Immanuel Kant :: essays research papers

Immanuel Kant was born in the East Prussian urban center of Knigsberg, stu take apartd at its university, and take a shited there as a manager and professor for more than forty years, never travelling more than l miles from home. Although his outward life was one of legendary calm and regularity, Kants 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 close comprehensive and influential philosophical programme of the modern era. His central thesisthat the possibility of human knowledge presupposes the active participation of the human assessmentis 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 met aphysical knowledge in its " supernatural 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 knftigen Metaphysik die als Wissenschaft wird auftreten knnen (Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysic) (1783). Carefully distinguishing judgments as analytical or synthetic and as a priori or a posteriori, Kant held that the most(prenominal) interesting and useful varieties of human knowledge rely upon synthetic a priori judgments, which are, in turn, manageable only when the mind determines the conditions of its own experience. Thus, it is we who impose the forms of quadrangle and time upon every last(predicate) in all possible sensation in mathematics, and it is we who render all experience coherent as scientific knowledge governed by tralatitious notions of substance and causality by applying the pure concepts of the understand ing to all possible experience. But regulative principles of this sort hold only for the world as we know it, 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 uttered in Metaphysische Anfangsgrnde der Naturwissenschaft (Metaphysical Foundations of the Science of Nature) (1786) and Beantwortung der Frage Ist es eine Erfahrung, da wir denken? (On Comprehension and Transcendental Consciousness) (1788-1791). Kants clean 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 requirement of a perfectly universalizable moral law, expressed in a two-dimensional imperative that must be regarded as binding upon every agent.