Kant Essays (1627 words) - Kantianism, Enlightenment Philosophy

Kant How does one label Kant as a philosopher? Is he a rationalist or an empiricist? Kant makes a distinction between appearances and things in themselves. He also says that things in themselves exist, and that we have no knowledge of things in themselves. This could be labeled CLOSE TO NONSENSE, but we know Kant better than that. No matter how many laps on the track of metaphysics Kant takes us through, he is still widely held as one of the greatest modern philosophers of our time. Let us explore the schools of rationalism and empiricism and compare his views with that of other rationalists and empiricists (mainly Hume), and see where he ends up on the finish line towards the nature of human knowledge. The term rationalism is used to designate any mode of thought in which human reason holds the place of supreme truth. Knowledge in this school of thought must be founded upon necessary truths (those that must be true and cannot be false); our ideas are derived from our experience; everything we experience is finite, but we do have the idea of infinity or else we couldn't conceive of things as finite. Descartes and Leibniz are well-known rationalists (handout on Rationalism versus Empiricism). Empiricism, on the other hand, is the concept that knowledge is grounded in experience, not reason, and our minds begin as a tabula rasa (term used by the great empiricist, John Locke meaning blank slate). Reason, for empiricists, can only process the ideas experience gives us. Knowledge is also founded on contingent truths (those that can be false and true); necessary truths are only good for organizing our ideas, as in mathematics, but that is all. There are also no innate ideas in empiricism; all of our ideas are built up from the raw materials given by our experience. Well-known empiricists include Locke, Berkeley, and Hume (handout on Rationalism versus Empiricism). So now that we know where the rationalists and empiricists generally stand, let us see where Kant generally stands. For Kant, human thought exist at three (closely interrelated and interconnected) levels (Ross, 2000). Sensibility conforms our perception of space and time. Understanding corresponds with our individual judgments regarding thought. Reason is the totality of our judgments. Their relationship is crucial in Kant's theory of the thing in itself. The thing in itself is the product of our mind's commitment to thinking about the phenomena (the items of our experience) as appearances (Ross, 2000). It might seem inappropriate to describe Kant as an empiricist. He believed, contrary to the basic empiricist principle, that there are important propositions that can be known independently of experience. He devoted, virtually all of his efforts as researcher to discovering how it is possible for us to have a synthetic a priori knowledge. However, Kant also believed that there are some things that we can know only through sensory experience as well. Kant appears to have left experience in charge of our knowledge (Ross, 2000). But, let us not concede yet. In Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (Transcendental Deduction), in the middle of his argument for why certain concepts would be necessary and known a priori with respect to experience, Kant realized that synthesis would have to produce, not just a structure of thought, but the entire structure of consciousness within which perception also occurs. He says that what is first given to us is appearance, and then combined with consciousness we have perception. It is the structure of consciousness that turns appearances into objects and perceptions, without which they would be nothing. Kant made synthesis a function of imagination rather than thought, though this creates its own confusions. Synthesis therefore brings things into consciousness, making it possible for us to recognize that our consciousness exists and that there are things in it (Ross, 2000). Let us now briefly look at Kant and his position with rationalism. Kant always believed that reason connected us directly to things in themselves. Kant's notion that reason connects us directly to things in themselves does not allow for metaphysics as practiced by the rationalists because reason alone does not determine any positive content of knowledge (Ross, 2000). Kant's theory as one of empirical realism is still very