Continental Philosophy

Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason

Primary Source:

• Solomon, From Rationalism to Existentialism, pp. 9-25 (Handout)

Background:
From the Routledge Online Encyclopedia:

Immanuel Kant was the paradigmatic philosopher of the European Enlightenment. He eradicated the last traces of the medieval worldview from modern philosophy, joined the key ideas of earlier rationalism and empiricism into a powerful model of the subjective origins of the fundamental principles of both science and morality, and laid the ground for much in the philosophy of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Above all, Kant was the philosopher of human autonomy, the view that by the use of our own reason in its broadest sense human beings can discover and live up to the basic principles of knowledge and action without outside assistance, above all without divine support or intervention.

Kant laid the foundations of his theory of knowledge in his monumental Critique of Pure Reason (1781). He described the fundamental principle of morality in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785) and the Critique of Practical Reason (1788).

In the Critique of Pure Reason [which the reading talks about], the essential forms of space, time and conceptual thought arise in the nature of human sensibility and understanding and ground the indispensable principles of human experience. He then argued that reason, in the narrow sense manifest in logical inference, plays a key role in systematizing human experience, but that it is a mistake to think that reason offers metaphysical insight into the existence and nature of the human soul, an independent world, and God.

Kant began the work with the promise to submit reason to a critique in order to obtain a “decision about the possibility or impossibility of metaphysics in general and the determination of its sources, its scope and its boundaries”. The ‘chief question’ would be “what and how much can understanding and reason know apart from all experience?” Answering this question would require discovering the fundamental principles that human understanding contributes to human experience and exposing the metaphysical illusions that arise when human reason tries to extend those principles beyond the limits of human experience.

Questions:

• How does Kant’s philosophy relate to Continental Rationalism and British Empiricism?
• What does Kant mean by the “synthetic a priori? What role does it play in his philosophy?
• What is the “transcendental ego”?
• Give an example of one of Kant’s antimonies. What is its significance?

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