||
* 1803: ''On Pedagogy'' (''Über Pädagogik'')<ref>Available {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160310102744/http://www.deutschestextarchiv.de/book/show/kant_paedagogik_1803 |date=10 March 2016 }}.</ref> | |||
* 1804: ''Opus Postumum'' | |||
* 1817: ''Lectures on Philosophical Theology'' (''Immanuel Kants Vorlesungen über die philosophische Religionslehre'' edited by K.H.L. Pölitz) {{efn|As noted by ] in his Introduction, p. 12. Wood further speculates that the lectures themselves were delivered in the Winter of 1783–84.}} | |||
===Collected works in German=== | |||
] inaugurated the Academy edition (the ''Akademie-Ausgabe'' abbreviated as ''AA'' or ''Ak'') of Kant's writings (''Gesammelte Schriften'', ], Berlin, 1902–38) in 1895,<ref>Immanuel Kant, ''Notes and Fragments'', Cambridge University Press, 2005, p. xvi.</ref> and served as its first editor. The volumes are grouped into four sections: | |||
* I. Kant's published writings (vols. 1–9), | |||
* II. Kant's correspondence (vols. 10–13), | |||
* III. Kant's literary remains, or '']'' (vols. 14–23), and | |||
* IV. Student notes from Kant's lectures (vols. 24–29). | |||
An electronic version is also available: (vols. 1–23). | |||
==Notes== | |||
{{notelist}} | |||
==References== | ==References== | ||
===Citations=== | |||
*Immanuel Kant (1902) Reflexionen zur anthropologie. In ''Gesammelte Schriften''., volume XV, pages 55-899. Hrsg. von der Königlich-Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, Berlin, 1902- | |||
{{reflist|22em}} | |||
*Brigitte Sassen (2000), ed., ''Kant's Early Critics: The Empiricist Critique of the Theoretical Philosophy'' | |||
*Kuehn, Manfred. ''Kant: A Biography''. Cambridge University Press, 2002 ISBN 0521524067 | |||
===Works cited=== | |||
*, ''The Economist'', May 3, 2001, retrieved March 19, 2005 | |||
{{refbegin|30em}} | |||
* {{cite journal |last1=Bernasconi |first1=Robert |title=Defining Race Scientifically: A response to Michael Banton |journal=Ethnicities |date=2010 |volume=10 |issue=1 |pages=141–148 |doi=10.1177/14687968100100010802 |jstor=23890861 |s2cid=143925406 |issn=1468-7968}} | |||
* {{cite web |last1=Bouie |first1=Jamelle |title=How the Enlightenment Created Modern Race Thinking and Why We Should Confront It |url=https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/06/taking-the-enlightenment-seriously-requires-talking-about-race.html |website=] |access-date=15 June 2020 |language=en |date=5 June 2018 |archive-date=15 June 2020 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200615090940/https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/06/taking-the-enlightenment-seriously-requires-talking-about-race.html |url-status=live }} | |||
* {{cite web |title=Kant on the different human races (1777) |last=Bowersox |first=Jeff |url=https://blackcentraleurope.com/sources/1750-1850/kant-on-the-different-human-races-1777/ |website=Black Central Europe |access-date=16 June 2020 |language=en |date=4 February 2016 |archive-date=16 June 2020 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200616003834/https://blackcentraleurope.com/sources/1750-1850/kant-on-the-different-human-races-1777/ |url-status=live }} | |||
* {{Cite book |last=Caygill |first=Howard |year=1995 |title=A Kant Dictionary |publisher=Blackwell Publishing}} | |||
* {{cite book |last1=Eze |first1=Emmanuel Chukwudi |title=Postcolonial African Philosophy: A Critical Reader |year=1997a |publisher=Wiley |isbn=978-0-631-20339-1 |pages=103–131 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=BwkRtAEACAAJ |access-date=15 June 2020 |language=en |archive-date=20 December 2020 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20201220055821/https://books.google.com/books?id=BwkRtAEACAAJ |url-status=live }} | |||
* {{cite book |last1=Eze |first1=Emmanuel Chukwudi |title=Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader |year=1997b |publisher=Wiley |isbn=978-0-631-20136-6 |pages=39–48 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=0BaguAEACAAJ |access-date=15 June 2020 |language=en |archive-date=20 December 2020 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20201220055823/https://books.google.com/books?id=0BaguAEACAAJ |url-status=live }} | |||
* {{cite book |title=Ethics: The Fundamentals |publisher=Blackwell |year=2007 |author=Driver, Julia |isbn=978-1-4051-1154-6}} | |||
* {{Cite book |last=di Giovanni |first=George |year=2005 |title=Freedom and Religion in Kant and His Immediate Successors |publisher=Cambridge University Press}} | |||
* {{Cite book |last=Guyer |first=Paul |year=2014 |title=Kant |publisher=Routledge}} | |||
* {{Cite book |last1=Guyer |first1=Paul |last2=Wood |first2=Alan W. |year=1998 |chapter=Introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason |title=The Critique of Pure Reason |publisher=Cambridge University Press}} | |||
* {{cite encyclopedia |last=Jankowiak |first=Tim |year=2023 |title=Immanuel Kant |publisher=The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy |url=https://iep.utm.edu/kantview/ |access-date=4 March 2023}} | |||
* {{cite encyclopedia |url=http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-moral/#DutResForMorLaw |title=Kant's Moral Philosophy |encyclopedia=Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy |year=2008 |access-date=11 September 2013 |last=Johnson |first=Robert}} | |||
* {{cite web |last1=Kant |first1=Immanuel |editor=Eze, Emmanuel Chukwudi|title=Kant on the Different Races of Man |year=2010|url=https://blogs.umass.edu/afroam391g-shabazz/files/2010/01/Kant-on-the-Different-Races-of-Man1.pdf |publisher=UMass Amherst |access-date=15 June 2020 |archive-date=1 August 2020 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200801194450/https://blogs.umass.edu/afroam391g-shabazz/files/2010/01/Kant-on-the-Different-Races-of-Man1.pdf |url-status=live }} | |||
* {{cite journal |last1=Kleingeld |first1=Pauline |title=Kant's Second Thoughts on Race |journal=The Philosophical Quarterly |date=October 2007 |volume=57 |issue=229 |pages=573–592 |doi=10.1111/j.1467-9213.2007.498.x |hdl=11370/e15b6815-5eab-42d6-a789-24a2f6ecb946 |s2cid=55185762 |url=https://pure.rug.nl/ws/files/2768306/Kants_second_thoughts_on_race.pdf |access-date=14 December 2020 |archive-date=16 February 2019 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190216193713/https://pure.rug.nl/ws/files/2768306/Kants_second_thoughts_on_race.pdf |url-status=live }} | |||
* {{Cite book |last=Kuehn |first=Manfred |year=2001 |title=Kant: a Biography |publisher=Cambridge University Press |isbn=978-0-521-49704-6}} | |||
* {{cite book |last1=Mills |first1=Charles W. |title=Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism |year=2017 |publisher=Oxford University Press |isbn=978-0-19-024545-0 |pages=169–193 |doi=10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190245412.001.0001 |url=https://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190245412.001.0001/acprof-9780190245412 |access-date=15 June 2020 |archive-date=16 June 2020 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200616003829/https://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190245412.001.0001/acprof-9780190245412 |url-status=live }} | |||
* {{cite encyclopedia |last=Rohlf |first=Michael |year=2020 |title=Immanuel Kant |publisher=The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2020 Edition) |editor=Edward N. Zalta |url=https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2020/entries/kant/}} | |||
* {{Cite book |last=Schneewind |first=J. B. |year=2010 |chapter=Autonomy, Obligation, and Virtue: An Overview of Kant's Moral Philosophy |title=Essays on the History of Moral Philosophy |publisher=Oxford University Press}} | |||
* {{cite news |last1=Shrage |first1=Laurie |title=Should we continue to teach thinkers like Kant, Voltaire and Hume without mention of the harmful prejudices they helped legitimize? |work=The New York Times |date=18 March 2019 |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/18/opinion/philosophy-anti-semitism.html |access-date=10 November 2022}} | |||
* {{cite encyclopedia |last=Stang |first=Nicholas F. |year=2022 |title=Kant's Transcendental Idealism |publisher=The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2022 Edition) |editor=Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman |url=https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2022/entries/kant-transcendental-idealism/}} | |||
* {{Cite book |last=Wood |first=Allen |year=1999 |title=Kant's Ethical Thought |publisher=Cambridge University Press |isbn=978-0521648363}} | |||
* {{Cite book |last=Wood |first=Allen |year=2006 |chapter=Kant's Practical Philosophy |title=The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism |editor=Karl Ameriks |publisher=Cambridge University Press. |isbn=978-0801486043}} | |||
* {{Cite book |last=Wood |first=Allen |year=2008 |title=Kantian Ethics |publisher=Cambridge University Press. |isbn=978-0521671149}} | |||
{{refend}} | |||
==External links== | |||
{{sister project links|d=Q9312|n=no|b=no|v=no|voy=no|m=no|mw=no|wikt=Kantian|s=Author:Immanuel_Kant|species=no}} | |||
* {{Gutenberg author|id=1426|name=Immanuel Kant}} | |||
* {{Internet Archive author|sname=Immanuel Kant}} | |||
* {{Librivox author|id=1312}} | |||
* , authors and papers database powered by PhilPapers, focused on Kant, and located at Cornell University | |||
* At the '']'': | |||
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Latest revision as of 18:59, 16 December 2024
German philosopher (1724–1804) "Kant" redirects here. For other uses, see Kant (disambiguation).
Immanuel Kant (born Emanuel Kant; 22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804) was a German philosopher 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 and controversial figures in modern Western philosophy. He has been called the "father of modern ethics", the "father of modern aesthetics", and for bringing together rationalism and empiricism, the "father of modern philosophy".
In his doctrine of transcendental idealism, Kant argued that space and time are mere "forms of intuition" that structure all experience, and that the objects of experience are mere "appearances". The nature of things as they are in themselves is unknowable to us. Nonetheless, in an attempt to counter the philosophical doctrine of skepticism, he wrote the Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787), his best-known work. 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. These claims have proved especially influential in the social sciences, particularly sociology and anthropology, which regard human activities as pre-oriented by cultural norms.
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 remains in dispute. He hoped that perpetual peace could be secured through an international federation of republican states and international cooperation. His cosmopolitan reputation is called into question by his promulgation of scientific racism for much of his career, although he altered his views on the subject in the last decade of his life.
Biography
Immanuel Kant was born on 22 April 1724 into a Prussian German family of Lutheran faith in Königsberg, East Prussia. His mother, Anna Regina Reuter (1697–1737), was born in Königsberg to a father from Nuremberg. Her surname is sometimes erroneously given as Porter. Kant's father, Johann Georg Kant (1682–1746), was a German harness-maker from Memel, at the time Prussia's most northeastern city (now Klaipėda, Lithuania). It is possible that the Kants got their name from the village of Kantvainiai (German: Kantwaggen – today part of Priekulė) and were of Kursenieki origin.
Kant was baptized as Emanuel and later changed the spelling of his name to Immanuel after learning Hebrew. He was the fourth of nine children (six of whom reached adulthood). The Kant household stressed the pietist values of religious devotion, humility, and a literal interpretation of the Bible. The young Immanuel's education was strict, punitive and disciplinary, and focused on Latin and religious instruction over mathematics and science. In his later years, Kant lived a strictly ordered life. It was said that neighbors would set their clocks by his daily walks. He never married but seems to have had a rewarding social life; he was a popular teacher as well as a modestly successful author, even before starting on his major philosophical works.
Young scholar
Kant showed a great aptitude for study at an early age. He first attended the Collegium Fridericianum, from which he graduated at the end of the summer of 1740. In 1740, aged 16, he enrolled at the University of Königsberg, where he would later remain for the rest of his professional life. He studied the philosophy of Gottfried Leibniz and Christian Wolff under Martin Knutzen (Associate Professor of Logic and Metaphysics from 1734 until he died in 1751), a rationalist who was also familiar with developments in British philosophy and science and introduced Kant to the new mathematical physics of Isaac Newton. Knutzen dissuaded Kant from the theory of pre-established harmony, which he regarded as "the pillow for the lazy mind". He also dissuaded Kant from idealism, the idea that reality is purely mental, which most philosophers in the 18th century regarded negatively. The theory of transcendental idealism that Kant later included in the Critique of Pure Reason was developed partially in opposition to traditional idealism. Kant had contacts with students, colleagues, friends and diners who frequented the local Masonic lodge.
His father's stroke and subsequent death in 1746 interrupted his studies. Kant left Königsberg shortly after August 1748; he would return there in August 1754. He became a private tutor in the towns surrounding Königsberg, but continued his scholarly research. In 1749, he published his first philosophical work, Thoughts on the True Estimation of Living Forces (written in 1745–1747).
Early work
Kant is best known for his work in the philosophy of ethics and metaphysics, but he made significant contributions to other disciplines. In 1754, while contemplating on a prize question by the Berlin Academy about the problem of Earth's rotation, he argued that the Moon's gravity would slow down Earth's spin and he also put forth the argument that gravity would eventually cause the Moon's tidal locking to coincide with the Earth's rotation. The next year, he expanded this reasoning to the formation and evolution of the Solar System in his Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens. In 1755, Kant received a license to lecture in the University of Königsberg and began lecturing on a variety of topics including mathematics, physics, logic, and metaphysics. In his 1756 essay on the theory of winds, Kant laid out an original insight into the Coriolis force.
In 1756, Kant also published three papers on the 1755 Lisbon earthquake. Kant's theory, which involved shifts in huge caverns filled with hot gases, though inaccurate, was one of the first systematic attempts to explain earthquakes in natural rather than supernatural terms. In 1757, Kant began lecturing on geography making him one of the first lecturers to explicitly teach geography as its own subject. Geography was one of Kant's most popular lecturing topics and, in 1802, a compilation by Friedrich Theodor Rink of Kant's lecturing notes, Physical Geography, was released. After Kant became a professor in 1770, he expanded the topics of his lectures to include lectures on natural law, ethics, and anthropology, along with other topics.
In the Universal Natural History, Kant laid out the nebular hypothesis, in which he deduced that the Solar System had formed from a large cloud of gas, a nebula. Kant also correctly deduced that the Milky Way was a large disk of stars, which he theorized formed from a much larger spinning gas cloud. He further suggested that other distant "nebulae" might be other galaxies. These postulations opened new horizons for astronomy, for the first time extending it beyond the solar system to galactic and intergalactic realms.
From then on, Kant turned increasingly to philosophical issues, although he continued to write on the sciences throughout his life. In the early 1760s, Kant produced a series of important works in philosophy. The False Subtlety of the Four Syllogistic Figures, a work in logic, was published in 1762. Two more works appeared the following year: Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy and The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God. By 1764, Kant had become a notable popular author, and wrote Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime; he was second to Moses Mendelssohn in a Berlin Academy prize competition with his Inquiry Concerning the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morality (often referred to as "The Prize Essay"). In 1766 Kant wrote a critical piece on Emanuel Swedenborg's Dreams of a Spirit-Seer.
In 1770, Kant was appointed Full Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at the University of Königsberg. In defense of this appointment, Kant wrote his inaugural dissertation On the Form and Principles of the Sensible and the Intelligible World This work saw the emergence of several central themes of his mature work, including the distinction between the faculties of intellectual thought and sensible receptivity. To miss this distinction would mean to commit the error of subreption, and, as he says in the last chapter of the dissertation, only in avoiding this error does metaphysics flourish.
It is often claimed that Kant was a late developer, that he only became an important philosopher in his mid-50s after rejecting his earlier views. While it is true that Kant wrote his greatest works relatively late in life, there is a tendency to underestimate the value of his earlier works. Recent Kant scholarship has devoted more attention to these "pre-critical" writings and has recognized a degree of continuity with his mature work.
Publication of the Critique of Pure Reason
Main article: Critique of Pure ReasonAt age 46, Kant was an established scholar and an increasingly influential philosopher, and much was expected of him. In correspondence with his ex-student and friend Markus Herz, Kant admitted that, in the inaugural dissertation, he had failed to account for the relation between our sensible and intellectual faculties. He needed to explain how we combine what is known as sensory knowledge with the other type of knowledge—that is, reasoned knowledge—these two being related but having very different processes. Kant also credited David Hume with awakening him from a "dogmatic slumber" in which he had unquestioningly accepted the tenets of both religion and natural philosophy. Hume, in his 1739 Treatise on Human Nature, had argued that we only know the mind through a subjective, essentially illusory series of perceptions. Ideas such as causality, morality, and objects are not evident in experience, so their reality may be questioned. Kant felt that reason could remove this skepticism, and he set himself to solving these problems. Although fond of company and conversation with others, Kant isolated himself, and resisted friends' attempts to bring him out of his isolation. When Kant emerged from his silence in 1781, the result was the Critique of Pure Reason, printed by Johann Friedrich Hartknoch. Kant countered Hume's empiricism by claiming that some knowledge exists inherently in the mind, independent of experience. He drew a parallel to the Copernican revolution in his proposal that worldly objects can be intuited a priori, and that intuition is consequently distinct from objective reality. Perhaps the most direct contested matter was Hume's argument against any necessary connection between causal events, which Hume characterized as the "cement of the universe." In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant argues for what he takes to be the a priori justification of such necessary connection.
Although now recognized as one of the greatest works in the history of philosophy, the Critique disappointed Kant's readers upon its initial publication. The book was long, over 800 pages in the original German edition, and written in a convoluted style. Kant was quite upset with its reception. His former student, Johann Gottfried Herder criticized it for placing reason as an entity worthy of criticism by itself instead of considering the process of reasoning within the context of language and one's entire personality. Similarly to Christian Garve and Johann Georg Heinrich Feder, he rejected Kant's position that space and time possess a form that can be analyzed. Garve and Feder also faulted the Critique for not explaining differences in perception of sensations. Its density made it, as Herder said in a letter to Johann Georg Hamann, a "tough nut to crack", obscured by "all this heavy gossamer". Its reception stood in stark contrast to the praise Kant had received for earlier works, such as his Prize Essay and shorter works that preceded the first Critique. Recognizing the need to clarify the original treatise, Kant wrote the Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics in 1783 as a summary of its main views. Shortly thereafter, Kant's friend Johann Friedrich Schultz (1739–1805), a professor of mathematics, published Explanations of Professor Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (Königsberg, 1784), which was a brief but very accurate commentary on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.
Kant's reputation gradually rose through the latter portion of the 1780s, sparked by a series of important works: the 1784 essay, "Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?"; 1785's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (his first work on moral philosophy); and Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science from 1786. Kant's fame ultimately arrived from an unexpected source. In 1786, Karl Leonhard Reinhold published a series of public letters on Kantian philosophy. In these letters, Reinhold framed Kant's philosophy as a response to the central intellectual controversy of the era: the pantheism controversy. Friedrich Jacobi had accused the recently deceased Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (a distinguished dramatist and philosophical essayist) of Spinozism. Such a charge, tantamount to an accusation of atheism, was vigorously denied by Lessing's friend Moses Mendelssohn, leading to a bitter public dispute among partisans. The controversy gradually escalated into a debate about the values of the Enlightenment and the value of reason. Reinhold maintained in his letters that Kant's Critique of Pure Reason could settle this dispute by defending the authority and bounds of reason. Reinhold's letters were widely read and made Kant the most famous philosopher of his era.
Later work
Kant published a second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason in 1787, heavily revising the first parts of the book. Most of his subsequent work focused on other areas of philosophy. He continued to develop his moral philosophy, notably in 1788's Critique of Practical Reason (known as the second Critique), and 1797's Metaphysics of Morals. The 1790 Critique of the Power of Judgment (the third Critique) applied the Kantian system to aesthetics and teleology. In 1792, Kant's attempt to publish the Second of the four Pieces of Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason, in the journal Berlinische Monatsschrift, met with opposition from the King's censorship commission, which had been established that same year in the context of the French Revolution. Kant then arranged to have all four pieces published as a book, routing it through the philosophy department at the University of Jena to avoid the need for theological censorship. This insubordination earned him a now-famous reprimand from the King. When he nevertheless published a second edition in 1794, the censor was so irate that he arranged for a royal order that required Kant never to publish or even speak publicly about religion. Kant then published his response to the King's reprimand and explained himself in the preface of The Conflict of the Faculties.
He also wrote a number of semi-popular essays on history, religion, politics, and other topics. These works were well received by Kant's contemporaries and confirmed his preeminent status in eighteenth-century philosophy. There were several journals devoted solely to defending and criticizing Kantian philosophy. Despite his success, philosophical trends were moving in another direction. Many of Kant's most important disciples and followers (including Reinhold, Beck, and Fichte) transformed the Kantian position. The progressive stages of revision of Kant's teachings marked the emergence of German idealism. In what was one of his final acts expounding a stance on philosophical questions, Kant opposed these developments and publicly denounced Fichte in an open letter in 1799.
In 1800, a student of Kant named Gottlob Benjamin Jäsche (1762–1842) published a manual of logic for teachers called Logik, which he had prepared at Kant's request. Jäsche prepared the Logik using a copy of a textbook in logic by Georg Friedrich Meier entitled Excerpt from the Doctrine of Reason, in which Kant had written copious notes and annotations. The Logik has been considered of fundamental importance to Kant's philosophy, and the understanding of it. The great 19th-century logician Charles Sanders Peirce remarked, in an incomplete review of Thomas Kingsmill Abbott's English translation of the introduction to Logik, that "Kant's whole philosophy turns upon his logic." Also, Robert Schirokauer Hartman and Wolfgang Schwarz wrote in the translators' introduction to their English translation of the Logik, "Its importance lies not only in its significance for the Critique of Pure Reason, the second part of which is a restatement of fundamental tenets of the Logic, but in its position within the whole of Kant's work."
Death and burial
Kant's health, long poor, worsened. He died at Königsberg on 12 February 1804, uttering Es ist gut ("It is good") before his death. His unfinished final work was published as Opus Postumum. Kant always cut a curious figure in his lifetime for his modest, rigorously scheduled habits, which have been referred to as clocklike. Heinrich Heine observed the magnitude of "his destructive, world-crushing thoughts" and considered him a sort of philosophical "executioner", comparing him to Robespierre with the observation that both men "represented in the highest the type of provincial bourgeois. Nature had destined them to weigh coffee and sugar, but Fate determined that they should weigh other things and placed on the scales of the one a king, on the scales of the other a god."
When his body was transferred to a new burial spot, his skull was measured during the exhumation and found to be larger than the average German male's with a "high and broad" forehead. His forehead has been an object of interest ever since it became well known through his portraits: "In Döbler's portrait and in Kiefer's faithful if expressionistic reproduction of it—as well as in many of the other late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century portraits of Kant—the forehead is remarkably large and decidedly retreating."
Kant's mausoleum adjoins the northeast corner of Königsberg Cathedral in Kaliningrad, Russia. The mausoleum was constructed by the architect Friedrich Lahrs and was finished in 1924, in time for the bicentenary of Kant's birth. Originally, Kant was buried inside the cathedral, but in 1880 his remains were moved to a neo-Gothic chapel adjoining the northeast corner of the cathedral. Over the years, the chapel became dilapidated and was demolished to make way for the mausoleum, which was built on the same location. The tomb and its mausoleum are among the few artifacts of German times preserved by the Soviets after they captured the city.
Into the 21st century, many newlyweds bring flowers to the mausoleum. Artifacts previously owned by Kant, known as Kantiana, were included in the Königsberg City Museum; however, the museum was destroyed during World War II. A replica of the statue of Kant that in German times stood in front of the main University of Königsberg building was donated by a German entity in the early 1990s and placed in the same grounds. After the expulsion of Königsberg's German population at the end of World War II, the University of Königsberg where Kant taught was replaced by the Russian-language Kaliningrad State University, which appropriated the campus and surviving buildings. In 2005, the university was renamed Immanuel Kant State University of Russia. The name change, which was considered a politically-charged issue due to the residents having mixed feelings about its German past, was announced at a ceremony attended by Russian president Vladimir Putin and German chancellor Gerhard Schröder, and the university formed a Kant Society, dedicated to the study of Kantianism. In 2010, the university was again renamed to Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University.
Philosophy
Like many of his contemporaries, Kant was greatly impressed with the scientific advances made by Newton and others. This new evidence of the power of human reason called into question for many the traditional authority of politics and religion. In particular, the modern mechanistic view of the world called into question the very possibility of morality; for, if there is no agency, there cannot be any responsibility.
The aim of Kant's critical project is to secure human autonomy, the basis of religion and morality, from this threat of mechanism—and to do so in a way that preserves the advances of modern science. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant summarizes his philosophical concerns in the following three questions:
- What can I know?
- What should I do?
- What may I hope?
The Critique of Pure Reason focuses upon the first question and opens a conceptual space for an answer to the second question. It argues that even though we cannot strictly know that we are free, we can—and for practical purposes, must—think of ourselves as free. In Kant's own words, "I had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith." Our rational faith in morality is further developed in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and the Critique of Practical Reason.
The Critique of the Power of Judgment argues we may rationally hope for the harmonious unity of the theoretical and practical domains treated in the first two Critiques on the basis, not only of its conceptual possibility, but also on the basis of our affective experience of natural beauty and, more generally, the organization of the natural world. In Religion within the Bounds of Mere Reason, Kant endeavors to complete his answer to this third question.
These works all place the active, rational human subject at the center of the cognitive and moral worlds. In brief, Kant argues that the mind itself necessarily makes a constitutive contribution to knowledge, that this contribution is transcendental rather than psychological, and that to act autonomously is to act according to rational moral principles.
Kant's critical project
See also: Critique of Pure ReasonKant's 1781 (revised 1787) Critique of Pure Reason has often been cited as the most significant volume of metaphysics and epistemology in modern philosophy. In the first Critique, and later on in other works as well, Kant frames the "general" and "real problem of pure reason" in terms of the following question: "How are synthetic judgments a priori possible?" To understand this claim, it is necessary to define some terms. First, Kant makes a distinction between two sources of knowledge:
- Cognitions a priori: "cognition independent of all experience and even of all the impressions of the senses".
- Cognitions a posteriori: cognitions that have their sources in experience—that is, which are empirical.
Second, he makes a distinction in terms of the form of knowledge:
- Analytic judgements: judgements in which the predicate concept is contained in the subject concept; e.g., "All bachelors are unmarried", or "All bodies take up space". These can also be called "judgments of clarification".
- Synthetic judgements: judgements in which the predicate concept is not contained in the subject concept; e.g., "All bachelors are alone", "All swans are white", or "All bodies have weight". These can also be called "judgments of amplification".
An analytic judgement is true by nature of strictly conceptual relations. All analytic judgements are a priori since basing an analytic judgement on experience would be absurd. By contrast, a synthetic judgement is one the content of which includes something new in the sense that it is includes something not already contained in the subject concept. The truth or falsehood of a synthetic statement depends upon something more than what is contained in its concepts. The most obvious form of synthetic judgement is a simple empirical observation.
Philosophers such as David Hume believed that these were the only possible kinds of human reason and investigation, which Hume called "relations of ideas" and "matters of fact". Establishing the synthetic a priori as a third mode of knowledge would allow Kant to push back against Hume's skepticism about such matters as causation and metaphysical knowledge more generally. This is because, unlike a posteriori cognition, a priori cognition has "true or strict ... universality" and includes a claim of "necessity". Kant himself regards it as uncontroversial that we do have synthetic a priori knowledge—most obviously, that of mathematics. That 7 + 5 = 12, he claims, is a result not contained in the concepts of seven, five, and the addition operation. Yet, although he considers the possibility of such knowledge to be obvious, Kant nevertheless assumes the burden of providing a philosophical proof that we have a priori knowledge in mathematics, the natural sciences, and metaphysics. It is the twofold aim of the Critique both to prove and to explain the possibility of this knowledge. Kant says "There are two stems of human cognition, which may perhaps arise from a common but to us unknown root, namely sensibility and understanding, through the first of which objects are given to us, but through the second of which they are thought."
Kant's term for the object of sensibility is intuition, and his term for the object of the understanding is concept. In general terms, the former is a non-discursive representation of a particular object, and the latter is a discursive (or mediate) representation of a general type of object. The conditions of possible experience require both intuitions and concepts, that is, the affection of the receptive sensibility and the actively synthesizing power of the understanding. Thus the statement: "Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind." Kant's basic strategy in the first half of his book will be to argue that some intuitions and concepts are pure—that is, are contributed entirely by the mind, independent of anything empirical. Knowledge generated on this basis, under certain conditions, can be synthetic a priori. This insight is known as Kant's "Copernican revolution", because, just as Copernicus advanced astronomy by way of a radical shift in perspective, so Kant here claims do the same for metaphysics. The second half of the Critique is the explicitly critical part. In this "transcendental dialectic", Kant argues that many of the claims of traditional rationalist metaphysics violate the criteria he claims to establish in the first, "constructive" part of his book. As Kant observes, however, "human reason, without being moved by the mere vanity of knowing it all, inexorably pushes on, driven by its own need to such questions that cannot be answered by any experiential use of reason". It is the project of "the critique of pure reason" to establish the limits as to just how far reason may legitimately so proceed.
Doctrine of transcendental idealism
See also: Transcendental idealismThe section of the Critique entitled "The transcendental aesthetic" introduces Kant's famous metaphysics of transcendental idealism. Something is "transcendental" if it is a necessary condition for the possibility of experience, and "idealism" denotes some form of mind-dependence that must be further specified. The correct interpretation of Kant's own specification remains controversial. The metaphysical thesis then states that human beings only experience and know phenomenal appearances, not independent things-in-themselves, because space and time are nothing but the subjective forms of intuition that we ourselves contribute to experience. Nevertheless, although Kant says that space and time are "transcendentally ideal"—the pure forms of human sensibility, rather than part of nature or reality as it exists in-itself—he also claims that they are "empirically real", by which he means "that 'everything that can come before us externally as an object' is in both space and time, and that our internal intuitions of ourselves are in time". However Kant's doctrine is interpreted, he wished to distinguish his position from the subjective idealism of Berkeley.
Paul Guyer, although critical of many of Kant's arguments in this section, writes of the "Transcendental Aesthetic" that it "not only lays the first stone in Kant's constructive theory of knowledge; it also lays the foundation for both his critique and his reconstruction of traditional metaphysics. It argues that all genuine knowledge requires a sensory component, and thus that metaphysical claims that transcend the possibility of sensory confirmation can never amount to knowledge."
Interpretive disagreements
One interpretation, known as the "two-world" interpretation, regards Kant's position as a statement of epistemological limitation, meaning that we are not able to transcend the bounds of our own mind, and therefore cannot access the "thing-in-itself". On this particular view, the thing-in-itself is not numerically identical to the phenomenal empirical object. Kant also spoke, however, of the thing-in-itself or transcendent object as a product of the (human) understanding as it attempts to conceive of objects in abstraction from the conditions of sensibility. Following this line of thought, a different interpretation argues that the thing-in-itself does not represent a separate ontological domain but simply a way of considering objects by means of the understanding alone; this is known as the "two-aspect" view. On this alternative view, the same objects to which we attribute empirical properties like color, size, and shape are also, when considered as they are in themselves, the things-in-themselves, otherwise inaccessible to human knowledge.
Kant's theory of judgment
See also: Category (Kant)Following the "Transcendental Analytic" is the "Transcendental Logic". Whereas the former was concerned with the contributions of the sensibility, the latter is concerned, first, with the contributions of the understanding ("Transcendental Analytic") and, second, with the faculty of reason as the source of both metaphysical errors and genuine regulatory principles ("Transcendental Dialectic"). The "Transcendental Analytic" is further divided into two sections. The first, "Analytic of Concepts", is concerned with establishing the universality and necessity of the pure concepts of the understanding (i.e., the categories). This section contains Kant's famous "transcendental deduction". The second, "Analytic of Principles", is concerned with the application of those pure concepts in empirical judgments. This second section is longer than the first and is further divided into many sub-sections.
Transcendental deduction of the categories of the understanding
The "Analytic of Concepts" argues for the universal and necessary validity of the pure concepts of the understanding, or the categories, for instance, the concepts of substance and causation. These twelve basic categories define what it is to be a thing in general—that is, they articulate the necessary conditions according to which something is a possible object of experience. These, in conjunction with the a priori forms of intuition, are the basis of all synthetic a priori cognition. According to Guyer and Wood, "Kant's idea is that just as there are certain essential features of all judgments, so there must be certain corresponding ways in which we form the concepts of objects so that judgments may be about objects."
Kant provides two central lines of argumentation in support of his claims about the categories. The first, known as the "metaphysical deduction", proceeds analytically from a table of the Aristotelian logical functions of judgment. As Kant was aware, this assumes precisely what the skeptic rejects, namely, the existence of synthetic a priori cognition. For this reason, Kant also supplies a synthetic argument that does not depend upon the assumption in dispute.
This argument, provided under the heading "Transcendental Deduction of the Pure Concepts of the Understanding", is widely considered to be both the most important and the most difficult of Kant's arguments in the Critique. Kant himself said that it is the one that cost him the most labor. Frustrated by its confused reception in the first edition of his book, he rewrote it entirely for the second edition.
The "Transcendental Deduction" gives Kant's argument that these pure concepts apply universally and necessarily to the objects that are given in experience. According to Guyer and Wood, "He centers his argument on the premise that our experience can be ascribed to a single identical subject, via what he calls the 'transcendental unity of apperception,' only if the elements of experience given in intuition are synthetically combined so as to present us with objects that are thought through the categories."
Kant's principle of apperception is that "The I think must be able to accompany all my representations; for otherwise something would be represented in me that could not be thought at all, which is as much as to say that the representation would either be impossible or else at least would be nothing for me." The necessary possibility of the self-ascription of the representations of self-consciousness, identical to itself through time, is an a priori conceptual truth that cannot be based on experience. This is only a bare sketch of one of the arguments that Kant presents.
Principles of pure understanding
Kant's deduction of the categories in the "Analytic of Concepts", if successful, demonstrates its claims about the categories only in an abstract way. The task of the "Analytic of Principles" is to show both that they must universally apply to objects given in actual experience (i.e., manifolds of intuition) and how it is they do so. In the first book of this section on the "schematism", Kant connects each of the purely logical categories of the understanding to the temporality of intuition to show that, although non-empirical, they do have purchase upon the objects of experience. The second book continues this line of argument in four chapters, each associated with one of the category groupings. In some cases, it adds a connection to the spatial dimension of intuition to the categories it analyzes. The fourth chapter of this section, "The Analogies of Experience", marks a shift from "mathematical" to "dynamical" principles, that is, to those that deal with relations among objects. Some commentators consider this the most significant section of the Critique. The analogies are three in number:
- Principle of persistence of substance: Kant is here concerned with the general conditions of determining time-relations among the objects of experience. He argues that the unity of time implies that "all change must consist in the alteration of states in an underlying substance, whose existence and quantity must be unchangeable or conserved."
- Principle of temporal succession according to the law of causality: Here Kant argues that "we can make determinate judgments about the objective succession of events, as contrasted to merely subjective successions of representations, only if every objective alteration follows a necessary rule of succession, or a causal law." This is Kant's most direct rejoinder to Hume's skepticism about causality.
- Principle of simultaneity according to the law of reciprocity or community: The final analogy argues that "determinate judgments that objects (or states of substance) in different regions of space exists simultaneously are possible only if such objects stand in mutual causal relation of community or reciprocal interaction." This is Kant's rejoinder to Leibniz's thesis in the Monadology.
The fourth section of this chapter, which is not an analogy, deals with the empirical use of the modal categories. That was the end of the chapter in the A edition of the Critique. The B edition includes one more short section, "The Refutation of Idealism". In this section, by analysis of the concept of self-consciousness, Kant argues that his transcendental idealism is a "critical" or "formal" idealism that does not deny the existence of reality apart from our subjective representations. The final chapter of "The Analytic of Principles" distinguishes phenomena, of which we can have genuine knowledge, from noumena, a term which refers to objects of pure thought that we cannot know, but to which we may still refer "in a negative sense". An Appendix to the section further develops Kant's criticism of Leibnizian-Wolffian rationalism by arguing that its "dogmatic" metaphysics confuses the "mere features of concepts through which we think things ... features of the objects themselves". Against this, Kant reasserts his own insistence upon the necessity of a sensible component in all genuine knowledge.
Critique of metaphysics
The second of the two Divisions of "The Transcendental Logic", "The Transcendental Dialectic", contains the "negative" portion of Kant's Critique, which builds upon the "positive" arguments of the preceding "Transcendental Analytic" to expose the limits of metaphysical speculation. In particular, it is concerned to demonstrate as spurious the efforts of reason to arrive at knowledge independent of sensibility. This endeavor, Kant argues, is doomed to failure, which he claims to demonstrate by showing that reason, unbounded by sense, is always capable of generating opposing or otherwise incompatible conclusions. Like "the light dove, in free flight cutting through the air, the resistance of which it feels", reason "could get the idea that it could do even better in airless space". Against this, Kant claims that, absent epistemic friction, there can be no knowledge. Nevertheless, Kant's critique is not entirely destructive. He presents the speculative excesses of traditional metaphysics as inherent in our very capacity of reason. Moreover, he argues that its products are not without some (carefully qualified) regulative value.
On the concepts of pure reason
Kant calls the basic concepts of metaphysics "ideas". They are different from the concepts of understanding in that they are not limited by the critical stricture limiting knowledge to the conditions of possible experience and its objects. "Transcendental illusion" is Kant's term for the tendency of reason to produce such ideas. Although reason has a "logical use" of simply drawing inferences from principles, in "The Transcendental Dialectic", Kant is concerned with its purportedly "real use" to arrive at conclusions by way of unchecked regressive syllogistic ratiocination. The three categories of relation, pursued without regard to the limits of possible experience, yield the three central ideas of traditional metaphysics:
- The soul: the concept of substance as the ultimate subject;
- The world in its entirety: the concept of causation as a completed series; and
- God: the concept of community as the common ground of all possibilities.
Although Kant denies that these ideas can be objects of genuine cognition, he argues that they are the result of reason's inherent drive to unify cognition into a systematic whole. Leibnizian-Wolffian metaphysics was divided into four parts: ontology, psychology, cosmology, and theology. Kant replaces the first with the positive results of the first part of the Critique. He proposes to replace the following three with his later doctrines of anthropology, the metaphysical foundations of natural science, and the critical postulation of human freedom and morality.
Dialectical inferences of pure reason
In the second of the two Books of "The Transcendental Dialectic", Kant undertakes to demonstrate the contradictory nature of unbounded reason. He does this by developing contradictions in each of the three metaphysical disciplines that he contends are in fact pseudosciences. This section of the Critique is long and Kant's arguments are extremely detailed. In this context, it not possible to do much more than enumerate the topics of discussion. The first chapter addresses what Kant terms the paralogisms—i.e., false inferences—that pure reason makes in the metaphysical discipline of rational psychology. He argues that one cannot take the mere thought of "I" in the proposition "I think" as the proper cognition of "I" as an object. In this way, he claims to debunk various metaphysical theses about the substantiality, unity, and self-identity of the soul. The second chapter, which is the longest, takes up the topic Kant calls the antinomies of pure reason—that is, the contradictions of reason with itself—in the metaphysical discipline of rational cosmology. Originally, Kant had thought that all transcendental illusion could be analyzed in antinomic terms. He presents four cases in which he claims reason is able to prove opposing theses with equal plausibility:
- That "reason seems to be able to prove that the universe is both finite and infinite in space and time";
- that "reason seems to be able to prove that matter both is and is not infinitely divisible into ever smaller parts";
- that "reason seems to be able to prove that free will cannot be a causally efficacious part of the world (because all of nature is deterministic) and yet that it must be such a cause"; and,
- that "reason seems to be able to prove that there is and there is not a necessary being (which some would identify with God)".
Kant further argues in each case that his doctrine of transcendental idealism is able to resolve the antinomy. The third chapter examines fallacious arguments about God in rational theology under the heading of the "Ideal of Pure Reason". (Whereas an idea is a pure concept generated by reason, an ideal is the concept of an idea as an individual thing.) Here Kant addresses and claims to refute three traditional arguments for the existence of God: the ontological argument, the cosmological argument, and the physio-theological argument (i.e., the argument from design). The results of the transcendental dialectic so far appear to be entirely negative. In an Appendix to this section, Kant rejects such a conclusion. The ideas of pure reason, he argues, have an important regulatory function in directing and organizing our theoretical and practical inquiry. Kant's later works elaborate upon this function at length and in detail.
Moral thought
Main article: Kantian ethicsKant developed his ethics, or moral philosophy, in three works: Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), Critique of Practical Reason (1788), and Metaphysics of Morals (1797). With regard to morality, Kant argued that the source of the good lies not in anything outside the human subject, either in nature or given by God, but rather is only the good will itself. A good will is one that acts from duty in accordance with the universal moral law that the autonomous human being freely gives itself. This law obliges one to treat humanity—understood as rational agency, and represented through oneself as well as others—as an end in itself rather than (merely) as means to other ends the individual might hold. Kant is known for his theory that all moral obligation is grounded in what he calls the "categorical imperative", which is derived from the concept of duty. He argues that the moral law is a principle of reason itself, not based on contingent facts about the world, such as what would make us happy; to act on the moral law has no other motive than "worthiness to be happy".
Idea of freedom
In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant distinguishes between the transcendental idea of freedom, which as a psychological concept is "mainly empirical" and refers to "whether a faculty of beginning a series of successive things or states from itself is to be assumed", and the practical concept of freedom as the independence of our will from the "coercion" or "necessitation through sensuous impulses". Kant finds it a source of difficulty that the practical idea of freedom is founded on the transcendental idea of freedom, but for the sake of practical interests uses the practical meaning, taking "no account of ... its transcendental meaning", which he feels was properly "disposed of" in the Third Antinomy, and as an element in the question of the freedom of the will is for philosophy "a real stumbling block" that has embarrassed speculative reason.
Kant calls practical "everything that is possible through freedom"; he calls the pure practical laws that are never given through sensuous conditions, but are held analogously with the universal law of causality, moral laws. Reason can give us only the "pragmatic laws of free action through the senses", but pure practical laws given by reason a priori dictate "what is to be done". Kant's categories of freedom function primarily as conditions for the possibility for actions (i) to be free, (ii) to be understood as free, and (iii) to be morally evaluated. For Kant, although actions as theoretical objects are constituted by means of the theoretical categories, actions as practical objects (objects of practical use of reason, and which can be good or bad) are constituted by means of the categories of freedom. Only in this way can actions, as phenomena, be a consequence of freedom, and be understood and evaluated as such.
Categorical imperative
Kant makes a distinction between categorical and hypothetical imperatives. A hypothetical imperative is one that we must obey to satisfy contingent desires. A categorical imperative binds us regardless of our desires: for example, everyone has a duty to respect others as individual ends in themselves, regardless of circumstances, even though it is sometimes in our narrowly selfish interest to not do so. These imperatives are morally binding because of the categorical form of their maxims, rather than contingent facts about an agent. Unlike hypothetical imperatives, which bind us insofar as we are part of a group or society which we owe duties to, we cannot opt out of the categorical imperative, because we cannot opt out of being rational agents. We owe a duty to rationality by virtue of being rational agents; therefore, rational moral principles apply to all rational agents at all times. Stated in other terms, with all forms of instrumental rationality excluded from morality, "the moral law itself, Kant holds, can only be the form of lawfulness itself, because nothing else is left once all content has been rejected".
Kant provides three formulations for the categorical imperative. He claims that these are necessarily equivalent, as all being expressions of the pure universality of the moral law as such; many scholars are not convinced. The formulas are as follows:
- Formula of Universal Law:
- "Act only in accordance with that maxim through which you at the same time can will that it become a universal law"; alternatively,
- Formula of the Law of Nature: "So act, as if the maxim of your action were to become through your will a universal law of nature."
- "Act only in accordance with that maxim through which you at the same time can will that it become a universal law"; alternatively,
- Formula of Humanity as End in Itself:
- "So act that you use humanity, as much in your own person as in the person of every other, always at the same time as an end and never merely as a means".
- Formula of Autonomy:
- "the idea of the will of every rational being as a will giving universal law", or "Not to choose otherwise than so that the maxims of one's choice are at the same time comprehended with it in the same volition as universal law"; alternatively,
- Formula of the Realm of Ends: "Act in accordance with maxims of a universally legislative member for a merely possible realm of ends."
- "the idea of the will of every rational being as a will giving universal law", or "Not to choose otherwise than so that the maxims of one's choice are at the same time comprehended with it in the same volition as universal law"; alternatively,
Kant defines maxim as a "subjective principle of volition", which is distinguished from an "objective principle or 'practical law.'" While "the latter is valid for every rational being and is a 'principle according to which they ought to act' a maxim 'contains the practical rule which reason determines in accordance with the conditions of the subject (often their ignorance or inclinations) and is thus the principle according to which the subject does act.'"
Maxims fail to qualify as practical laws if they produce a contradiction in conception or a contradiction in the will when universalized. A contradiction in conception happens when, if a maxim were to be universalized, it ceases to make sense, because the "maxim would necessarily destroy itself as soon as it was made a universal law". For example, if the maxim 'It is permissible to break promises' was universalized, no one would trust any promises made, so the idea of a promise would become meaningless; the maxim would be self-contradictory because, when it is universalized, promises cease to be meaningful. The maxim is not moral because it is logically impossible to universalize—that is, we could not conceive of a world where this maxim was universalized. A maxim can also be immoral if it creates a contradiction in the will when universalized. This does not mean a logical contradiction, but that universalizing the maxim leads to a state of affairs that no rational being would desire.
"The Doctrine of Virtue"
As Kant explains in the 1785 Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and as its title directly indicates, that text is "nothing more than the search for and establishment of the supreme principle of morality". His promised Metaphysics of Morals was much delayed and did not appear until its two parts, "The Doctrine of Right" and "The Doctrine of Virtue", were published separately in 1797 and 1798. The first deals with political philosophy, the second with ethics. "The Doctrine of Virtue" provides "a very different account of ordinary moral reasoning" than the one suggested by the Groundwork. It is concerned with duties of virtue or "ends that are at the same time duties". It is here, in the domain of ethics, that the greatest innovation by The Metaphysics of Morals is to be found. According to Kant's account, "ordinary moral reasoning is fundamentally teleological—it is reasoning about what ends we are constrained by morality to pursue, and the priorities among these ends we are required to observe".
There are two sorts of ends that it is our duty to have: our own perfection and the happiness of others (MS 6:385). "Perfection" includes both our natural perfection (the development of our talents, skills, and capacities of understanding) and moral perfection (our virtuous disposition) (MS 6:387). A person's "happiness" is the greatest rational whole of the ends the person set for the sake of her own satisfaction (MS 6:387–388).
Kant's elaboration of this teleological doctrine offers up a moral theory very different from the one typically attributed to him on the basis of his foundational works alone.
Political philosophy
Main article: Political philosophy of Immanuel KantIn Towards Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Project, Kant listed several conditions that he thought necessary for ending wars and creating a lasting peace. They included a world of constitutional republics. His classical republican theory was extended in the Doctrine of Right, the first part of the Metaphysics of Morals (1797). Kant believed that universal history leads to the ultimate world of republican states at peace, but his theory was not pragmatic. The process was described in Perpetual Peace as natural rather than rational:
What affords this guarantee (surety) is nothing less than the great artist nature (natura daedala rerum) from whose mechanical course purposiveness shines forth visibly, letting concord arise by means of the discord between human beings even against their will; and for this reason nature, regarded as necessitation by a cause the laws of whose operation are unknown to us, is called fate, but if we consider its purposiveness in the course of the world as the profound wisdom of a higher cause directed to the objective final end of the human race and predetermining this course of the world, it is called providence.
Kant's political thought can be summarized as republican government and international organization: "In more characteristically Kantian terms, it is doctrine of the state based upon the law (Rechtsstaat) and of eternal peace. Indeed, in each of these formulations, both terms express the same idea: that of legal constitution or of 'peace through law.'" "Kant's political philosophy, being essentially a legal doctrine, rejects by definition the opposition between moral education and the play of passions as alternate foundations for social life. The state is defined as the union of men under law. The state rightly so called is constituted by laws which are necessary a priori because they flow from the very concept of law. A regime can be judged by no other criteria nor be assigned any other functions, than those proper to the lawful order as such."
Kant opposed "democracy", which at his time meant direct democracy, believing that majority rule posed a threat to individual liberty. He stated that "democracy in the strict sense of the word is necessarily a despotism because it establishes an executive power in which all decide for and, if need be, against one (who thus does not agree), so that all, who are nevertheless not all, decide; and this is a contradiction of the general will with itself and with freedom."
As with most writers at the time, Kant distinguished three forms of government—namely, democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy—with mixed government as the most ideal form of it. He believed in republican ideals and forms of governance, and rule of law brought on by them. Although Kant published this as a "popular piece", Mary J. Gregor points out that two years later, in The Metaphysics of Morals, Kant claims to demonstrate systematically that "establishing universal and lasting peace constitutes not merely a part of the doctrine of right, but rather the entire final end of the doctrine of right within the limits of mere reason".
The Doctrine of Right, published in 1797, contains Kant's most mature and systematic contribution to political philosophy. It addresses duties according to law, which are "concerned only with protecting the external freedom of individuals" and indifferent to incentives. Although there is a moral duty "to limit ourselves to actions that are right, that duty is not part of itself". Its basic political idea is that "each person's entitlement to be his or her own master is only consistent with the entitlements of others if public legal institutions are in place". He formulates the universal principle of right as:
Any action is right if it can coexist with everyone's freedom in accordance with a universal law, or if on its maxim the freedom of choice of each can coexist with everyone's freedom in accordance with a universal law. (MS 6:230).
Religious writings
Main article: Religion within the Bounds of Bare ReasonStarting in the 20th century, commentators tended to see Kant as having a strained relationship with religion, although in the nineteenth century this had not been the prevalent view. Karl Leonhard Reinhold, whose letters helped make Kant famous, wrote: "I believe that I may infer without reservation that the interest of religion, and of Christianity in particular, accords completely with the result of the Critique of Reason." According to Johann Schultz, who wrote one of the first commentaries on Kant: "And does not this system itself cohere most splendidly with the Christian religion? Do not the divinity and beneficence of the latter become all the more evident?" The reason for these views was Kant's moral theology and the widespread belief that his philosophy was the great antithesis to Spinozism, which was widely seen as a form of sophisticated pantheism or even atheism. As Kant's philosophy disregarded the possibility of arguing for God through pure reason alone, for the same reasons it also disregarded the possibility of arguing against God through pure reason alone.
Kant directs his strongest criticisms of the organization and practices of religious organizations at those that encourage what he sees as a religion of counterfeit service to God. Among the major targets of his criticism are external ritual, superstition, and a hierarchical church order. He sees these as efforts to make oneself pleasing to God in ways other than conscientious adherence to the principle of moral rightness in choosing and acting upon one's maxims. Kant's criticisms on these matters, along with his rejection of certain theoretical proofs for the existence of God that were grounded in pure reason (particularly the ontological argument) and his philosophical commentary on some Christian doctrines, have resulted in interpretations that see Kant as hostile to religion in general and to Christianity in particular. Other interpreters, nevertheless, consider that Kant was trying to mark off defensible from indefensible Christian belief.
Regarding Kant's conception of religion, some critics have argued that he was sympathetic to deism. Other critics have argued that Kant's moral conception moves from deism to theism (as moral theism), for example Allen W. Wood, as well as Merold Westphal. As for Kant's book Religion within the Bounds of Mere Reason, it was emphasized that Kant reduced religiosity to rationality, religion to morality, and Christianity to ethics; however, many interpreters, including Wood, alongside Lawrence Pasternack, now agree with Stephen Palmquist's claim that a better way of reading Kant's Religion is to see him as raising morality to the status of religion.
Aesthetics
See also: Kant's teleologyKant discusses the subjective nature of aesthetic qualities and experiences in Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1764). Kant's contribution to aesthetic theory is developed in the Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), where he investigates the possibility and logical status of "judgments of taste". In the "Critique of Aesthetic Judgment", the first major division of the Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant used the term "aesthetic" in a manner that resembles its modern sense. In the Critique of Pure Reason, to note essential differences between judgments of taste, moral judgments, and scientific judgments, Kant abandoned the term "aesthetic" as "designating the critique of taste", noting that judgments of taste could never be "directed" by "laws a priori". After A. G. Baumgarten, who wrote Aesthetica (1750–58), Kant was one of the first philosophers to develop and integrate aesthetic theory into a unified and comprehensive philosophical system, utilizing ideas that played an integral role throughout his philosophy. In the chapter "Analytic of the Beautiful" in the Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant states that beauty is not a property of an artwork or natural phenomenon, but is instead consciousness of the pleasure that attends the 'free play' of the imagination and the understanding. Even though it appears that we are using reason to decide what is beautiful, the judgment is not a cognitive judgment, "and is consequently not logical, but aesthetical".
A pure judgement of taste is subjective since it refers to the emotional response of the subject and is based upon nothing but esteem for an object itself: it is a disinterested pleasure, and we feel that pure judgements of taste (i.e., judgements of beauty), lay claim to universal validity. This universal validity is not derived from a determinate concept of beauty but from common sense. Kant also believed that a judgment of taste shares characteristics with a moral judgment: both are disinterested, and we hold them to be universal. In the chapter "Analytic of the Sublime," Kant identifies the sublime as an aesthetic quality that, like beauty, is subjective, but unlike beauty, it refers to an indeterminate relationship between the faculties of the imagination and reason. It also shares the character of moral judgments in its engagement with reason. The feeling of the sublime, divided into two distinct modes (the mathematical and the dynamical sublime), describes two subjective moments that concern the relationship of the faculty of the imagination to reason. Some commentators argue that Kant's critical philosophy contains a third kind of the sublime, the moral sublime, which is the aesthetic response to the moral law or a representation, and a development of the "noble" sublime in Kant's theory of 1764.
The mathematical sublime results from the failure of the imagination to comprehend natural objects that appear boundless and formless, or appear "absolutely great". This imaginative failure is then recuperated through the pleasure taken in reason's assertion of the concept of infinity. In this move the faculty of reason proves itself superior to our fallible sensible self. In the dynamical sublime, there is the sense of annihilation of the sensible self as the imagination tries to comprehend a vast might. This power of nature threatens us but through the resistance of reason to such sensible annihilation, the subject feels a pleasure and a sense of the human moral vocation. This appreciation of moral feeling through exposure to the sublime helps to develop moral character. Kant developed a theory of humor, which has been interpreted as an "incongruity" theory. He illustrated his theory of humor by telling three narrative jokes in the Critique of Judgment. He thought that the physiological impact of humor is akin to that of music.
Kant developed a distinction between an object of art as a material value subject to the conventions of society and the transcendental condition of the judgment of taste as a "refined" value in his Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim (1784). In the Fourth and Fifth Theses of that work he identified all art as the "fruits of unsociableness" due to men's "antagonism in society" and, in the Seventh Thesis, asserted that while such material property is indicative of a civilized state, only the ideal of morality and the universalization of refined value through the improvement of the mind "belongs to culture".
Anthropology
Kant lectured on anthropology, the study of human nature, for twenty-three years. His Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View was published in 1798. Transcripts of Kant's lectures on anthropology were published for the first time in 1997 in German. Kant was among the first people of his time to introduce anthropology as an intellectual area of study, long before the field gained popularity, and his texts are considered to have advanced the field. His point of view was to influence the works of later philosophers such as Martin Heidegger and Paul Ricoeur.
Kant was the first to suggest using a dimensionality approach to human diversity. He analyzed the nature of the Hippocrates-Galen four temperaments and plotted in two dimensions "what belongs to a human being's faculty of desire": "his natural aptitude or natural predisposition" and "his temperament or sensibility". Cholerics were described as emotional and energetic, phlegmatics as balanced and weak, sanguines as balanced and energetic, and melancholics as emotional and weak. These two dimensions reappeared in all subsequent models of temperament and personality traits. Kant viewed anthropology in two broad categories: (1) the physiological approach, which he referred to as "what nature makes of the human being"; and (2) the pragmatic approach, which explores the things that a human "can and should make of himself".
Racism
Kant's theory of race and his prejudicial beliefs are among the most contentious areas of recent Kant scholarship. While few, if any, dispute the overt racism and chauvinism present in his work, a more contested question is the degree to which it degrades or invalidates his other contributions. His most severe critics assert that Kant intentionally manipulated science to support chattel slavery and discrimination. Others acknowledge that he lived in an era of immature science, with many erroneous beliefs, some racist, all appearing decades before evolution, molecular genetics, and other sciences that today are taken for granted. Kant was one of the most notable Enlightenment thinkers to defend racism. Philosopher Charles W. Mills is unequivocal: "Kant is also seen as one of the central figures in the birth of modern 'scientific' racism. Whereas other contributors to early racial thought like Carolus Linnaeus and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach had offered only 'empirical' (scare-quotes necessary!) observation, Kant produced a full-blown theory of race."
Using the four temperaments of ancient Greece, Kant proposed a hierarchy of racial categories including white Europeans, black Africans, and red Native Americans. Although he was a proponent of scientific racism for much of his career, Kant's views on race changed significantly in the last decade of his life, and he ultimately rejected racial hierarchies and European colonialism in Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch (1795). Kant was an opponent of miscegenation, believing that whites would be "degraded" and that "fusing of races" is undesirable, for "not every race adopts the morals and customs of the Europeans". He states that "instead of assimilation, which was intended by the melting together of the various races, nature has here made a law of just the opposite". Kant was also an anti-Semite, believing that Jews were incapable of transcending material forces, which a moral order required. In this way, Jews are presented as the opposite of autonomous, rational Christians, and therefore incapable of being incorporated into an ethical Christian society. In his "Anthropology", Kant called the Jews "a nation of cheaters" and portrayed them as "a group that has followed not the path of transcendental freedom but that of enslavement to the material world".
Mills wrote that Kant has been "sanitized for public consumption", his racist works conveniently ignored. Robert Bernasconi stated that Kant "supplied the first scientific definition of race". Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze is credited with bringing Kant's contributions to racism to light in the 1990s among Western philosophers, who he believed often glossed over this part of his life and works. Pauline Kleingeld argues that, while Kant "did defend a racial hierarchy until at least the end of the 1780s", his views on race changed significantly in works published in the last decade of his life. In particular, she argues that Kant rejected past views related to racial hierarchies and the diminished rights or moral status of non-whites in Perpetual Peace (1795). This work also saw him providing extended arguments against European colonialism, which he claimed was morally unjust and incompatible with the equal rights held by indigenous populations. Kleingeld argues that this shift in Kant's views later in life has often been forgotten or ignored in the literature on Kant's racist anthropology, and that the shift suggests a belated recognition of the fact that racial hierarchy was incompatible with a universalized moral framework.
While Kant's racist rhetoric is indicative of the state of scholarship and science during the 18th century, German philosopher Daniel-Pascal Zorn explains the risk of taking period quotations out of context. Many of Kant's most outrageous quotations are from a series of articles from 1777–1788, a public exchange among Kant, Herder, natural scientist Georg Forster, and other scholars prominent in that period. Kant asserts that all races of humankind are of the same species, challenging the position of Forster and others that the races were distinct species. While his commentary is clearly biased at times, certain extreme statements were patterned specifically to paraphrase or counter Forster and other authors. By considering the full arc of Kant's scholarship, Zorn notes the progression in both his philosophical and his anthropological works, "with which he argues, against the zeitgeist, for the unity of humanity".
Influence and legacy
Kant's influence on Western thought has been profound. Although the basic tenets of Kant's transcendental idealism (i.e., that space and time are a priori forms of human perception rather than real properties and the claim that formal logic and transcendental logic coincide) have been claimed to be falsified by modern science and logic, and no longer set the intellectual agenda of contemporary philosophers, Kant is credited with having innovated the way philosophical inquiry has been carried on at least up to the early nineteenth century. This shift consisted of several closely related innovations that, although highly contentious in themselves, have become important in subsequent philosophy and in the social sciences broadly construed:
- The human subject seen as the center of inquiry into human knowledge, such that it is impossible to philosophize about things as they exist independently of human perception or of how they are "for us";
- the notion that is possible to discover and systematically explore the inherent limits of the human ability to know entirely a priori;
- the notion of the "categorical imperative", an assertion that people are naturally endowed with the ability and obligation toward right reason and acting. Perhaps his most famous quote is drawn from the Critique of Practical Reason: "Two things fill my mind with ever new and increasing admiration and reverence ... : the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me";
- the concept of "conditions of possibility", as in his notion of "the conditions of possible experience"; that is, that things, knowledge, and forms of consciousness rest on prior conditions that make them possible, so that, to understand or to know them, several conditions must be understood:
- the claim that objective experience is actively constituted or constructed by the functioning of the human mind;
- the concept of moral autonomy as central to humanity; and
- the assertion of the principle that human beings should be treated as ends rather than as mere means.
Kant's ideas have been incorporated into a variety of schools of thought. These include German idealism, Marxism, positivism, phenomenology, existentialism, critical theory, linguistic philosophy, structuralism, post-structuralism, and deconstruction.
Historical influence
During his own life, much critical attention was paid to Kant's thought. He influenced Reinhold, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and Novalis during the 1780s and 1790s. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was greatly influenced by Kant and helped to spread awareness of him, and of German Idealism generally, in the UK and the US. In his Biographia Literaria (1817), he credits Kant's ideas in coming to believe that the mind is not a passive, but an active agent in the apprehension of reality. Hegel was one of Kant's first major critics. In Hegel's view the entire project of setting a "transcendental subject" (i.e., human consciousness) apart from the living individual as well as from nature, history, and society was fundamentally flawed, although parts of that very project could be put to good use in a new direction. Similar concerns motivated Hegel's criticisms of Kant's concept of moral autonomy, to which Hegel opposed an ethic focused on the "ethical life" of the community. In a sense, Hegel's notion of "ethical life" is meant to subsume, rather than replace, Kantian ethics. And Hegel can be seen as trying to defend Kant's idea of freedom as going beyond finite "desires", by means of reason. Thus, in contrast to later critics like Nietzsche or Russell, Hegel shares some of Kant's concerns.
Kant's thinking on religion was used in Britain by philosophers such as Thomas Carlyle to challenge the nineteenth-century decline in religious faith. British Catholic writers, notably G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, followed this approach. Criticisms of Kant were common in the realist views of the new positivism at that time. Arthur Schopenhauer was strongly influenced by Kant's transcendental idealism. Like G. E. Schulze, Jacobi, and Fichte before him, Schopenhauer was critical of Kant's theory of the thing-in-itself. Things-in-themselves, they argued, are neither the cause of what we observe, nor are they completely beyond our access. Ever since the Critique of Pure Reason, philosophers have been critical of Kant's theory of the thing-in-itself. Many have argued that, if such a thing exists beyond experience, then one cannot posit that it affects us causally, since that would entail stretching the category "causality" beyond the realm of experience.
With the success and wide influence of Hegel's writings, Kant's own influence began to wane, but a re-examination of his ideas began in Germany in 1865 with the publication of Kant und die Epigonen by Otto Liebmann, whose motto was "Back to Kant". There proceeded an important revival of Kant's theoretical philosophy, known as Neo-Kantianism. Kant's notion of "critique" has been more broadly influential. The early German Romantics, especially Friedrich Schlegel in his "Athenaeum Fragments", used Kant's reflexive conception of criticism in their Romantic theory of poetry. Also in aesthetics, Clement Greenberg, in his classic essay "Modernist Painting", uses Kantian criticism, what Greenberg refers to as "immanent criticism", to justify the aims of abstract painting, a movement Greenberg saw as aware of the key limitation—flatness—that makes up the medium of painting. French philosopher Michel Foucault was also greatly influenced by Kant's notion of "critique" and wrote several pieces on Kant for a re-thinking of the Enlightenment as a form of "critical thought". He went so far as to classify his own philosophy as a "critical history of modernity, rooted in Kant".
Kant believed that mathematical truths were forms of synthetic a priori knowledge, which means they are necessary and universal, yet known through the a priori intuition of space and time, as transcendental preconditions of experience. Kant's often brief remarks about mathematics influenced the mathematical school known as intuitionism, a movement in philosophy of mathematics opposed to Hilbert's formalism, and Frege and Bertrand Russell's logicism.
Influence on modern thinkers
With his Perpetual Peace, Kant is considered to have foreshadowed many of the ideas that have come to form the democratic peace theory, one of the main controversies in political science. More concretely, constructivist theorist Alexander Wendt proposed that the anarchy of the international system could evolve from the "brutish" Hobbesian anarchy understood by realist theorists, through Lockean anarchy, and ultimately a Kantian anarchy in which states would see their self-interests as inextricably linked to the well being of other states, thus transforming international politics into a far more peaceful form.
Prominent recent Kantians include the British philosophers P. F. Strawson, Onora O'Neill, and Quassim Cassam, and the American philosophers Wilfrid Sellars and Christine Korsgaard. Due to the influence of Strawson and Sellars, among others, there has been a renewed interest in Kant's view of the mind. Central to many debates in philosophy of psychology and cognitive science is Kant's conception of the unity of consciousness.
Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls are two significant political and moral philosophers whose work is strongly influenced by Kant's moral philosophy. They have argued against relativism, supporting the Kantian view that universality is essential to any viable moral philosophy. Mou Zongsan's study of Kant has been cited as a highly crucial part in the development of Mou's personal philosophy, namely New Confucianism. Widely regarded as the most influential Kant scholar in China, Mou's rigorous critique of Kant's philosophy—having translated all three of Kant's critiques—served as an ardent attempt to reconcile Chinese and Western philosophy whilst increasing pressure to Westernize in China.
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 influence extended to the social, behavioral, and physical sciences—as in the sociology of Max Weber, the psychology of Jean Piaget, and Carl Gustav Jung. 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, although it was one which he later criticized and rejected. In the 2020s, there was a renewed interest in Kant's theory of mind from the point of view of formal logic and computer science.
Bibliography
Unless otherwise noted, all citations are to The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant in English Translation, 16 vols., ed. Guyer, Paul, and Wood, Allen W. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Citations in the article are to individual works per abbreviations in List of Major works below.
- Theoretical Philosophy, 1755-1770. Ed. and trans. David Walford with Ralf Meerbote. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
- Lectures on Logic. Ed. and trans. J. Michael Young. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
- Opus postumum. Ed. Eckart Förster, trans. Eckart Förster and Michael Rosen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993
- Practical Philosophy. Ed. and trans. Mary J. Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
- Religion and Rational Theology. Ed. and trans.Allen W. Wood and George di Giovanni. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996
- Lectures on Metaphysics. Ed. and trans. Karl Ameriks and Steve Naragon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
- Lectures on Ethics. Ed. Peter Heath and J.B. Schneewind, trans. Peter Heath. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
- Critique of Pure Reason. Ed. and trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
- Correspondence. Ed. and trans. Arnulf Zweig. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
- Critique of the Power of Judgment. Ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
- Theoretical Philosophy after 1781. Ed. Henry Allison and Peter Heath, trans. Gary Hatfield, Michael Friedman, Henry Allison, and Peter Heath. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
- Notes and Fragments. Ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Curtis Bowman, Paul Guyer, and Frederick Rauscher. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
- Anthropology, History, and Education, Ed. Günter Zöller and Robert B. Louden. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
- Lectures on Anthropology, Ed. Allen W. Wood and Robert B. Louden Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
- Natural Science, Ed. Eric Watkins. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
List of major works
Abbreviations used in body of article are boldface in brackets. Unless otherwise noted, pagination is to the critical Akademie edition, which can be found in the margins of the Cambridge translations.
- 1749: Thoughts on the True Estimation of Living Forces (Gedanken von der wahren Schätzung der lebendigen Kräfte)
- 1755: Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens (Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels)
- 1755: Brief Outline of Certain Meditations on Fire (Meditationum quarundam de igne succinta delineatio (master's thesis under Johann Gottfried Teske))
- 1755: A New Elucidation of the First Principles of Metaphysical Cognition (Principiorum primorum cognitionis metaphysicae nova dilucidatio (doctoral thesis))
- 1756: The Use in Natural Philosophy of Metaphysics Combined with Geometry, Part I: Physical Monadology (Metaphysicae cum geometrica iunctae usus in philosophia naturali, cuius specimen I. continet monadologiam physicam, abbreviated as Monadologia Physica (thesis as a prerequisite of associate professorship))
- 1762: The False Subtlety of the Four Syllogistic Figures (Die falsche Spitzfindigkeit der vier syllogistischen Figuren)
- 1763: The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God (Der einzig mögliche Beweisgrund zu einer Demonstration des Daseins Gottes)
- 1763: Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy (Versuch den Begriff der negativen Größen in die Weltweisheit einzuführen)
- 1764: Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen)
- 1764: Essay on the Illness of the Head (Über die Krankheit des Kopfes)
- 1764: Inquiry Concerning the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morality (the Prize Essay) (Untersuchungen über die Deutlichkeit der Grundsätze der natürlichen Theologie und der Moral)
- 1766: Dreams of a Spirit-Seer (Träume eines Geistersehers)
- 1768: On the Ultimate Ground of the Differentiation of Regions in Space (Von dem ersten Grunde des Unterschiedes der Gegenden im Raume)
- 1770: Dissertation on the Form and Principles of the Sensible and the Intelligible World (De mundi sensibilis atque intelligibilis forma et principiis )
- 1775: On the Different Races of Man (Über die verschiedenen Rassen der Menschen)
- 1781: First edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (Kritik der reinen Vernunft)
- 1783: Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik)
- 1784: "An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?" ("Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?")
- 1784: "Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose" ("Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht")
- 1785: "Determination of the Concept of a Human Race" (Bestimmung des Begriffs einer Menschenrace)
- 1785: Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten)
- 1786: Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft)
- 1786: "What does it mean to orient oneself in thinking?" ("Was heißt: sich im Denken orientieren?")
- 1786: Conjectural Beginning of Human History (Mutmaßlicher Anfang der Menschengeschichte)
- 1787: Second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (Kritik der reinen Vernunft)
- 1788: Critique of Practical Reason (Kritik der praktischen Vernunft)
- 1790: Critique of Judgment (Kritik der Urteilskraft)
- 1793: Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason (Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft)
- 1793: On the Old Saw: That May be Right in Theory But It Won't Work in Practice (Über den Gemeinspruch: Das mag in der Theorie richtig sein, taugt aber nicht für die Praxis)
- 1795: Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch ("Zum ewigen Frieden")
- 1797: Metaphysics of Morals (Metaphysik der Sitten). First part is The Doctrine of Right, which has often been published separately as The Science of Right.
- 1798: Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht)
- 1798: Conflict of Faculties (Der Streit der Fakultäten)
- 1800: Logic (Logik)
- 1803: On Pedagogy (Über Pädagogik)
- 1804: Opus Postumum
- 1817: Lectures on Philosophical Theology (Immanuel Kants Vorlesungen über die philosophische Religionslehre edited by K.H.L. Pölitz)
Collected works in German
Wilhelm Dilthey inaugurated the Academy edition (the Akademie-Ausgabe abbreviated as AA or Ak) of Kant's writings (Gesammelte Schriften, Königlich-Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Berlin, 1902–38) in 1895, and served as its first editor. The volumes are grouped into four sections:
- I. Kant's published writings (vols. 1–9),
- II. Kant's correspondence (vols. 10–13),
- III. Kant's literary remains, or Nachlass (vols. 14–23), and
- IV. Student notes from Kant's lectures (vols. 24–29).
An electronic version is also available: Elektronische Edition der Gesammelten Werke Immanuel Kants (vols. 1–23).
Notes
- UK: /kænt/, US: /kɑːnt/, German: [ɪˈmaːnu̯eːl kant];
- Kant himself seems to have found his contribution not significant enough that he published his arguments in a newspaper commentary on the prize question and did not submit them to the Academy: "Whether the Earth has Undergone an Alteration of its Axial Rotation". Kant's Cosmogony. Translated by Hastie, William. Glasgow: James Maclehose. 1900 . pp. 1–11. Retrieved 29 March 2022.. The prize was instead awarded in 1756 to P. Frisi, who incorrectly argued against the slowing down of the spin.
- Since he had written his last habilitation thesis 14 years earlier, a new habilitation thesis was required (see S.J. McGrath, Joseph Carew (eds.), Rethinking German Idealism, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, p. 24).
- It has been noted that in 1778, in response to one of these offers by a former pupil, Kant wrote, "Any change makes me apprehensive, even if it offers the greatest promise of improving my condition, and I am persuaded by this natural instinct of mine that I must take heed if I wish that the threads which the Fates spin so thin and weak in my case to be spun to any length. My great thanks, to my well-wishers and friends, who think so kindly of me as to undertake my welfare, but at the same time a most humble request to protect me in my current condition from any disturbance."
- More technically, Kant puts his general point that all genuine knowledge requires both sensory input and intellectual organization by saying that all knowledge requires both "intuitions" and "concepts" (e.g., A 50 / B 74). Intuitions and concepts are two different species of the genus "representation" (Vorstellung), Kant's most general term for any cognitive state (see A 320 / B 376–7). At the outset of the "Transcendental Aesthetic", Kant states that an "intuition" is our most direct or "immediate" kind of representation of objects, in contrast to a "concept" which always represents an object "through a detour (indirecte)"—that is, merely by some "mark" or property that the object has (A 19 / B 33). In his logic textbook, Kant defines an intuition as a "singular representation"—that is, one that represents a particular object—while a concept is always a "universal (repraesentation per notas communes)", which represents properties common to many objects (Logic, §1, 9:91).
- Beardsley, Monroe. "History of Aesthetics". Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Vol. 1, section on "Toward a unified aesthetics", p. 25, Macmillan 1973. Baumgarten coined the term "aesthetics" and expanded, clarified, and unified Wolffian aesthetic theory, but had left the Aesthetica unfinished (See also: Tonelli, Giorgio. "Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten". Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Vol. 1, Macmillan 1973). In Bernard's translation of the Critique of Judgment he indicates in the notes that Kant's reference in § 15 in regard to the identification of perfection and beauty is probably a reference to Baumgarten.
- Kant's general discussions of the distinction between "cognition" and "conscious of" are also given in the Critique of Pure Reason (notably A320/B376), and section V and the conclusion of section VIII of his Introduction in Logic.
- Kant wrote that " contain all the impulses of nature in affects and passions, all talents, all dispositions to culture and civilization and can as readily obey as govern. They are the only ones who always advance to perfection." He describes South Asians as "educated to the highest degree but only in the arts and not in the sciences". He goes on that Hindustanis can never reach the level of abstract concepts and that a "great hindustani man" is one who has "gone far in the art of deception and has much money". He states that the Hindus always stay the way they are and can never advance. About black Africans, Kant wrote that "they can be educated but only as servants, that is they allow themselves to be trained". To Kant, "the Negro can be disciplined and cultivated, but is never genuinely civilized. He falls of his own accord into savagery." Native Americans, Kant opined, "cannot be educated". He calls them unmotivated, lacking affect, passion and love, and describes them as too weak for labor, unfit for any culture, and too phlegmatic for diligence. He said that Native Americans are "far below the Negro, who undoubtedly holds the lowest of all remaining levels by which we designate the different races". Kant stated that "Americans and Blacks cannot govern themselves. They thus serve only for slaves."
- Oliver A. Johnson claims, "With the possible exception of Plato's Republic, (Critique of Pure Reason) is the most important philosophical book ever written." Article on Kant within the collection Great thinkers of the Western World, Ian P. McGreal, Ed., HarperCollins, 1992.
- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Natural Law: The Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Law, Its Place in Moral Philosophy, and Its Relation to the Positive Sciences. trans. T. M. Knox. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1975. Hegel's mature view and his concept of "ethical life" is elaborated in his Philosophy of Right. Hegel, Philosophy of Right. trans. T. M. Knox. Oxford University Press, 1967.
- Robert Pippin's Hegel's Idealism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) emphasizes the continuity of Hegel's concerns with Kant's. Robert Wallace, Hegel's Philosophy of Reality, Freedom, and God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) explains how Hegel's Science of Logic defends Kant's idea of freedom as going beyond finite "inclinations", contra skeptics such as David Hume.
- For a review of this problem and the relevant literature see The Thing in Itself and the Problem of Affection in the revised edition of Henry Allison's Kant's Transcendental Idealism.
- Körner, Stephan, The Philosophy of Mathematics, Dover, 1986. For an analysis of Kant's writings on mathematics see, Friedman, Michael, Kant and the Exact Sciences, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1992.
- Strawson, P. F., The Bounds of Sense: An Essay on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Routledge: 2004. When first published in 1966, this book forced many Anglo-American philosophers to reconsider Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.
- Korsgaard, Christine. Creating the Kingdom of Ends. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996.ISBN 978-0-521-49644-5 Not a commentary, but a defense of a broadly Kantian approach to ethics.
- Brook, Andrew. Kant and the Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. See also, Meerbote, R. "Kant's Functionalism". In: J. C. Smith, ed. Historical Foundations of Cognitive Science. Dordrecht, Holland: Reidel, 1991. Brook has an article on Kant's View of the Mind in the Stanford Encyclopedia Archived 9 July 2010 at the Wayback Machine
- See Habermas, J. Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action. Trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1996. For Rawls see, Rawls, John. Theory of Justice Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1971. Rawls has a well-known essay on Kant's concept of good. See, Rawls, "Themes in Kant's Moral Philosophy" in Kant's Transcendental Deductions. Ed. Eckart Förster. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989.
- available online at Bonner Kant-Korpus Archived 6 March 2016 at the Wayback Machine.
- As noted by Allen W. Wood in his Introduction, p. 12. Wood further speculates that the lectures themselves were delivered in the Winter of 1783–84.
References
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- ^ Smith, Homer W. (1952). Man and His Gods. New York: Grosset & Dunlap. p. 404.
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- Rohlf 2020, §2.2.
- Jankowiak 2023, 2(g).
- Guyer 2014, ch. 4.
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- ^ Rohlf 2020, §3.
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- Guyer & Wood 1998, p. 11.
- see Kant, CPuR A182–26/B224–36
- see Kant, CPuR A186–211/B232–56
- see Kant, CPuR A211-15/B256-62
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- ^ Guyer & Wood 1998, p. 15.
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- ^ Jankowiak 2023, §2(g.ii).
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- Jankowiak 2023, §2(g.iii).
- Guyer & Wood 1998, p. 18.
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- Johann Schultz, Exposition of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (1784), 141.
- Kant, RBMR Part IV, First part, First section
- E.g., Walsh, W. H., 1967, "Kant, Immanuel: Philosophy of Religion", The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Volume Four, Paul Edwards (ed.), New York: Macmillan Publishing Co. Inc. & The Free Press, 322.
- Pasternack, Lawrence; Rossi, Philip. "Kant's Philosophy of Religion". In Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2014 ed.). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. Archived from the original on 9 July 2010. Retrieved 18 October 2019.
- For example Peter Byrne, who wrote about Kant's relationship with deism. Byrne, Peter (2007), Kant on God, London: Ashgate, p. 159.
- Wood, Allen W. (1970), Kant's moral religion, London and Ithaca: Cornell University Press, p. 16.
- Westphal, Merold (2010), The Emergence of Modern Philosophy of Religion, in Taliaferro, Charles, Draper, Paul and Quinn, Philip (editors), A Companion to Philosophy of Religion, Oxford: Blackwell, p. 135.
- Iţu, Mircia (2004), Dumnezeu şi religia în concepţia lui Immanuel Kant din Religia în limitele raţiunii, in Boboc, Alexandru and Mariş, N.I. (editors), Studii de istoria filosofiei universale, volume 12, Bucharest: Romanian Academy.
- Wood, Allen W. (2020), Kant and Religion, Cambridge University Press, p.2.
- See e.g., Lawrence Pasternack, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Kant on Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (New York, Routledge, 2014), pp. 239–240.
- Palmquist, Stephen (1992), "Does Kant Reduce Religion to Morality?", Kant-Studien 83.2, pp. 129–148.
- Critique of Judgment in "Kant, Immanuel", Encyclopedia of Philosophy, volume 5, Macmillan, 2006, accessed on 16 November 2024
- Kant, CPuR A22/B36
- German Idealism in "History of Aesthetics" Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Vol 1. Macmillan, 1973.
- Kant, CPJ §1
- Kant, CPJ §§ 20–22
- Kant, CPJ §40
- Guyer, Paul (1997). Kant and the Claims of Taste. Harvard University Press. pp. 15–20. ISBN 978-0674500358.
- Clewis, Robert R. (2009). The Kantian Sublime and the Revelation of Freedom. Cambridge University Press. pp. 48–52. ISBN 978-0521760867.
- Kant, CPJ §24
- Clewis, Robert (2009). "The Kantian Sublime and the Revelation of Freedom". Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Archived from the original on 20 October 2012. Retrieved 8 December 2011.
- Kant, CPJ §§23–25
- Kant, CPJ §§25–26
- Kant, CPJ §54
- Jakobidze-Gitman, Alexander (2020). "Kant's Situated Approach to Musicking and Joking". Journal of Interdisciplinary Music Studies. 10: 17–33. doi:10.25364/24.10:2020.2.
- Kant, UH 8:20–22
- Kant, UH 8:24–26.
- Wilson, Holly (2006). Kant's Pragmatic Anthropology. Albany: State University of New York Press. p. 7. ISBN 978-0-7914-6849-4.
- Thomas Sturm, Kant und die Wissenschaften vom Menschen (Paderborn: Mentis Verlag, 2009).
- Piercey, Robert; Philosophy Documentation Center (2011). "Kant and the Problem of Hermeneutics: Heidegger and Ricoeur on the Transcendental Schematism". Idealistic Studies. 41 (3): 187–202. doi:10.5840/idstudies201141315. ISSN 0046-8541.
- Kant APPV 7:285
- Kant APPV 7:119
- ^ Mikkelsen, Jon M., ed. (2013). Kant and the Concept of Race. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press. pp. 12–30. ISBN 978-1438443614.
- ^ Zorn, Daniel-Pascal (2020). "Kant—a Racist?". Public History Weekly. 2020 (8). doi:10.1515/phw-2020-17156. ISSN 2197-6376. S2CID 225247836.
- ^ Kleingeld 2007, pp. 573–592.
- Eze, Emmanuel (1997). "The Color of Reason: the Idea of 'Race' in Kant's Anthropology". In Eze, Emmanuel Chukwudi (ed.). Postcolonial African Philosophy: A Critical Reader. Blackwell. pp. 103–140. Retrieved 20 April 2023.
- Serequeberhan, T. (1996). "Eurocentrism in Philosophy: the Case of Immanuel Kant". The Philosophical Forum. S2CID 170547963.
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- Mills 2017, p. 95.
- ^ Kant, Immanuel (1997) . "On the Different Races of Man". In Eze, Emmanuel Chukwudi (ed.). Race and the Enlightenment: a reader. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell. pp. 38–49. ISBN 0-631-20136-X. OCLC 34663347.
- Mills 2017, pp. 91–112.
- Mills 2017, pp. 169–193.
- Bowersox 2016.
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- Bouie 2018.
- Mikkelsen, Jon M., ed. (2013). Kant and the Concept of Race: late eighteenth-century writings. Jon M. Mikkelsen. Albany: State University of New York Press. ISBN 978-1-4619-4312-9. OCLC 861693001.
- Kuehn 2001, pp. 298–301, 343–345.
- cf. Kant, DCHR 8:91-106
- Strawson, Peter. Bounds of Sense: Essay on Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason". ASIN 0415040302.
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- Stephen Palmquist, "The Architectonic Form of Kant's Copernican Logic", Metaphilosophy 17:4 (October 1986), pp. 266–288; revised and reprinted as Chapter III of Kant's System of Perspectives Archived 14 April 2012 at the Wayback Machine: An architectonic interpretation of the Critical philosophy (Lanham: University Press of America, 1993).
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- Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1827). Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline. Heidelberg. pp. 14–15.
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- Greenberg, Clement. "Modernist Painting", in The Philosophy of Art, ed. Alex Neill and Aaron Ridley, McGraw-Hill, 1995.
- See "Essential Works of Foucault: 1954–1984 vol. 2: Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology". Ed. by James Faubion, Trans. Robert Hurley et al. New York City: The New Press, 1998 (2010 reprint). See "Foucault, Michel, 1926 –" entry by Maurice Florence.
- For a discussion and qualified defense of this position, see Stephen Palmquist, "A Priori Knowledge in Perspective: (I) Mathematics, Method and Pure Intuition", The Review of Metaphysics 41:1 (September 1987), pp. 3–22.
- Ray, James Lee (1998). "Does Democracy Cause Peace?". Annual Review of Political Science. 1: 27–46. doi:10.1146/annurev.polisci.1.1.27. Archived from the original on 17 February 2008.
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- Aridi, Sara (14 March 2017). "Onora O'Neill Wins Holberg Prize for Academic Research". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 9 January 2019. Retrieved 9 January 2019.
- Cassam, Q. The Possibility of Knowledge Oxford: 2009
- Sellars, Wilfrid, Science and Metaphysics: Variations on Kantian Themes. Ridgeview Publishing Company, 1967
- Habermas, J. (1994): The Unity of Reason in the Diversity of Its Voices. In: Habermas, J. (Ed.): Postmetaphysical Thinking. Political Essays, Cambridge, Massachusetts: 115–148.
- Palmquist, Stephen (2010). Cultivating Personhood: Kant and Asian Philosophy. Hong Kong: De Gruyter, Inc. p. 25. ISBN 978-3-11-022624-9.
- Wing-Cheuk, Chan (21 February 2006). "Mou Zongsan's Transformation of Kant's Philosophy". Journal of Chinese Philosophy. 33 (1): 1. doi:10.1111/j.1540-6253.2006.00340.x.
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- Isaacson, Walter. "Einstein: His Life and Universe". p. 20.
- Theodora Achourioti & Michiel van Lambalgen, 'A Formalization of Kant's Transcendental Logic', The Review of Symbolic Logic, 4 (2011), 254–289.
- The thesis was submitted on 17 April 1755. "The public examination was held four weeks later on 13 May, and the degree was formally awarded on 12 June" (Eric Watkins, Kant: Natural Science, Cambridge University Press, 2012, p. 309).
- Eric Watkins (ed.), Kant and the Sciences, Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 27.
- Martin Schonfeld, The Philosophy of the Young Kant: The Precritical Project, Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 74.
- Available online at Bonner Kant-Korpus Archived 6 March 2016 at the Wayback Machine.
- The thesis was publicly disputed on 27 September 1755 (Kuehn 2001, p. 100).
- Kant's application for the position was unsuccessful. He defended it on 10 April 1756 (Kuehn 2001, p. 102).
- Available online at Archive.org.
- Immanuel Kant, "Concerning the ultimate ground of the differentiation of directions in space" Archived 16 July 2018 at the Wayback Machine.
- The thesis was publicly disputed on 21 August 1770 (Kuehn 2001, p. 189).
- Available online at Google Books Archived 3 August 2020 at the Wayback Machine.
- English translation available online at Wikisource.
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Works cited
- Bernasconi, Robert (2010). "Defining Race Scientifically: A response to Michael Banton". Ethnicities. 10 (1): 141–148. doi:10.1177/14687968100100010802. ISSN 1468-7968. JSTOR 23890861. S2CID 143925406.
- Bouie, Jamelle (5 June 2018). "How the Enlightenment Created Modern Race Thinking and Why We Should Confront It". Slate. Archived from the original on 15 June 2020. Retrieved 15 June 2020.
- Bowersox, Jeff (4 February 2016). "Kant on the different human races (1777)". Black Central Europe. Archived from the original on 16 June 2020. Retrieved 16 June 2020.
- Caygill, Howard (1995). A Kant Dictionary. Blackwell Publishing.
- Eze, Emmanuel Chukwudi (1997a). Postcolonial African Philosophy: A Critical Reader. Wiley. pp. 103–131. ISBN 978-0-631-20339-1. Archived from the original on 20 December 2020. Retrieved 15 June 2020.
- Eze, Emmanuel Chukwudi (1997b). Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader. Wiley. pp. 39–48. ISBN 978-0-631-20136-6. Archived from the original on 20 December 2020. Retrieved 15 June 2020.
- Driver, Julia (2007). Ethics: The Fundamentals. Blackwell. ISBN 978-1-4051-1154-6.
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- Mills, Charles W. (2017). Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism. Oxford University Press. pp. 169–193. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190245412.001.0001. ISBN 978-0-19-024545-0. Archived from the original on 16 June 2020. Retrieved 15 June 2020.
- Rohlf, Michael (2020). Edward N. Zalta (ed.). Immanuel Kant. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2020 Edition).
- Schneewind, J. B. (2010). "Autonomy, Obligation, and Virtue: An Overview of Kant's Moral Philosophy". Essays on the History of Moral Philosophy. Oxford University Press.
- Shrage, Laurie (18 March 2019). "Should we continue to teach thinkers like Kant, Voltaire and Hume without mention of the harmful prejudices they helped legitimize?". The New York Times. Retrieved 10 November 2022.
- Stang, Nicholas F. (2022). Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (ed.). Kant's Transcendental Idealism. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2022 Edition).
- Wood, Allen (1999). Kant's Ethical Thought. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0521648363.
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External links
- Works by Immanuel Kant at Project Gutenberg
- Works by or about Immanuel Kant at the Internet Archive
- Works by Immanuel Kant at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
- KantPapers, authors and papers database powered by PhilPapers, focused on Kant, and located at Cornell University
- At the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
- At the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
- Immanuel Kant
- Kant and Hume on Causality
- Kant and Hume on Morality
- Kant's Account of Reason
- Kant's Aesthetics and Teleology
- Kant's Critique of Metaphysics
- Kant's Moral Philosophy
- Kant's Philosophical Development
- Kant's Philosophy of Mathematics
- Kant's Philosophy of Religion
- Kant's Philosophy of Science
- Kant's Social and Political Philosophy
- Kant's Theory of Judgment
- Kant's Transcendental Arguments
- Kant's View of the Mind and Consciousness of Self
- Kant's Views on Space and Time
- Kantian Conceptualism/Nonconceptualism
- Leibniz's Influence on Kant
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