SEP — Immanuel Kant (Rohlf)

Michael Rohlf, “Immanuel Kant,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. First published 20 May 2010, substantive revision 31 July 2024. The spoke’s fourth T1 and the source that fills the hole coverage edge 6’s successor named: the corpus ran ancient → early modern → 19th-century continental with the critical turn missing, while every later page assumed it.

The move

Kant (1724–1804) spent his whole life in Königsberg and taught at the Albertina from 1755 until retiring in 1796. He was schooled in Wolff’s rationalism and read the British empiricists, and the critical philosophy is his refusal of both.

The turn is stated as an inversion. Instead of assuming “all our cognition must conform to the objects,” Kant proposes that “the objects must conform to our cognition” (Bxvi) — Copernican in the sense that an apparent motion in the heavens depends on the observer’s own motion as well as the object’s. The consequence, and the sentence the whole system runs on: “we can cognize of things a priori only what we ourselves have put into them” (Bxviii). Space and time come from sensibility, the categories from the understanding; experience is built, not received.

Why it is not a compromise

Rationalists (Leibniz, Wolff) claimed a priori knowledge of an intelligible world beyond experience; empiricists (Hume, Locke) confined knowledge to experience. Kant denies the first — things in themselves are not knowable — and refuses the second’s price, keeping a priori knowledge by relocating it into the conditions of experience. What is left is “immanent metaphysics or the metaphysics of experience.”

The synthetic a priori is the load-bearing category: knowledge that adds content beyond what analysis of concepts yields, yet does not rest on experience. This entry gestures at the machinery rather than working through it, so the analytic/synthetic and a priori/a posteriori distinctions are here named, not held in detail — a limit of this source, not of Kant.

The transcendental deduction, in three steps

The entry calls it the hardest and most central argument.

Self-consciousness is formal, not material. Against Locke, identity does not consist in some constant content; it arises from synthesizing representations whatever their content. The principle of apperception: “The I think must be able to accompany all my representations” (B131–132) — which requires an a priori, law-governed activity.
Objectivity comes through judgment. To tell myself from the world I must separate connections that hold universally from my own associations, and judgment is “the way to bring given cognitions to the objective unity of apperception” (B141–142). Judging needs the categories — causality, substance — as rules.
One space and one time. All representations must belong to a single objective world, which the understanding constructs as a whole. So “our categories are the source of the fundamental laws of nature” (B165), and the understanding is “the legislation for nature” (A125–126).

Appearances and things in themselves, still disputed

Appearances are objects as structured by our faculties; things in themselves are what they are independently, and are unknowable. The entry keeps the interpretive fight open rather than settling it:

Two objects — two classes of entity, appearances existing in minds. Charged with skepticism and with incoherence, since a non-spatial, non-temporal thing cannot obviously cause anything.
Two aspects — one set of objects under two descriptions. Avoids phenomenalism, inherits epistemological trouble of its own.

The practical half

The categorical imperative commands unconditionally, unlike a hypothetical imperative conditional on what you want: “Act only in accordance with that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law” (4:421). Autonomy is the will being “a law to itself” (4:440) — the practical counterpart of the understanding legislating for nature, which is the symmetry that makes this one system and not two. Moral knowledge is not deduced but met, as the fact of reason: the consciousness of obligation (5:31–32), which reveals freedom because ought implies can.

The point of the architecture, per the entry, is to hold Newtonian science and moral freedom together: determinism governs appearances, freedom belongs to the noumenal, and human autonomy is the common ground of both.

What it does here

It gives immanuel-kant a page written from an SEP-class source rather than a survey article, and it puts the hinge under the pages that were leaning on it — rene-descartes and rationalism on one side, friedrich-nietzsche and martin-heidegger on the other. It also answers, for one thinker, the spoke’s standing complaint that the founding twelve rest on Wikipedia.

It does not close the empiricism edge. Hume and Locke are named as the position Kant is answering, and this corpus still holds no source in which either speaks.

immanuel-kant · epistemology · rationalism · mind-body-problem · sep-epistemology · rene-descartes · friedrich-nietzsche · western-philosophy · synthesis