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How Is Kant Related To The Nature Of Reality

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Immanuel Kant was born in 1724 in the East Prussian town of Königsberg and lived there practically all his life. He came from a deeply pious Lutheran family, and his own religious convictions formed a significant background to his philosophy. Like Berkeley, he felt it was essential to preserve the foundations of Christian belief.

Kant became Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at the University of Königsberg in 1770 and taught there for most of his life. He was also greatly interested in science and published works on astronomy and geophysics.

His three most significant works were published later in life. The Critique of Pure Reason came out in 1781, followed in 1788 by the Critique of Practical Reason and in 1790 by the Critique of …show more content…

When we wonder where the world came from, however - and then discuss possible answers - reason is in a sense on hold. It has no sensory material to process, no experience to make use of, because we have never experienced the whole of the great reality of which we are a tiny part.

In such weighty questions as to the nature of reality, Kant showed that there will always be two contrasting viewpoints that are equally likely or unlikely, depending on what our reason tells us.

It is just as meaningful to say that the world must have had a beginning in time as to say that it had no such beginning. Reason cannot decide between them. We can allege that the world has always existed, but can anything always have existed if there was never any beginning? So now we are forced to adopt the opposite view.

Both possibilities are equally problematic. Yet it seems one of them must be right and the other wrong.

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Hume's scepticism with regard to what reason and the senses can tell us forced Kant to think through many of life's important questions again. He was especially interested in ethics.

For Hume it was neither our reason nor our experience that determined the difference between right and wrong. It was simply our sentiments. This was too tenuous a basis for Kant, who had always felt that the difference between right and wrong was a matter of reason, not sentiment. In this he agreed with the rationalists, who said the ability to distinguish

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