When1: 1770
When2: 1798
Who: Immanuel Kant [Kant, Immanuel]
What: philosopher
Where: Königsberg, Germany
works\ On the Forms and Principles of the Intelligible and Sensible World [1770]; Critique of Pure Reason [1781 and 1787: science]; Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics or Introduction to any Future Metaphysics [1783]; Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals or Foundations of the Metaphysics of Ethics [1785]; Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science [1786]; Critique of Practical Reason [1788: morality]; Critique of Judgment [1790: aesthetics and purposes]; Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone or Religion within the Boundaries of Pure Reason [1793]; Doctrine of Law or Doctrine of Right [1797: Natural law is the form of reason. Universal law mutually encourages and regulates everyone's freedom and will.]; Metaphysics of Morals [1797]; Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View [1798]
Detail: He lived 1724 to 1804, was pietist, and synthesized rationalism and empiricism.
Aesthetics
Consciousness has feeling, including judging art {judgment, Kant} {aesthetics, Kant}. Aesthetics is about perceptions that reveal object formal properties {Form, Kant} and lead to feelings of the Beautiful and the Sublime.
The beautiful or sublime is subjective feeling and is not necessarily useful or agreeable. The feeling is not about physical object or concept but about mental image or perception that reveals object formal properties, exciting understanding, imagination, and sensibility. The Beautiful and Sublime belong to consciousness-in-general and are beautiful or sublime for everyone.
The sublime causes painful subjective inadequacy feelings in humans, because its greatness overcomes sensual abilities. Then human higher abilities relate sublime to super-sensual mastery, overcome awe, and obtain final delight. The sublime harmonizes sensual and super-sensual. Theoretical reason masters the mathematically sublime. Practical reason masters the dynamically sublime or powerful.
Art tries to elicit feelings of the beautiful or the sublime. Feeling suggests nature's purpose, which is to harmonize experience Forms and contents. Good artists therefore follow nature's forms.
Epistemology
Consciousness has thinking or ideation {theoretical reason} {pure reason}, which leads to questions about knowledge. Knowledge can only be about experience. Reasoning strives to find ultimate, complete, and consistent knowledge by pure reason but can only know how to act in experience {practical reason}. Through reason, people have ideas {ideas of reason} about self, physical world, and God.
Immanent principles involve Mind, which perceives world and has experience sense data {phenomena, Kant}. Transcendent principles involve reason, which uses unconditioned ideas beyond experience, such as actual objects and ideal forms {thing-in-itself} {noumena, Kant} {Idea, Kant}, about which one can have only faith in a-priori universal and necessary truths.
People can reflect and judge, using mass terms and sortal terms {natural kind, Kant}, to find experience order and purpose. Because all people use same tools, they share universal judgments of beauty and laws.
Knowledge is about perceptions, objects, and mental concepts, which can be true or not true and have value levels. Knowledge statements require subjects and predicates. Predicate to subject relations are third concepts different from subject and predicate concepts.
Applying concepts to objects using rules {judgment rule} is one cognition aspect. Judgments {analytical judgment} {explicative judgment} such as tautologies have predicate same as subject, so statement must be true. Judgments {synthetic judgment} {ampliative judgment} can have predicates that differ from subjects. Synthetic judgments have two types. People learn synthetic judgments, such as facts about world and perceptions, from experience {a posteriori synthetic judgment}. Synthetic judgments, such as mathematics and reasoning principles, relate subject and predicate in universally true and logically necessary way, unrelated to experience {a priori synthetic judgment}.
The main question about knowledge is about thinking forms or tools, how ideas originate and what mental activities are {critical method} {transcendental method}. The reason uses such concepts, principles, and judgments, but they are not innate, are not from experience, and are not consciousness contents. The fundamental categories used to understand reality are not objective features but are conceptual mental structures {Kantian idealism, Kant} and make experience possible {transcendental idealism, Kant}. Human understanding needs a priori concepts about space, time, substance, and cause to have experience, know objects, and give objects properties {transcendental argument}. A-priori synthetic judgments are only in mathematics, pure natural science, and metaphysics and are mental concepts, not physical reality. The basis for their truth is how people think.
Basic reasoning activity is synthesis {transcendental logic}, which is unifying manifolds or plurality. Sensations synthesize to perceptions, perceptions to judgments, and judgments to Ideas. First, mind combines sensations caused by physical objects {things-in-themselves} with mental space and time Forms to make perceptions. Second, mind combines perceptions with understanding concepts, which can create ideas, to make experience judgments {spontaneity, Kant}. Third, mind combines judgments about experience to make Ideas or general principles. Thus, a priori judgments do not require formal or analytical logic.
Using synthesis, people can make general synthetic judgments based on their perceptions. Such judgments are about perceived-thing relations, such as "every change must have a cause."
People cannot know physical reality itself.
Mind uses general judgments to form further concepts from perceptions.
Space and time ideas are pure perception forms and are a-priori principles, not mental concepts. Perceived particular things must be in space and time. Space and time are infinite, are about only one thing, are not subjective, do not relate to particulars as wholes relate to parts, are not necessarily actually in the physical world, are invariable, and are not universals. Space and time unify the sense manifold. Time unifies the self-perception manifold.
Twelve judgment types reflect twelve relations between subject and predicate. Universal quantity uses "all". Particular quantity uses "some". Singular quantity uses "one". Affirmative quality uses "true". Negative quality uses "false". Infinite quality uses "all" or "none". Categorical relation uses "all" or "none". Hypothetical relation uses "if ... then ...". Disjunctive relation uses "and/or". Problematic modality uses "possible" or "contingent". Assertoric relation uses existence as actuality. Apodictic relation uses necessity. Twelve Categories correspond to twelve relations. Respectively, they are totality, plurality, unity, reality, negation, limitation, inherence vs. subsistence {accident, substance}, causality vs. dependence or effect, community or reciprocity, possibility vs. impossibility, existence vs. non-existence, and necessity vs. contingency.
Categories lead to reasoning principles. Quantity gives the principle: all phenomena are extensive magnitudes. Quality gives the principle: sensation objects are intensive magnitudes. Three categories define possible, actual, and necessary {modality, Kant}. Relation category and other categories give principles. Substance is permanent. Substance quanta cannot increase or decrease. All changes have causes and effects. All substances continually interact. In mathematical form, these principles are all inferences from motion laws, because motion accounts for all events and perception changes. Principles are only about perceptions and experiences, not about actual physical reality.
The principle of pure understanding, which is self, ego, or consciousness as whole, develops from all Categories.
People can think of things-in-themselves as quality totalities, setting up intuition or non-sensuous mind perception, and so can think of world, souls, God, and imaginary creatures. World is totality of sensations. Souls are totality of self-perceptions. God is totality of everything. Such unifying totalities are the Ideas.
Subjectively, mind has sensibility and understanding. Sensibility is passive or receptive. Things in themselves can generate mental contents or representations {intuition, Kant} in sensibility {perception, Kant}. The fundamental time and space categories are in sensibility. Time is the form of inner sense, which allows people to know mind's contents. Space is the form of outer sense {outer sense}, which allows people to perceive external objects. Understanding acts on sensibility to form conceptions from intuitions. Understanding includes fundamental categories and general conceptualization principles, which allow people to find natural laws. Imagination links sense data to understanding to recognize objects and apply laws. Imagination is necessary {transcendental, Kant} mediator between receptive sense and active understanding.
Contradictions and opposite conclusions {antimony} happen when using space, time, and categories to understand things that cannot be in experience. Antimony subjects are not experience objects but are transcendent reality. Pure reason has four such unresolved principle logical contradictions. A logical contradiction is that universe had beginning and has finite space, or it had no beginning and is infinite. Space and time are both infinite and finite. A logical contradiction is that substances have simpler substances, or only one substance exists. Substance is both simple and composite.
These two antimonies are about infinities.
A logical contradiction is that people have free will separate from physical laws, or that physical laws or God determine everything. Things can be both caused and uncaused. A logical contradiction is that necessary being exists or does not exist. God does and does not exist.
These two antimonies are about causation.
Thesis and anti-thesis are true. Contradictions happen because people can only know perceptions, cannot know actual world, and try to draw conclusions about world anyway. Infinite regression through same answer type, to which human experience cannot provide unconditional answers, causes antimonies.
Neither experience nor logical operations and concepts can prove existence of actual material things or their causal relations. Substance and causality are only mental associations.
Philosophy is about concepts, is analytic, searches for definitions, depends on experience, and depends on understanding concepts. Metaphysics is synthetic but a priori, as in statements about ultimate existence and causation.
Mathematics is about magnitudes, is synthetic, uses definitions, is independent of experience, and depends on clear and distinct perceptions using space and time.
Humor depends on feelings of superiority [1790].
Ethics
Consciousness has willing, which questions morality {practical reason, Kant}. Thought contents synthesize will or purpose objects using Forms, and wills perform acts. Ordinary will tries to gain happiness or satisfy desire by synthesizing ends with means to find action courses.
Rational will has universal and necessary purpose, which is duty. Rational will follows a priori moral laws {categorical imperative}. Rational wills can want that everyone do action. People should act based on principles that they will that they should become universal laws. Such moral judgments have no conditions and are universal laws. Wrong action or thing is against reason.
People do not perform ethical actions to obtain happiness or pleasure. Following duty is action for its own sake. Consequences are not important.
Phenomena are deterministic. Noumena are not deterministic. Rational will is autonomous and free. People are free in as much as they are things-in-themselves. People's will is free to act. All actions must come from will. People consider {autonomy, Kant} which actions to take in situations to attain goals. People can choose to act morally and justly.
Conscience is feeling responsibility for actions and implies that people can choose in unconditioned ways. Being moral is having temperament that follows duty. Reverence for law causes obedience. People gain the dignity of law itself.
Pleasure or approval feelings unite and synthesize theoretical and practical reason and tell people if object or idea in theoretical reason is means for desire or purpose of practical reason. Feelings can be pleasant or show utility. Feelings can arise from Forms themselves. One feeling is what people feel when they obey or break the categorical imperative.
The Idea of the highest good connects perceptions and unconditioned things by uniting happiness, which is object of natural or sensuous will, and virtue, which is object of rational will. The only happiness is virtue or justice. All ends have highest end, to attain after death, that combines virtue and happiness.
Divinity above experience can represent the moral ideal. The moral law within us leads to faith in free will, God, and immortality.
God, society, or mental feeling or goal {heteronomy} can command moral law. Religion makes the moral law divine command. Because people, in their guilt and awe, need help, God offers man redeeming love to obey the law.
People have reason, and others must respect this reason and so respect people as persons or agents, with ends in themselves. People are subjects and should not be tools, instruments, or objects.
Logic
Logic is science of understanding. Logic has twelve judgment types. Logic {transcendental analytic} has quantity, quality, relation, and morality.
Metaphysics
People seek highest good, so a source of all morality must exist and make this idea. However, ontological and cosmological arguments are invalid.
If universe and time are infinite, everything should have happened already and everything should have same temperature. If universe began at a time, why did it begin at that instant after infinite time?
Mind
Perhaps, people have mental faculty that unifies their experiences {transcendental ego, Kant} and separate mental faculty that makes them self-conscious {empirical ego} [Kant, 1787].
Politics
Law and rights are about people's actions, not intentions or temperaments. Law is only valid if enforcement is certain. Law should unite people's wills to ensure freedom, by blocking natural or sensuous will. People's dignity, derived from moral law, makes them ends in themselves not things.
Penal law should only be for necessary retribution. Perhaps, before governments, people were innocent of duty. History has brought people closer to duty but not happiness, because it has increased people's wants. History is movement toward more rational social order.
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Date Modified: 2022.0224