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kantbls00
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Name: Immanuel
Gender: Male
Interests: Philosophy, Transcendental Idealism
Expertise: Epistemology, Moral Philosophy
Occupation: Philosopher, Professor
Industry: Education
Message: message me
Member Since:
12/10/2006
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| I’ve been hard at work lately on what I hope will be my masterpiece, my Critique of Pure Reason. It’s now 1780, and I hope to be finished next year. I started work on the book to argue against the great philosopher David Hume. Hume thought he showed that there was no way to prove the existence of cause and effect relationships. However, I knew better. In my Critique, I showed that while there was perhaps no way to prove the actual existence of cause and effect in the world, I could prove that it was impossible to understand certain actions as anything other than cause and effect. In order to do this, I differentiated between knowledge of “things-in-themselves” and “things-as-they-appear”. I am arguing that all human knowledge is really knowledge of “things-as-they-appear”. In other words, knowledge of the world depends on the inner workings of the human mind, and it is up to human beings to determine truth and fact. Much like how other Enlightenment philosophers argued that it was the people that determined whether a government deserved to rule, I showed that it was the people who determined truth.
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| I lived during a period in European history called the Enlightenment. It started in the late 1600’s and lasted until the early 1800’s. While it affected most of Europe, its most famous figures were concentrated in Great Britain in France (even though that is not where I lived). Some of the other most famous Enlightenment philosophers were David Hume, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Like myself, we all investigated questions of how people come to understand truth. We also asked questions about what was a legitimate moral and political organization of society. We totally changed how people understood their selves and the world around them. We laid down a rational foundation for the developments of the Scientific Revolution. In addition, we gave the world the arguments that would inspire and justify revolutions are around the world. I exemplified the developments of the Enlightenment in many ways. Most importantly, I gave the world a foundation for justifying knowledge and understandings of the world within the human brain. Before my arguments and the Enlightenment, most people justified their believes based on what others or the Bible said. However, with my arguments, we were able to give justifications to understandings based on human observation and argument. This paved the way for the major Revolutions of the late 17th and 18th Centuries.
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| My name is Immanuel Kant, one of the great Enlightenment philosophers. I lived from 1724-1804 in Konigsberg, Prussia. Though I spoke and wrote in German and most of Prussia went on to become part of what you now call Germany, the physical place where I lived is now actually part of Russia. Seeking to give a philosophical foundation to the advancements of the Scientific Revolution, I investigated the conditions and experience of human knowledge, publishing many books. Probably my most important work was a book called the Critique of Pure Reason in 1781. In it, I showed that all human knowledge of the world was only known through the experience of the senses, and that certain categories of understanding within the mind gave us understanding of the relationship between things we observed. I differentiated between the knowledge of “things as they appear” and “things as they really are”, showing that people can really only ever know “things as they appear”. This revolutionized what people could claim as the truth. No longer could people claim to know the actual truth about something. Rather, they could only claim truth about the appearances that they observed.
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| My name is Immanuel Kant. Welcome to my blog.
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