Immanuel Kant is too great a philosopher to be covered in one post. Here's the first.He synthesized early modern rationalism and empiricism.
Kant was born in 1724 in Königsberg, then East Prussia, now part of Russia, to a harness-maker of modest means. He studied at Saint George's Hospital School and then at the Collegium Fredericianum, a Pietist school (a German religious movement whose members strongly believed in religious experience and biblical study), where he remained from 1732 until 1740.
In 1740 Kant entered the University of Königsberg. He became interested in philosophy, mathematics, and the natural sciences. The death of Kant's father in 1746 left him without income. He became a private tutor for seven years in order to have enough time and money to continue his education. During this period Kant published several papers dealing with scientific questions. The most important was the "General Natural History and Theory of the Heavens" in 1755. In this work Kant concluded the origin of the solar system was a result of the gravitational (having to do with the force exerted between bodies of matter) connection of atoms (the smallest pieces of matter). In the same year Kant presented a Latin treatise, "On Fire," to qualify for the doctoral degree.
He graduated six years later. At the age of 31, he obtained an unsalaried position as a private docent at the university, lecturing an average of twenty hours per week on an array of subjects including logic, metaphysics, mathematics, and physical geography. In addition to teaching the dominant Wolffian-Leibnizian philosophy, Kant also incorporated ideas from abroad. David Hume (1711–1776) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), in particular, became influential in Kant’s thought, and he shared his reflections on these thinkers with his students. Kant published several significant essays during the first decades of his career at the Albertina. Although these essays were not nearly as influential as his later works, they already contained the seeds of his “critical philosophy.”
At the age of fifty-seven Kant published the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason . This enormous work is one of the most important and difficult books in Western thought. The aim of the critique is to explain how experience and reason interact in thought and understanding. The Critique of Pure Reason is a methodology (a collection of methods and rules) of how "understanding and reason [the power of understanding] can know apart from experience." This revolutionary proposal means that the mind organizes our experiences into the way the world appears and the way that we think about the world. Any experience is placed into one of these categories so that it can be understood. Kant also wrote that the mind can have knowledge of things that have or have not been experienced, but these are only possibilities. Kant does not say that the mind creates objects—only the conditions under which objects are noticed and understood. We can never know noumenal reality (theoretical objects or ideas that are understood by thought alone) with any certainty.
Kant suggests that the theories of God, freedom, and immorality (something that goes against ideas or right and wrong) are not proved or disproved through the use of reason, nor can the use of scientific methods prove or disprove their existence. The idea of them is beyond the realm of human experience. Kant expressed that faith in God, freedom, and immorality are rational beliefs because their existence makes an orderly and moral world a possibility.
1785 he presented an early view of the practical aspects of reason in Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals. In 1788 he published the Critique of Practical Reason.
While theoretical reason is concerned with knowledge, practical reason is concerned with will, or self-determination. There is only one human reason, but after it decides what it can know, it must determine how it shall act. Thus the freedom of the will determines how one shall lead his life. And the basic, reasonable principle of a free morality (a morality that one is free to choose) is some universal and necessary law which follows. This principle is called by Kant the "Categorical Imperative," which states that a man should act in a way that is acceptable and applicable to all people. In questioning the outcome of man's freedom, Kant insists that practical reason assumes the immortality of the soul and the existence of God as the conditions for true freedom.
In 1790 Kant completed his third critique, which attempts to draw these conflicting ideas together. The Critique of Judgment attempts to connect the concepts of nature with the concepts of freedom.
Although Kant continued to write until shortly before his death, the "critical works" are the source of his influence. Only a life of extraordinary self-discipline enabled him to accomplish his task. He was barely five feet tall and extremely thin, and his health was fragile. Toward the end of his life he became increasingly antisocial and bitter over the growing loss of his memory and capacity for work. Kant became totally blind and finally died on February 12, 1804, in Königsberg.
Epistemology
Kant’s work addresses the question “What can we know?” The answer, if it can be stated simply, is that our knowledge is constrained to mathematics and the science of the natural, empirical world.
Propositions have been divided on the basis of meaning (Semantic) Analytic propositions are true by virtue of meaning. The classic "All bachelors are unmarried." is an example.
Propositions whose truth value cannot be decided based on meaning alone are Synthetic .
Prior to Kant there were two camps in Epistemology. Rationalists and Empiricists. Broadly the former such as Liebnitz believed that by means of reasoning while the latter such as Hume believed that Experience is way we learn every thing including formation of concepts.
The Empiricist's answer to the question how can we know the outside world independent of the observer(sense experience) is that we know on the basis of prior experience and a posteriori reasoning.Rationalists argued that the only way to observer independent knowledge was reason.
Since our knowledge of external world is limited by our senses before we do any reasoning , we do not know if there is a match between sensations and the properties that objects possess in themselves. This is referred to as material idealism. According to Kant this nullifies any judgments on objects.Kant argued that that division between a priori truths and a posteriori truths employed Rationalists as well as Empiricists was inadequate to describe the sort of metaphysical claims that were under dispute. Kant made a subdivision of each of the two categories into analytic and synthetic yielding four categories.
analytic apriori
The claim, "Every body occupies space," is analytic as meaning is contained in the definition of space.This is same as the traditional analytic.
synthetic aposteriori
is the same as traditional a posteriori. verifiable only by experience e.g "George is rocking the boat"
analytic aposteriori
is a division that has no real instantiation and is Hypothetical
synthetic apriori
A synthetic a priori claim constructs upon and adds to what is contained analytically in a concept without appealing to experience e.g "the quantity of matter is always preserved,"
According to Kant mind possesses a priori templates for judgments, not a priori judgments.
The idea of time itself cannot be gathered from experience because succession and simultaneity of objects, the phenomena that would indicate the passage of time, would be impossible to represent if we did not already possess the capacity to represent objects in time.
A little jargon.
Dialectic
The art of investigating or discussing the truth of opinions.synonyms: reasoning, argumentation, contention, logic; inquiry into metaphysical contradictions and their solutions.
Conditions for the possibility of our experience of objects by examining the mental capabilities that are required for us to have any cognition of objects at all.
Transcendent
Exceeding usual limits : surpassing. b : extending or lying beyond the limits of ordinary experience. c in Kantian philosophy : being beyond the limits of all possible experience and knowledge.
Claiming to have knowledge from the application of concepts beyond the bounds of sensation results in the empty and illusory transcendent metaphysics of Rationalism
But experience is the product both of external objects affecting our sensibility and of the operation of our cognitive faculties in response to this effect, and Kant's claim is that we can have "pure" or apriori cognition of the contributions to experience made by the operation
of these faculties themselves, rather than of the effect of external objects on us in experience. Kant divides our cognitive capacities into our receptivity to the effects of external objects acting on us and giving us sensations, through which these objects are given to us in empirical intuition, and our active faculty for relating the data of intuition by thinking them under concepts, which is called understanding, and forming judgments about them.
This division is the basis for Kant's division of the "Transcendental Doctrine of Elements" into the "Transcendental Aesthetic," which deals with sensibility and its pure form, and the "Transcendental Logic," which deals with the operations of the understanding and judgment as well as both the spurious and the legitimate activities of theoretical reason.
In the "Analytic of Concepts," Kant presents the understanding as the source of certain concepts that are apriori and are conditions of the possibility of any experience whatever. These twelve basic concepts, which Kant calls the categories, are fundamental concepts of an object in general, or the forms for any particular concepts of objects, and in conjunction
with the apriori forms of intuition are the basis of all synthetic apriori cognition.
On the logical function of the understanding in judgments and the twelve Categories
If we abstract from all content of a judgment in general, and attend only to the mere form of the understanding in it, we find that the function of thinking in that can be brought under four titles, each of which contains under itself three subdivisions .
1.Quantity of Judgments
Universal
Particular
Singular
2.Quality
Affirmative
Negative
Infinite
3·Relation
Categorical
Hypothetical
Disjunctive
4·Modality
Problematic
Assertoric
Apodictic
Principles of pure understanding. Even if the transcendental deduction does establish that the categories do apply to all possible data for experience, or (in Kant's terms) all manifolds of intuition, it does so only abstractly and collectively - that is, it does not specify how each
category applies necessarily to the objects given in experience or show
Thus the argument of the "Analytic of Principles" as a whole is that the categories both must and can only be used to yield knowledge of objects in space and time.
The Transcendental Doctrine of Elements
sensibility
The capacity(receptivity) to acquire representations through the way in which we are affected by objects is called sensibility
All thought is related to sensibility because objects appear to us through thought or sensibility giving rise to concepts
sensation
The effect of an object on the capacity for representation, insofar as B 34 we are affected by it, is sensation.
That intuition which is related to the object through sensation is called empirical.
The undetermined object of an empirical intuition is called appearance.
Kant calls that in the appearance which corresponds to sensation its matter, but that which allows the manifold of appearance to be intuited as ordered in certain relations the form of appearance
Since that within(with? ) which the sensations can alone be ordered and placed in a certain form cannot itself be in turn sensation, the matter of all appearance is only given to us aposteriori, but its form must all lie ready for it in the mind apriori, and can therefore be considered separately from all sensation.
extension and form belong to the pure intuition, which occurs apriori, even without an actual object of the senses or sensation, as a mere form of sensibility in the mind.
transcendental aesthetic
Kant calls a science of all principles of apriori sensibility the transcendental aesthetic.
Space is not an empirical concept that has been drawn from outer experiences
Colors are not objective qualities of the bodies to the intuition of which they are attached, but are also only modifications of the sense of sight, which is affected by light in a certain
A little digression
What happens if the apriori or built in is different ? Non Euclidean geometry? How many geometries infinite or un-countably infinite? How many of these make sense? What is make sense (meaning) . May be meaningless here but meaningful to aliens. What do we do with meaning (or understanding) We act on or react to it. With a different meaning we react differently.
Here is my take perception+ apriori(n)-->synthetic apriori(n)-->action n
How are synthetic judgments apriori possible?
How is pure mathematics possible?
How is pure natural science possible?
But since unavoidable contradictions have always been found in all previous attempts to answer these natural questions, e.g., whether the world has a beginning or exists from eternity, etc., one cannot leave it up to the mere natural predisposition to metaphysics, i.e., to the pure faculty of reason itself, from which, to be sure, some sort of metaphysics
(whatever it might be) always grows, but it must be possible to bring it
How is metaphysics possible as science?
Kant calls all cognition transcendental that is occupied not so much with objects but rather with our mode of cognition
first a Doctrine of Elements and second a Doctrine of Method of pure reason. Each of these main parts will have its subdivision, the grounds for which cannot yet be expounded.
Transcendental Doctrine of Elements
The capacity (receptivity) to acquire representations through the way in which
we are affected by objects is called sensibility.
The effect of an object on the capacity for representation, insofar as we are affected by it, is sensation." That intuition which is related to the object through sensation is called empirical. The undetermined object of an empirical intuition is called appearance
Kant calls that in the appearance which corresponds to sensation its matter, but that which allows the manifold of appearance to be intuited as ordered in certain relations a he call it the form of appearance.
Kant calls a science of all principles of apriori sensibility the transcendental aesthetic
If I can say apriori: all outer appearances are in space and determined apriori according to the relations of space, so from the principle of inner sense I can say entirely generally: all appearances in general, i.e., all objects of the senses, are in time, and necessarily stand
in relations of time.
Kant was born in 1724 in Königsberg, then East Prussia, now part of Russia, to a harness-maker of modest means. He studied at Saint George's Hospital School and then at the Collegium Fredericianum, a Pietist school (a German religious movement whose members strongly believed in religious experience and biblical study), where he remained from 1732 until 1740.
In 1740 Kant entered the University of Königsberg. He became interested in philosophy, mathematics, and the natural sciences. The death of Kant's father in 1746 left him without income. He became a private tutor for seven years in order to have enough time and money to continue his education. During this period Kant published several papers dealing with scientific questions. The most important was the "General Natural History and Theory of the Heavens" in 1755. In this work Kant concluded the origin of the solar system was a result of the gravitational (having to do with the force exerted between bodies of matter) connection of atoms (the smallest pieces of matter). In the same year Kant presented a Latin treatise, "On Fire," to qualify for the doctoral degree.
He graduated six years later. At the age of 31, he obtained an unsalaried position as a private docent at the university, lecturing an average of twenty hours per week on an array of subjects including logic, metaphysics, mathematics, and physical geography. In addition to teaching the dominant Wolffian-Leibnizian philosophy, Kant also incorporated ideas from abroad. David Hume (1711–1776) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), in particular, became influential in Kant’s thought, and he shared his reflections on these thinkers with his students. Kant published several significant essays during the first decades of his career at the Albertina. Although these essays were not nearly as influential as his later works, they already contained the seeds of his “critical philosophy.”
At the age of fifty-seven Kant published the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason . This enormous work is one of the most important and difficult books in Western thought. The aim of the critique is to explain how experience and reason interact in thought and understanding. The Critique of Pure Reason is a methodology (a collection of methods and rules) of how "understanding and reason [the power of understanding] can know apart from experience." This revolutionary proposal means that the mind organizes our experiences into the way the world appears and the way that we think about the world. Any experience is placed into one of these categories so that it can be understood. Kant also wrote that the mind can have knowledge of things that have or have not been experienced, but these are only possibilities. Kant does not say that the mind creates objects—only the conditions under which objects are noticed and understood. We can never know noumenal reality (theoretical objects or ideas that are understood by thought alone) with any certainty.
Kant suggests that the theories of God, freedom, and immorality (something that goes against ideas or right and wrong) are not proved or disproved through the use of reason, nor can the use of scientific methods prove or disprove their existence. The idea of them is beyond the realm of human experience. Kant expressed that faith in God, freedom, and immorality are rational beliefs because their existence makes an orderly and moral world a possibility.
1785 he presented an early view of the practical aspects of reason in Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals. In 1788 he published the Critique of Practical Reason.
While theoretical reason is concerned with knowledge, practical reason is concerned with will, or self-determination. There is only one human reason, but after it decides what it can know, it must determine how it shall act. Thus the freedom of the will determines how one shall lead his life. And the basic, reasonable principle of a free morality (a morality that one is free to choose) is some universal and necessary law which follows. This principle is called by Kant the "Categorical Imperative," which states that a man should act in a way that is acceptable and applicable to all people. In questioning the outcome of man's freedom, Kant insists that practical reason assumes the immortality of the soul and the existence of God as the conditions for true freedom.
In 1790 Kant completed his third critique, which attempts to draw these conflicting ideas together. The Critique of Judgment attempts to connect the concepts of nature with the concepts of freedom.
Although Kant continued to write until shortly before his death, the "critical works" are the source of his influence. Only a life of extraordinary self-discipline enabled him to accomplish his task. He was barely five feet tall and extremely thin, and his health was fragile. Toward the end of his life he became increasingly antisocial and bitter over the growing loss of his memory and capacity for work. Kant became totally blind and finally died on February 12, 1804, in Königsberg.
Epistemology
Kant’s work addresses the question “What can we know?” The answer, if it can be stated simply, is that our knowledge is constrained to mathematics and the science of the natural, empirical world.
Propositions have been divided on the basis of meaning (Semantic) Analytic propositions are true by virtue of meaning. The classic "All bachelors are unmarried." is an example.
Propositions whose truth value cannot be decided based on meaning alone are Synthetic .
Prior to Kant there were two camps in Epistemology. Rationalists and Empiricists. Broadly the former such as Liebnitz believed that by means of reasoning while the latter such as Hume believed that Experience is way we learn every thing including formation of concepts.
The Empiricist's answer to the question how can we know the outside world independent of the observer(sense experience) is that we know on the basis of prior experience and a posteriori reasoning.Rationalists argued that the only way to observer independent knowledge was reason.
Since our knowledge of external world is limited by our senses before we do any reasoning , we do not know if there is a match between sensations and the properties that objects possess in themselves. This is referred to as material idealism. According to Kant this nullifies any judgments on objects.Kant argued that that division between a priori truths and a posteriori truths employed Rationalists as well as Empiricists was inadequate to describe the sort of metaphysical claims that were under dispute. Kant made a subdivision of each of the two categories into analytic and synthetic yielding four categories.
analytic apriori
The claim, "Every body occupies space," is analytic as meaning is contained in the definition of space.This is same as the traditional analytic.
synthetic aposteriori
is the same as traditional a posteriori. verifiable only by experience e.g "George is rocking the boat"
analytic aposteriori
is a division that has no real instantiation and is Hypothetical
synthetic apriori
A synthetic a priori claim constructs upon and adds to what is contained analytically in a concept without appealing to experience e.g "the quantity of matter is always preserved,"
According to Kant mind possesses a priori templates for judgments, not a priori judgments.
The idea of time itself cannot be gathered from experience because succession and simultaneity of objects, the phenomena that would indicate the passage of time, would be impossible to represent if we did not already possess the capacity to represent objects in time.
A little jargon.
Dialectic
The art of investigating or discussing the truth of opinions.synonyms: reasoning, argumentation, contention, logic; inquiry into metaphysical contradictions and their solutions.
Conditions for the possibility of our experience of objects by examining the mental capabilities that are required for us to have any cognition of objects at all.
Transcendent
Exceeding usual limits : surpassing. b : extending or lying beyond the limits of ordinary experience. c in Kantian philosophy : being beyond the limits of all possible experience and knowledge.
Claiming to have knowledge from the application of concepts beyond the bounds of sensation results in the empty and illusory transcendent metaphysics of Rationalism
But experience is the product both of external objects affecting our sensibility and of the operation of our cognitive faculties in response to this effect, and Kant's claim is that we can have "pure" or apriori cognition of the contributions to experience made by the operation
of these faculties themselves, rather than of the effect of external objects on us in experience. Kant divides our cognitive capacities into our receptivity to the effects of external objects acting on us and giving us sensations, through which these objects are given to us in empirical intuition, and our active faculty for relating the data of intuition by thinking them under concepts, which is called understanding, and forming judgments about them.
This division is the basis for Kant's division of the "Transcendental Doctrine of Elements" into the "Transcendental Aesthetic," which deals with sensibility and its pure form, and the "Transcendental Logic," which deals with the operations of the understanding and judgment as well as both the spurious and the legitimate activities of theoretical reason.
In the "Analytic of Concepts," Kant presents the understanding as the source of certain concepts that are apriori and are conditions of the possibility of any experience whatever. These twelve basic concepts, which Kant calls the categories, are fundamental concepts of an object in general, or the forms for any particular concepts of objects, and in conjunction
with the apriori forms of intuition are the basis of all synthetic apriori cognition.
On the logical function of the understanding in judgments and the twelve Categories
If we abstract from all content of a judgment in general, and attend only to the mere form of the understanding in it, we find that the function of thinking in that can be brought under four titles, each of which contains under itself three subdivisions .
1.Quantity of Judgments
Universal
Particular
Singular
2.Quality
Affirmative
Negative
Infinite
3·Relation
Categorical
Hypothetical
Disjunctive
4·Modality
Problematic
Assertoric
Apodictic
Principles of pure understanding. Even if the transcendental deduction does establish that the categories do apply to all possible data for experience, or (in Kant's terms) all manifolds of intuition, it does so only abstractly and collectively - that is, it does not specify how each
category applies necessarily to the objects given in experience or show
Thus the argument of the "Analytic of Principles" as a whole is that the categories both must and can only be used to yield knowledge of objects in space and time.
The Transcendental Doctrine of Elements
sensibility
The capacity(receptivity) to acquire representations through the way in which we are affected by objects is called sensibility
All thought is related to sensibility because objects appear to us through thought or sensibility giving rise to concepts
sensation
The effect of an object on the capacity for representation, insofar as B 34 we are affected by it, is sensation.
That intuition which is related to the object through sensation is called empirical.
The undetermined object of an empirical intuition is called appearance.
Kant calls that in the appearance which corresponds to sensation its matter, but that which allows the manifold of appearance to be intuited as ordered in certain relations the form of appearance
Since that within(with? ) which the sensations can alone be ordered and placed in a certain form cannot itself be in turn sensation, the matter of all appearance is only given to us aposteriori, but its form must all lie ready for it in the mind apriori, and can therefore be considered separately from all sensation.
extension and form belong to the pure intuition, which occurs apriori, even without an actual object of the senses or sensation, as a mere form of sensibility in the mind.
transcendental aesthetic
Kant calls a science of all principles of apriori sensibility the transcendental aesthetic.
Space is not an empirical concept that has been drawn from outer experiences
Colors are not objective qualities of the bodies to the intuition of which they are attached, but are also only modifications of the sense of sight, which is affected by light in a certain
way. e.g. Bat hears sounds we can't. sound is relative to observer. So is color.
Time is nothing other than the form of inner sense, i.e., of the intuition of our self and our inner state.
Synthetic apriori judgments are contained as principles in all theoretical sciences of reason.
Natural science (Physical) contains within itself synthetic apriori judgments as principles.
In the proposition "The world must have a first beginning," and others besides, and thus metaphysics, at least as far as its end is concerned, consists of purely synthetic apriori propositions.
Synthetic apriori judgments are contained as principles in all theoretical sciences of reason.
Natural science (Physical) contains within itself synthetic apriori judgments as principles.
In the proposition "The world must have a first beginning," and others besides, and thus metaphysics, at least as far as its end is concerned, consists of purely synthetic apriori propositions.
A little digression
What happens if the apriori or built in is different ? Non Euclidean geometry? How many geometries infinite or un-countably infinite? How many of these make sense? What is make sense (meaning) . May be meaningless here but meaningful to aliens. What do we do with meaning (or understanding) We act on or react to it. With a different meaning we react differently.
Here is my take perception+ apriori(n)-->synthetic apriori(n)-->action n
How are synthetic judgments apriori possible?
How is pure mathematics possible?
How is pure natural science possible?
But since unavoidable contradictions have always been found in all previous attempts to answer these natural questions, e.g., whether the world has a beginning or exists from eternity, etc., one cannot leave it up to the mere natural predisposition to metaphysics, i.e., to the pure faculty of reason itself, from which, to be sure, some sort of metaphysics
(whatever it might be) always grows, but it must be possible to bring it
How is metaphysics possible as science?
Kant calls all cognition transcendental that is occupied not so much with objects but rather with our mode of cognition
first a Doctrine of Elements and second a Doctrine of Method of pure reason. Each of these main parts will have its subdivision, the grounds for which cannot yet be expounded.
Transcendental Doctrine of Elements
The capacity (receptivity) to acquire representations through the way in which
we are affected by objects is called sensibility.
The effect of an object on the capacity for representation, insofar as we are affected by it, is sensation." That intuition which is related to the object through sensation is called empirical. The undetermined object of an empirical intuition is called appearance
Kant calls that in the appearance which corresponds to sensation its matter, but that which allows the manifold of appearance to be intuited as ordered in certain relations a he call it the form of appearance.
Kant calls a science of all principles of apriori sensibility the transcendental aesthetic
If I can say apriori: all outer appearances are in space and determined apriori according to the relations of space, so from the principle of inner sense I can say entirely generally: all appearances in general, i.e., all objects of the senses, are in time, and necessarily stand
in relations of time.
