Immanuel Kant

1
Immanuel Kant

• Mathematics, Physics, Metaphysics and Moral
  Philosophy at the End of the Modern
  Era

2
Immanuel Kant

• Immanuel Kant, the last of the modern
  philosophers, was born and educated in
  Königsberg, East Prussiapart of the Kaliningrad
  region of Russia today. Completing his university
  studies around 1746, Kant served as a tutor in a
  number of East Prussian families until 1755 when
  he took a masters degree at Königsberg and began
  teaching there as a Privatdozent, lecturing on
  mathematics, physics, physical geography, and
  philosophy.

1724-1804
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Immanuel Kant

• Kant published his first book in 1747 and wrote
  extensively, from 1754 to 1760, on a wide variety
  of subjects belonging to the natural sciences.
  After 1760, he wrote increasingly on subjects
  wed now think of as belonging to philosophy in
  the narrower sense of the term.
• Appointed to the chair of logic and metaphysics
  in 1770, Kant stopped publishing and began work
  on his great work, the Critique of Pure Reason,
  which appeared in 1781.

1724-1804
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Kants Main Writings

• Critique of Pure Reason (1781 2nd edition 1787)
• Prolegomena (1783)
• Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785)
• Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science
  (1786)
  
• Critique of Practical Reason (1788)
• Critique of Judgment (1790)
• Religion within the Limits of Pure Reason Alone
  (1793)
  
• Metaphysics of Morals (1797)

1724-1804
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The Critical Philosophy

• Kants great contribution to the history of
  philosophy lies in the project he conceived
  shortly after 1770 of a critique of reasonan
  examination of the nature and limits of reason
  designed to find out what reason is actually
  capable of accomplishing by itself
• Kant carries out the critique in his Critique of
  Pure Reason, Critique of Practical Reason, and
  Critique of Judgmentworks that correspond to the
  three questions Kant regarded as the basic
  questions of philosophy
• What can I know? (Whats the truth?)
• What should do? (Whats the good?)
• What may I hope? (Whats the point?)

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The Critical Philosophy

• In the first Critique Kant tries to show that
  only two of the three traditional theoretical
  sciences (mathematics, natural science, and
  metaphysics) can really be sciences
• The various branches of special metaphysics
  (rational psychology, rational cosmology, and
  rational theology) are all characterized as
  understandable yearnings of reason incapable of
  being brought forth as sciences, and general
  metaphysicsontology, or thing theoryis
  reconceptualized as the purely rational part of
  natural science the pure science of nature
• So reason cannot prove (or disprove) the
  immortality of the soul, the freedom of the will,
  or the existence of God

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The Critical Philosophy

• In the second Critique Kant begins by identifying
  what he sees as the purely rational principles of
  morality, prudence, and skill, and then argues
  that what reason could never prove regarding the
  soul, the will, and God can be quite legitimately
  postulated by a pure practical reason
• In other words, Kant holds that there are moral
  grounds for believing in the freedom of the will,
  the existence of God, and the immortality of the
  soul. As he put it in his preface to the second
  edition of the first Critique
• I have found it necessary to deny knowledge, in
  order to make room for faith. The dogmatism of
  metaphysicsis the source of all that
  unbeliefwhich wars against morality. (xxx)

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The Critical Philosophy

• With this, the claims of both science and
  morality would seem to have been vindicated, and
  all that remains is to turn to the question of
  the possible bearing of the concept of purpose on
  both fine art and nature
• This Kant does in his third Critique
• In Part I, Kant conducts a critique of aesthetic
  judgment which leads to an account of the meaning
  of such terms as beautiful, ugly, sublime,
  and ridiculous according to which each
  involves the notion of a things seeming other
  than it is
• In Part II, he takes up the notion of
  teleologypurpose in natureand suggests that
  while the concept of a natural purpose (an
  organism) is a heuristically useful concept, it
  can play no part in rigorous natural scientific
  explanation

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Synthetic Propositions a priori

• In all these contexts, Kant maintains, the
  illuminating propositions that can be established
  by means of pure reason alone have the character
  of synthetic propositions a priori, and so the
  absolutely general problem of pure reason is, as
  he says in the Prolegomena, the problem
• How are synthetic propositions a
  priori possible? (23)
  
• So the first thing we must try to masterand this
  is what Kant himself begins with in the
  Prolegomenais the pair of distinctions between
  
• Knowledge a priori and knowledge a posteriori,
  and
  
• Synthetic and analytic propositions (or
  judgments)
  
• More about this next time.