Summary Of Kants Life Essays - Enlightenment Philosophy, Kantianism

Summary Of Kant's Life Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) spent all of his life in K?nigsberg, a small German town on the Baltic Sea in East Prussia. (After World War II, Germany's border was pushed west, so K?nigsberg is now called Kaliningrad and is part of Russia.) At the age of fifty-five, Kant appeared to be a washout. He had taught at K?nigsberg University for over twenty years, yet had not published any works of significance. During the last twenty-five years of his life, however, Kant left a mark on the history of philosophy that is rivaled only by such towering giants as Plato and Aristotle. Kant's three major works are often considered to be the starting points for different branches of modern philosophy: the Critique of Pure Reason (1781) for the philosophy of mind; the Critique of Practical Reason (1788) for moral philosophy; and the Critique of Judgment (1790) for aesthetics, the philosophy of art. The Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals was published in 1785, just before the Critique of Practical Reason. It is essentially a short introduction to the argument presented in the second Critique. In order to understand what Kant is up to in this book, it is useful to know something about Kant's other works and about the intellectual climate of his time. Kant lived and wrote during a period in European intellectual history called the Enlightenment. Stretching from the mid-seventeenth century to the early nineteenth, this period produced the ideas about human rights and democracy that inspired the French and American revolutions. (Some other major figures of the Enlightenment were Locke, Hume, Rousseau, and Leibniz.) The characteristic quality of the Enlightenment was an immense confidence in reason--that is, in humanity's ability to solve problems through logical analysis. The central metaphor of the Enlightenment was a notion of the light of reason dispelling the darkness of mythology and misunderstanding. Enlightenment thinkers like Kant felt that history had placed them in the unique position of being able to provide clear reasons and arguments for their beliefs. The ideas of earlier generations, they thought, had been determined by myths and traditions; their own ideas were based on reason. (According to this way of thinking, the French monarchy's claims to power were based on tradition; reason prescribed a republican government like that created by the revolution.) Kant's philosophical goal was to use logical analysis to understand reason itself. Before we go about analyzing our world, Kant argued, we must understand the mental tools we will be using. In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant set about developing a comprehensive picture of how our mind--our reason-- receives and processes information. Kant later said that the great Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711-76) had inspired him to undertake this project. Hume, Kant said, awoke him from an intellectual slumber. The idea that so inspired Kant was Hume's analysis of cause-and-effect relationships. When we talk about events in the world, Hume noted, we say that one thing causes another. But nothing in our perceptions tells us that anything causes anything else. All we know from our perceptions is that certain events regularly occur immediately after certain other events. Causation is a concept that we employ to make sense of why certain events regularly follow certain other events. Kant took Hume's idea and went one step further. Causation, Kant argues, is not just an idea that we employ to make sense of our perceptions. It is a concept that we cannot help but employ. We don't sit around watching events and then develop an idea of causation on the basis of what we see. When we see a baseball break a window, for instance, we don't need to have seen balls break windows before to say that the ball caused the window to break; causation is an idea that we automatically bring to bear on the situation. Kant argued that causation and a number of other basic ideas--time and space, for instance--are hardwired, as it were, into our minds. Anytime we try to understand what we see, we cannot help but think in terms of causes and effects. Kant's argument with Hume may seem like hairsplitting, but it has huge implications. If our picture of the world is structured by concepts that are hardwired into our minds, then we can't know anything about how the world really is. The world we know about is developed by combining sensory data (appearances or phenomena, as Kant called them) with fundamental concepts of reason (causation, etc.). We don't know anything about the things-in- themselves from which sensory data emanates. This recognition that our understanding of the world may