Modified: 2025-01-08 1:20 PM
- Born in Königsberg
- Taught at University of Königsberg
- Regular habits
- Early to rise, wrote, lectured, lunch with friends, walk
- Critique of Pure Reason
- Book was against Leibniz's rationalism and Hume's skepticism
- Against Hume he wrote:
- "I freely admit that it was the remembrance of David Hume which, many years ago, first interrupted my dogmatic slumber and gave my investigations in the field of speculative philosophy a completely different direction."
- Against Leibniz he argued that his monads were not required to understand the world
- Kant argued fo a priori innate knowledge (meaning these qualities of mind were innate, not learned)
- Quantity: unity, plurality, totality
- Quality: reality, negation, limitation
- Relation: inherence and subsistence, cause and effect, community
- Modality: possibility-impossibility, existence-nonexistence, necessity, contingency
- Intuitions: space, time
- My easy way to understand Kant: think that space, time, causality are innate
- Spoiler Alert: Helmholtz (chapter 7) will show that Kant was mistaken
- Kant's logic dictated that God, the immortal soul, and freedom were out of bounds in his philosophy
- Transcendental Idealism: the innate categories of mind combined with sensory observations to reveal the truths of the physical world (AKA: synthetic approach-innate categories plus sensory observations)
- Crisis of the Enlightenment: how to separate God from philosophy
- What was the relationship between theology and philosophy
- Kant's approach removed God from philosophy but did not denigrate worship, reverence, and a belief in God. All of those were simply not part of philosophy
- Moral Behavior
- Were there similar a priori principles for action based on reason and not on passions?
- Kant argued for reason over passions
- He differentiated between hypothetical imperatives and categorical imperatives
- Hypothetical imperatives included the word "if"
- Example: If you don't wish to pass this course, quit reading this page."
- Categorical imperatives included the word "ought"
- Example: "You ought to keep your promises."
- Logic only was required to prove a categorical imperative
- If promises were not kept then the concept of a "promise" could not exist
- Free will
- Outside forces limited people's freedom
- Example: SAU will post an F on your transcript for any course you do not pass. Here SAU is the outside force, and you, the SAU student are not free.
- Ahead of his time?
- Perhaps. Kant applied the idea of freedom equally to men and women
- Kant demonstrated necessary connection between rationalism and empiricism
- Modern psychology uses both
- Consciousness and cognition
- Those topics in psychology (see chapter 13) derive directly from Kant
- BUT, Kant did not foresee the development of a scientific psychology
- Instead, He predicted psychology would never exist as a science
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