Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) is considered one of the giants of
philosophy, of his age or any other. It is largely this book that
provides the foundation of this assessment. Kant was a professor of
philosophy in the German city of Konigsberg, where he spent his
entire life and career. Kant had a very organized and clockwork
life - his habits were so regular that it was considered that the
people of Konigsberg could set their clocks by his walks. The same
regularity was part of his publication history, until 1770, when
Kant had a ten-year hiatus in publishing. This was largely because
he was working on this book, the 'Critique of Pure Reason'. Kant as
a professor of philosophy was familiar with the Rationalists, such
as Descartes, who founded the Enlightenment and in many ways
started the phenomenon of modern philosophy. He was also familiar
with the Empiricist school (John Locke and David Hume are perhaps
the best known names in this), which challenged the rationalist
framework. Between Leibniz' monads and Hume's development of
Empiricism to its logical (and self-destructive) conclusion,
coupled with the Romantic ideals typified by Rousseau, the
philosophical edifice of the Enlightenment seemed about to topple.
Kant rode to the rescue, so to speak. He developed an idea that was
a synthesis of Empirical and Rationalist ideas. He developed the
idea of a priori knowledge (that coming from pure reasoning) and a
posterior knowledge (that coming from experience) and put them
together into synthetic a priori statements as being possible.
Knowledge, for Kant, comes from a synthesis of pure reason concepts
and experience. Pure thought and sense experience were intertwined.
However, there were definite limits to knowledge.
Appearance/phenomenon was different from Reality/noumena - Kant
held that the unknowable was the 'ding-an-sich', roughly translated
as the 'thing-in-itself', for we can only know the appearance and
categorial aspects of things. Kant was involved heavily in
scientific method, including logic and mathematical methods, to try
to describe the various aspects of his development. This is part of
what makes Kant difficult reading for even the most dedicated of
philosophy students and readers. He spends a lot of pages on
logical reasoning, including what makes for fallacious and faulty
reasoning. He also does a good deal of development on the ideas of
God, the soul, and the universe as a whole as being essentially
beyond the realm of this new science of metaphysics - these are not
things that can be known in terms of the spatiotemporal realm, and
thus proofs and constructs about them in reason are bound to fail.
Kant does go on to attempt to prove the existence of God and the
soul (and other things) from moral grounds, but that these cannot
be proved in the scientific methodology of his metaphysics and
logic. This book presents Kant's epistemology and a new concept of
metaphysics that involves transcendental knowledge, a new category
of concepts that aims to prove one proposition as the necessary
presupposition of another. This becomes the difficulty for later
philosophers, but it does become a matter that needs to be
addressed by them. As Kant writes at the end of the text, 'The
critical path alone is still open. If the reader has had the
courtesy and patience to accompany me along this path, he may now
judge for himself whether, if he cares to lend his aid in making
this path into a high-road, it may not be possible to achieve
before the end of the present century what many centuries have not
been able to accomplish; namely, to secure for human reason
complete satisfacton in regard to that with which it has all along
so eagerly occupied itself, though hitherto in vain.' This is heavy
reading, but worthwhile for those who will make the journey with
Kant.
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