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Immanuel Kant was born in the
East Prussian city of Königsberg, studied at its university, and worked there
as a tutor and professor for more than forty years, never travelling more than
fifty miles from home. Although his outward life was one of legendary calm and
regularity, Kant's intellectual work easily justified his own claim to have
effected a Copernican revolution in philosophy. Beginning with his Inaugural
Dissertation (1770) on the difference between right- and left-handed spatial
orientations, Kant patiently worked out the most comprehensive and influential
philosophical programme of the modern era. His central thesis—that the
possibility of human knowledge presupposes the active participation of the
human mind—is deceptively simple, but the details of its application are
notoriously complex.
The monumental Kritik
der reinen Vernunft (Critique of Pure Reason) (1781,
1787) fully spells out the conditions for mathematical, scientific, and
metaphysical knowledge in its "Transcendental Aesthetic,"
"Transcendental Analytic," and "Transcendental Dialectic,"
but Kant found it helpful to offer a less technical exposition of the same
themes in the Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik die als
Wissenschaft wird auftreten können (Prolegomena to any Future
Metaphysic) (1783). Carefully distinguishing judgments as analytic or
synthetic and as a priori or a posteriori, Kant held
that the most interesting and useful varieties of human knowledge rely upon
synthetic a priori judgments, which are, in turn, possible only
when the mind determines the conditions of its own experience. Thus, it is we
who impose the forms of space and time upon all possible sensation in
mathematics, and it is we who render all experience coherent as scientific
knowledge governed by traditional notions of substance and causality by
applying the pure concepts of the understanding to all possible
experience. But regulative principles of this sort hold only for, and
since metaphysical propositions seek a truth beyond all experience, they
cannot be established within the bounds of reason.
Significant applications of
these principles are expressed in Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der
Naturwissenschaft (Metaphysical Foundations of the Science of Nature) (1786)
and Beantwortung der Frage: Ist es eine Erfahrung, daß wir denken? (On
Comprehension and Transcendental Consciousness) (1788-1791).
Kant's moral philosophy is
developed in the Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (Grounding
for the Metaphysics of Morals) (1785). From his analysis of the
operation of the human will, Kant derived the necessity of a perfectly
universalizable moral law, expressed in a categorical imperative that must be
regarded as binding upon every agent. In the Third Section of the Grounding
and in the Kritik der practischen Vernunft (Critique of
Practical Reason) (1788), Kant grounded this conception of moral upon
our postulation of god, freedom, and immortality.
In later life, Kant drew art
and science together under the concept of purpose in the Kritik der
Urteilskraft (Critique of Judgment) (1790),
considered the consequences of transcendental criticism for theology in Die
Religion innerhalb die Grenzen der blossen Vernunft (Religion
within the Limits of Reason Alone) (1793), stated the fundamental
principles for civil discourse in Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?
("What is Enlightenment?" (1784), and made an eloquent
plea for international cooperation in Zum ewigen Frieden (Perpetual
Peace) (1795).
(from Philosophypages.com)
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