Immanuel Kant

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) spent his entire life in Königsberg and taught at the Albertina from 1755 until he retired in 1796. Trained in Wolff’s rationalism, read in the British empiricists, and the author of the argument that neither side could have what it wanted. Written here from sep-kant.

The critical turn

Philosophy before him asked how the mind can conform to objects. Kant asks the question the other way round — “the objects must conform to our cognition” (Bxvi) — and draws the consequence that fixes the limits of knowledge: “we can cognize of things a priori only what we ourselves have put into them” (Bxviii). Space and time are forms of sensibility, the categories (causality, substance) are the understanding’s contribution, and experience is assembled out of both rather than delivered whole sep-kant.

Core ideas

• Synthetic a priori knowledge. Knowledge that goes beyond the analysis of concepts and still does not depend on experience. The category the whole critical project needs, and the one this corpus holds only by name so far.
• The transcendental deduction. Self-consciousness is formal — it consists in synthesizing representations, not in any constant content, so “the I think must be able to accompany all my representations” (B131–132). Objectivity is achieved in judgment, judgment requires the categories, and the upshot is that the understanding is “the legislation for nature” (A125–126).
• Appearances and things in themselves. We know things as they appear; what they are apart from our faculties is closed to us. Whether this names two classes of object or one class under two aspects is still argued sep-kant.
• The categorical imperative. “Act only in accordance with that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law” (4:421) — unconditional, unlike an imperative that depends on what you happen to want.
• Autonomy. The will as “a law to itself” (4:440). Kant’s two halves are the same shape: the understanding legislates for nature, reason legislates for the will.
• The fact of reason. Moral knowledge is not derived but encountered — the consciousness of obligation (5:31–32) — and it discloses freedom, since ought implies can.

Where he sits in this corpus

Kant is the hinge the spoke had been reaching across. rene-descartes made the thinking subject the first certainty and rationalism made reason its instrument; Kant accepts that reason contributes something a priori and denies that it reaches beyond experience. That verdict is what friedrich-nietzsche‘s perspectivism and martin-heidegger‘s reopening of the question of being both come after, and it is why the corpus’s second thread — the reach of reason — was previously missing its middle term.

Two threads of this wiki meet on him. On the mind-body-problem, he neither restores Descartes’ two substances nor accepts a purely physical account; the knowing subject becomes a condition of experience rather than an object in it. On epistemology, his answer to skepticism is structural — not “here is a foundation that cannot be doubted” but “these are the conditions any experience must satisfy.”

Not held yet: the Critique of Pure Reason itself. Every quotation on this page comes through sep-kant, which is scholarship about the text rather than the text.

Related

sep-kant · epistemology · rationalism · mind-body-problem · rene-descartes · baruch-spinoza · friedrich-nietzsche · martin-heidegger · western-philosophy