Immanuel Kant’s Metaphysics Essay

In the Critique of Pure Reason, philosopher Immanuel Kant aims to thoroughly explain his philosophy of the metaphysical world. Within the Transcendental Aesthetic, Kant focuses on confirming that space and time are a priori intuitions. He provides reasoning and arguments as to why they are transcendentally ideal but empirically real, making space and time subjectively necessary for experiences. Simultaneously, Kant distinguishes space and time from secondary qualities, which belong to our senses through experience, by confirming that unlike space and time, secondary qualities are not empirically real. Kant does run into conflicts with his theory, he still successfully claims that space and time are transcendentally ideal but empirically real, as well as distinguish them from secondary qualities by supporting his theories with reasoning.

Immanuel Kant, a philosopher, main goal was to discover the answer to how human beings could be genuinely good and kind, apart from the expectations of traditional religions. Immanuel Kant was born in the year 1724 to parents who were extremely modest. His father was a saddle maker who never made an excess amount of money. He was very thankful for his family and all things God had him blessed with. Kant got a late start in his studies, unlike David Hume. It was not until he was in his fifties that he became a professor that acquired a full salary and received a considerable amount of respect. Kant’s family held him to high standards and made it appoint to practice their religious beliefs. As Kant grew in age and knowledge he did not have any orthodox religious beliefs, but still saw the role that religion had played in his parent’s ability to deal with their hardships and blessing and how useful religion could be in creating a society where everyone was united.

The project of the whole transcendental dialectic is well-known. Kant’s primary aim here is that of warning us against the danger involved in the misunderstanding and subsequent hypostatization of the concepts of reason.4 However, this section of the Critique of Pure Reason does not play a purely negative role; instead, it furthers a positive enquiry of what Reason is and what his contents are. Furthermore, it also provides an explanation of the epistemic role played by these elements, the ideas of pure reason or transcendental ideas5, defined as being those concepts which contain the ‘unconditioned’.6 In other words, these concepts are related to the transcendental premises of any possible experience, that is, to infinite and unconditioned ‘transcendent objects’ unattainable through

Philosophers have for long debated on the existence of a Supreme all powerful and all perfect God, Kant, and Anselm being among them. Where Anselm has supported the presence of God and all the attributes that regard to the Him, Kant has risen up with a counter argument. The interaction between the two, the philosophical objection raised by Kant, and what this means to the rest of mankind will be analyzed in this paper.

Before uncovering Immanuel Kant's work in Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals , let it be known that he claims to be a rationalist who purely seeks the truth and only the truth. Kant's beliefs are consistent of the idea of true knowledge which exists separate from ones sensation. True knowledge exists a priori within a separate body of sensation. Kant exclaims how sensation can tamper with true knowledge due to the fact

Moore presents, in his paper, exactly the evidence that Kant is searching for, in a clear and simple argument that seems to answer ‘the skeptic’s’ main concern as well. There are many variations of skeptical arguments against the existence of an external world, but we can more generally define ‘the skeptic’ as someone who does not believe that it is possible to have adequate justification for a knowledge claim—in this case, knowledge claims about an external world’s existence. In other words, they claim no one can know anything for certain, even about the existence of the world around us. Moore’s argument, however, makes skeptics’ concerns seem rather silly, compared to his sensible, much more obvious points.

Groundwork for the Metaphysic of Morals, published in 1785, is Kant’s first major work in ethics. Like the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, the Groundwork is the short and easy-to-read version of what Kant deals with at greater length and complexity in his Critique. The Critique of Practical Reason, published three years later, contains greater detail than the Groundwork and differs from it on some points—in the Critique of Practical Reason, for instance, Kant places greater emphasis on ends and not just on motives—but this summary and analysis will cover only the general points of Kant’s ethics, which

Immanuel Kant was a famous philosopher whose philosophical influences impacted almost every new philosophical idea, theory, concept etc. In a sense, he was considered the central face of contemporary philosophy. Kant spent his whole life in Russia. Starting out as a tutor, to then a professor, he lectured about everything; from geography to obviously philosophy. In his early life, he was raised to emphasize faith and religious feelings over reason and theological principles. As he got older though, that position changed. It then became that knowledge is necessarily confided and within the bounds of reason. Now with this in mind, Kant claims many different things that derive from this. There are many different parts and aspects to it which is why it relates to almost every philosophical idea out there. Kant referred his epistemology as “critical philosophy” since all he wanted to do was critique reason and sort our legitimate claims of reasons from illegitimate ones. His epistemology says that we can have an objective, universal, and necessary knowledge of the world, and that science cannot tell us about reality. He claims science cannot tell us anything because it only tells us about the world as it is perceived, whether it’s based on measures, manipulations, experiments and so on. Kant says that we all have knowledge; that the mind and experience work together and that we construct and gain this knowledge by both reason and experience.

In the critique of pure reason, Kant states, “All alternations occur in accordance with the law of the connection of cause and effect.”1 This statement is interpreted in two different ways: weak readings and strong readings. The weak readings basically suggest that Kant's statement only refer to “All events have a cause”; however, the strong readings suggest that “the Second Analogy is committed not just to causes, but to causal laws as well.”2 To understand the difference between the readings, it is helpful to notice Kant's distinction between empirical laws of nature and universal transcendental principles. Empirical laws have an empirical element that universal transcendental principles cannot imply. On the other hand, empirical experiences require necessity to become a law, accordingly, “the transcendental laws “ground” the empirical laws by supplying them with their necessity.”3In this paper, according to this distinction, I first, argue that the second analogy supports the weak reading, second, show how in Prolegomena he uses the concept of causation in a way that is compatible to the strong reading, and third, investigate whether this incongruity is solvable.

In his publication, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, Immanuel Kant supplies his readers with a thesis that claims morality can be derived from the principle of the categorical imperative. The strongest argument to support his thesis is the difference between actions in accordance with duty and actions in accordance from duty. To setup his thesis, Kant first draws a distinction between empirical and “a priori” concepts. Empirical concepts are ideas we reach from our experiences in the world. On the other hand and in contrast, “a priori” concepts are ideas we reach as an end point of reasoning prior to or apart from any experience of how things occur in the world. Kant

Immanuel Kant claims that our concepts of space and time are transcendent and provide a framework for cognition to begin to understand raw sensory input from the outside world. For Kant, space and time are a priori pure intuitions, knowledge existing outside of sensory experience. This paper will further dissect Kant’s arguments for space and time as pure intuitions before making an argument in favor of Kant’s understanding of space and time.

The original Greek term logos is the root of the modern English word “logic.” Reason is agreed on by many philosophers to be a necessary skill to resolve and reflect on a situation. The philosophers Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, Leibniz, and Kant all have different views on reason but all agree it has large influence on mankind as a whole. Sophocles wrote the play Oedipus the King.

He persuasively unveils imperatives both universal and hypothetical, the elements of unconventional practical reason, and examples of extreme controversy that force people to consider situations from a previously unconsidered moral perspective; however, Kant’s initial moral work is not without its critique: ranging from

For Immanuel Kant, truth is accessible to the mind only because it derives from rational categories already in the mind. Although knowledge begins in the senses, Kant claims, “besides what is given to the sensuous intuition, special concepts must yet be superadded—concepts which have their origin wholly a priori in the pure understanding, and under which every perception must be first of all subsumed and then by their means changed into experience.”6 The sources of such synthetic a priori concepts are categories inherent in reason, and Kant supplies a table of such categories, including in it: Unity (measure), Plurality (magnitude), Totality (whole), Reality, Negation, Limitation, Substance, Cause, Community, Possibility, Existence, and Necessity.7 Thus, the understanding of any perceived thing as a whole entity, or as having an independent material existence, or as being caused by anything, or as itself the cause of anything has its origin in rational categories in the mind and is not traceable to any essential quality or state of being that can be attributed to the thing in itself, according to Kant.

Kant explains our knowledge of the world is based on our awareness of the world. Same goes our consciousness which gives us representations of the world: ideas of things. There are several main ideas in Kant work that I would like explore in this paper. He talks about experience, ideas, logic, and the five main human senses. He explains that in order to have an idea of something, humans first have to experience something that is similar so that they can create something new in their mind. If this does not happen, then they cannot have the idea of the thing since the idea would have no experience to gain from. For example,