Kant, << kant or kahnt, >> Immanuel (1724-1804), was an important German philosopher. His work was influential because he established the main lines for philosophical developments since his day.
In his chief work, Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Kant discussed the nature and limits of human knowledge. This question became important to him because of Scottish philosopher David Hume’s theories. Before Hume, most philosophers assumed that our past experience could provide knowledge about matters that go beyond our experience. But Hume argued that we cannot be certain of anything beyond our experience. For example, the law of universal gravitation states that a force of attraction acts between all objects. But our experience is restricted to only a few objects that we have observed. We cannot be certain that the force operates on objects beyond our experience (see Hume, David ).
Kant’s ideas.
Kant believed that we cannot justify claims beyond our actual experience as long as we continue to think of the mind and its objects as separate things. He held instead that the mind is actively involved in the objects it experiences. That is, it organizes experience into categories, or forms of understanding. All things capable of being experienced are also arranged in these categories. Kant believed that we can have knowledge of what we have not yet experienced based on what we have already experienced. But he limited this knowledge to sensory experience.
Kant’s conclusions meant having to abandon any claim to know things as they are in themselves, things in which the mind is not involved. But he did not deny the existence of things in themselves, which he called noumena. Some philosophers regarded this refusal to claim absolute knowledge as too serious a limitation on a system of philosophy. Other philosophers argued that we have an intuitive, nonrational knowledge of things.
Kant also wrote on theology and ethics. He argued that the existence of God cannot be proved or disproved by the use of reason. According to Kant, reason is restricted to ideas of possible experience, and the idea of God transcends all possible experience. Yet Kant held that faith could be rational because we cannot think of the world as orderly or justify our morality without supposing the existence of God.
In ethics, Kant tried to show (1) that doing one’s duty consisted in following only those principles that one would accept as applying equally to all, and (2) that even assuming that scientists can predict what we are going to do, the predictions do not conflict with our use of free will. Therefore, the predictions of scientists have no bearing on our duty to live morally. Kant’s chief work on ethics is the Critique of Practical Reason (1788).
His life.
Kant was born on April 22, 1724, and lived in Königsberg, in East Prussia (now Kaliningrad in Russia). He taught near Königsberg from 1746 to 1755, and then at Königsberg University until his death nearly 50 years later, on Feb. 12, 1804.
