What was kant

Thomas Hobbes, an English philosopher in the 17th century, was best known for his book 'Leviathan' and his political views on society. Jean-Jacques Rousseau is best known as an influential 18th-century philosopher who wrote the acclaimed work 'A Discourse on the Arts and Sciences.

Cesare Beccaria was one of the greatest minds of the Age of Enlightenment in the 18th century. His writings on criminology and economics were well ahead of their time. John Stuart Mill, who has been called the most influential English-speaking philosopher of the 19th century, was a British philosopher, economist, and moral and political theorist.

Henry Fielding was an 18th century English writer and magistrate who established the mechanisms of the modern novel through such works as 'Tom Jones' and 'Amelia. Francis Bacon was an English Renaissance statesman and philosopher, best known for his promotion of the scientific method. Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher during the Enlightenment era of the late 18th century. His best-known work is the 'Critique of Pure Reason. Olivia Rodrigo —.

Suppose that you are in that situation and you lie to the murderer. This maxim seems to pass the test of the categorical imperative. Procedure for determining whether a proposed action violates CI I am to do x in circumstances y in order to bring about z. I am to lie on a loan application when I am in severe financial difficulty and there is no other way to obtain funds, in order to ease the strain on my finances.

Everyone always does x in circumstances y in order to bring about z. Everyone always lies on a loan application when he is in severe financial difficulty and there is no other way to obtain funds, in order to ease the strain on his finances.

Note: assume that after the adjustment to equilibrium the new law is common knowledge -- everyone knows that it is true, everyone knows that everyone knows, etc. The Kantian evaluation rule is this: we must be able to answer yes to both questions for the maxim to be acceptable.

If we get a no answer to either, we must reject the maxim and try to find another one on which to act. This is the example we have been using in spelling out the procedure. The maxim fails because I must answer "no" to the first question: I could not rationally act on the maxim in the PSW. There are two reasons Kant states for this: 1 promising and 2 the end to be attained by it would be impossible, since no one would believe what was promised him but would laugh at all such utterances as being vain pretenses.

Lying on a loan application would not get us anywhere in a world where everyone always lied when under similar circumstances. The second part of the test is the "contradiction in the will test. The next example is supposed to illustrate a failure of this test. Here the maxim is something like the following:. In order to advance my own interests, I will not do anything to help others in need unless I have something to gain from doing so.

The PSW will contain a law of nature of the form:. To advance his own interests, everyone always refrains from helping others in need unless he has something to gain from doing so. Now Kant would say that there is no problem in conceiving such a PSW in fact, those of a cynical bent might think that the PSW is no different from the existing world. Applying the first question of the procedure, we see that we cannot answer no to the first question: it would be rational in the PSW to follow the maxim if everyone else is doing the same, because in that world everyone is indifferent to the needs of others, so the best way for you to advance your interests is to be likewise indifferent for you will not gain anything through reciprocity of others by departing from the maxim.

However, according to Kant the second part of the test fails: I could not rationally choose the PSW, because "a will which resolved itself in this way would contradict itself, inasmuch as cases might often arise in which one would have need of the love and sympathy of others and in which he would deprive himself, by such a law of nature springing from his own will, of all hope of the aid he wants for himself If a maxim flunks Q1 see above then we have a perfect duty to refrain from acting on that maxim.

If a maxim flunks Q2 see above but not Q1 , then we have an imperfect duty to refrain from acting on that maxim. Illustration : We have a perfect duty not to murder. This means that we must never murder under any circumstances. We have an imperfect duty to help the needy. This means that we should do so on occasion, where this does not conflict with our perfect duties. Duties Perfect Imperfect. To Others tell truth assist others in need. To Self no suicide or.

According to Kant, perfect duties duties of justice can appropriately be enforced by means of the public, juridical use of coercion, and the remainder are imperfect duties duties of virtue , which are fit subjects for moral assessment but not coercion. Martha, as a home-service medical care volunteer, has cared for George through the final weeks of his fatal illness. Just before he died, George told Martha where a large sum of money he had accumulated was stored.

Since George's illness did not affect his mental capacity, she agreed. But now that he has died, she is considering using the money to support the activities of the local Hunger Task Force, an organization that provides donated food to those who need it. George has no surviving friends or relatives, and no one else knows about the money. He left no written will. To run this case through the CI procedure, we first need to identify Martha's maxim.

To do this, we look at the description of the situation and see if we can determine which sort of principle Martha would sincerely formulate as justification of her action. Recall that all maxims can be put into the form:. So we can determine the maxim by specifying what should go in for x, y and z. Reason legislates a priori for freedom and its own causality, as the supersensible in the subject, for an unconditioned practical cognition.

One way to understand the problem Kant is articulating here is to consider it once again in terms of the crisis of the Enlightenment.

But the transcendental idealist framework within which Kant develops this response seems to purchase the consistency of these interests at the price of sacrificing a unified view of the world and our place in it. It is important to Kant that a third faculty independent of both understanding and reason provides this mediating perspective, because he holds that we do not have adequate theoretical grounds for attributing objective teleology to nature itself, and yet regarding nature as teleological solely on moral grounds would only heighten the disconnect between our scientific and moral ways of viewing the world.

That is why his theoretical philosophy licenses us only in attributing mechanical causation to nature itself. To this limited extent, Kant is sympathetic to the dominant strain in modern philosophy that banishes final causes from nature and instead treats nature as nothing but matter in motion, which can be fully described mathematically. But Kant wants somehow to reconcile this mechanistic view of nature with a conception of human agency that is essentially teleological.

As we saw in the previous section, Kant holds that every human action has an end and that the sum of all moral duties is to promote the highest good. This harmony can be orchestrated only from an independent standpoint, from which we do not judge how nature is constituted objectively that is the job of understanding or how the world ought to be the job of reason , but from which we merely regulate or reflect on our cognition in a way that enables us to regard it as systematically unified.

In the Critique of the Power of Judgment , Kant discusses four main ways in which reflecting judgment leads us to regard nature as purposive: first, it leads us to regard nature as governed by a system of empirical laws; second, it enables us to make aesthetic judgments; third, it leads us to think of organisms as objectively purposive; and, fourth, it ultimately leads us to think about the final end of nature as a whole. First, reflecting judgment enables us to discover empirical laws of nature by leading us to regard nature as if it were the product of intelligent design — We do not need reflecting judgment to grasp the a priori laws of nature based on our categories, such as that every event has a cause.

But in addition to these a priori laws nature is also governed by particular, empirical laws, such as that fire causes smoke, which we cannot know without consulting experience. To discover these laws, we must form hypotheses and devise experiments on the assumption that nature is governed by empirical laws that we can grasp Bxiii—xiv.

Reflecting judgment makes this assumption through its principle to regard nature as purposive for our understanding, which leads us to treat nature as if its empirical laws were designed to be understood by us — Since this principle only regulates our cognition but is not constitutive of nature itself, this does not amount to assuming that nature really is the product of intelligent design, which according to Kant we are not justified in believing on theoretical grounds.

Rather, it amounts only to approaching nature in the practice of science as if it were designed to be understood by us. We are justified in doing this because it enables us to discover empirical laws of nature. But it is only a regulative principle of reflecting judgment, not genuine theoretical knowledge, that nature is purposive in this way.

Second, Kant thinks that aesthetic judgments about both beauty and sublimity involve a kind of purposiveness, and that the beauty of nature in particular suggests to us that nature is hospitable to our ends. So beauty is not a property of objects, but a relation between their form and the way our cognitive faculties work. Yet we make aesthetic judgments that claim intersubjective validity because we assume that there is a common sense that enables all human beings to communicate aesthetic feeling —, — Beautiful art is intentionally created to stimulate this universally communicable aesthetic pleasure, although it is effective only when it seems unintentional — Natural beauty, however, is unintentional: landscapes do not know how to stimulate the free play of our cognitive faculties, and they do not have the goal of giving us aesthetic pleasure.

In both cases, then, beautiful objects appear purposive to us because they give us aesthetic pleasure in the free play of our faculties, but they also do not appear purposive because they either do not or do not seem to do this intentionally. Although it is only subjective, the purposiveness exhibited by natural beauty in particular may be interpreted as a sign that nature is hospitable to our moral interests Moreover, Kant also interprets the experience of sublimity in nature as involving purposiveness.

Third, Kant argues that reflecting judgment enables us to regard living organisms as objectively purposive, but only as a regulative principle that compensates for our inability to fully understand them mechanistically, which reflects the limitations of our cognitive faculties rather than any intrinsic teleology in nature. The parts of a watch are also possible only through their relation to the whole, but that is because the watch is designed and produced by some rational being.

An organism, by contrast, produces and sustains itself, which is inexplicable to us unless we attribute to organisms purposes by analogy with human art — Specifically, we cannot understand how a whole can be the cause of its own parts because we depend on sensible intuition for the content of our thoughts and therefore must think the particular intuition first by subsuming it under the general a concept.

To see that this is just a limitation of the human, discursive intellect, imagine a being with an intuitive understanding whose thought does not depend, as ours does, on receiving sensory information passively, but rather creates the content of its thought in the act of thinking it.

Such a divine being could understand how a whole can be the cause of its parts, since it could grasp a whole immediately without first thinking particulars and then combining them into a whole — Therefore, since we have a discursive intellect and cannot know how things would appear to a being with an intuitive intellect, and yet we can only think of organisms teleologically, which excludes mechanism, Kant now says that we must think of both mechanism and teleology only as regulative principles that we need to explain nature, rather than as constitutive principles that describe how nature is intrinsically constituted ff.

Fourth, Kant concludes the Critique of the Power of Judgment with a long appendix arguing that reflecting judgment supports morality by leading us to think about the final end of nature, which we can only understand in moral terms, and that conversely morality reinforces a teleological conception of nature. Once it is granted on theoretical grounds that we must understand certain parts of nature organisms teleologically, although only as a regulative principle of reflecting judgment, Kant says we may go further and regard the whole of nature as a teleological system — But we can regard the whole of nature as a teleological system only by employing the idea of God, again only regulatively, as its intelligent designer.

This involves attributing what Kant calls external purposiveness to nature — that is, attributing purposes to God in creating nature According to Kant, the final end of nature must be human beings, but only as moral beings , — This is because only human beings use reason to set and pursue ends, using the rest of nature as means to their ends — Moreover, Kant claims that human happiness cannot be the final end of nature, because as we have seen he holds that happiness is not unconditionally valuable — Rather, human life has value not because of what we passively enjoy, but only because of what we actively do We can be fully active and autonomous, however, only by acting morally, which implies that God created the world so that human beings could exercise moral autonomy.

Since we also need happiness, this too may be admitted as a conditioned and consequent end, so that reflecting judgment eventually leads us to the highest good Thus Kant argues that although theoretical and practical philosophy proceed from separate and irreducible starting points — self-consciousness as the highest principle for our cognition of nature, and the moral law as the basis for our knowledge of freedom — reflecting judgment unifies them into a single, teleological worldview that assigns preeminent value to human autonomy.

Life and works 2. Transcendental idealism 3. The transcendental deduction 4. Morality and freedom 5. The highest good and practical postulates 6. The unity of nature and freedom 7. Kant expresses this Enlightenment commitment to the sovereignty of reason in the Critique : Our age is the age of criticism, to which everything must submit. Religion through its holiness and legislation through its majesty commonly seek to exempt themselves from it. But in this way they excite a just suspicion against themselves, and cannot lay claim to that unfeigned respect that reason grants only to that which has been able to withstand its free and public examination.

Axi Enlightenment is about thinking for oneself rather than letting others think for you, according to What is Enlightenment? As he explained in a February 21, letter to his friend and former student, Marcus Herz: In my dissertation I was content to explain the nature of intellectual representations in a merely negative way, namely, to state that they were not modifications of the soul brought about by the object. However, I silently passed over the further question of how a representation that refers to an object without being in any way affected by it can be possible….

And if such intellectual representations depend on our inner activity, whence comes the agreement that they are supposed to have with objects — objects that are nevertheless not possibly produced thereby?

Kant characterizes this new constructivist view of experience in the Critique through an analogy with the revolution wrought by Copernicus in astronomy: Up to now it has been assumed that all our cognition must conform to the objects; but all attempts to find out something about them a priori through concepts that would extend our cognition have, on this presupposition, come to nothing.

Hence let us once try whether we do not get farther with the problems of metaphysics by assuming that the objects must conform to our cognition, which would agree better with the requested possibility of an a priori cognition of them, which is to establish something about objects before they are given to us.

This would be just like the first thoughts of Copernicus, who, when he did not make good progress in the explanation of the celestial motions if he assumed that the entire celestial host revolves around the observer, tried to see if he might not have greater success if he made the observer revolve and left the stars at rest.

Now in metaphysics we can try in a similar way regarding the intuition of objects. If intuition has to conform to the constitution of the objects, then I do not see how we can know anything of them a priori; but if the object as an object of the senses conforms to the constitution of our faculty of intuition, then I can very well represent this possibility to myself.

Yet because I cannot stop with these intuitions, if they are to become cognitions, but must refer them as representations to something as their object and determine this object through them, I can assume either that the concepts through which I bring about this determination also conform to the objects, and then I am once again in the same difficulty about how I could know anything about them a priori, or else I assume that the objects, or what is the same thing, the experience in which alone they can be cognized as given objects conforms to those concepts, in which case I immediately see an easier way out of the difficulty, since experience itself is a kind of cognition requiring the understanding, whose rule I have to presuppose in myself before any object is given to me, hence a priori, which rule is expressed in concepts a priori, to which all objects of experience must therefore necessarily conform, and with which they must agree.

Bxvi—xviii As this passage suggests, what Kant has changed in the Critique is primarily his view about the role and powers of the understanding, since he already held in the Inaugural Dissertation that sensibility contributes the forms of space and time — which he calls pure or a priori intuitions — to our cognition of the sensible world. Transcendental idealism Perhaps the central and most controversial thesis of the Critique of Pure Reason is that human beings experience only appearances, not things in themselves; and that space and time are only subjective forms of human intuition that would not subsist in themselves if one were to abstract from all subjective conditions of human intuition.

What may be the case with objects in themselves and abstracted from all this receptivity of our sensibility remains entirely unknown to us. We are acquainted with nothing except our way of perceiving them, which is peculiar to us, and which therefore does not necessarily pertain to every being, though to be sure it pertains to every human being. We are concerned solely with this. Space and time are its pure forms, sensation in general its matter.

We can cognize only the former a priori, i. The former adheres to our sensibility absolutely necessarily, whatever sort of sensations we may have; the latter can be very different. Space and time are not things in themselves, or determinations of things in themselves that would remain if one abstracted from all subjective conditions of human intuition. Space and time are nothing other than the subjective forms of human sensible intuition.

Most readers of Kant who have interpreted his transcendental idealism in this way have been — often very — critical of it, for reasons such as the following: First, at best Kant is walking a fine line in claiming on the one hand that we can have no knowledge about things in themselves, but on the other hand that we know that things in themselves exist, that they affect our senses, and that they are non-spatial and non-temporal.

The transcendental deduction The transcendental deduction is the central argument of the Critique of Pure Reason and one of the most complex and difficult texts in the history of philosophy. For they then are related necessarily and a priori to objects of experience, since only by means of them can any object of experience be thought at all. Its highest principle is self-consciousness, on which our knowledge of the basic laws of nature is based.

Given sensory data, our understanding constructs experience according to these a priori laws. Practical philosophy is about how the world ought to be ibid. Its highest principle is the moral law, from which we derive duties that command how we ought to act in specific situations.

Kant also claims that reflection on our moral duties and our need for happiness leads to the thought of an ideal world, which he calls the highest good see section 6. Given how the world is theoretical philosophy and how it ought to be practical philosophy , we aim to make the world better by constructing or realizing the highest good. This immediate consciousness of the moral law takes the following form: I have, for example, made it my maxim to increase my wealth by every safe means.

Now I have a deposit in my hands, the owner of which has died and left no record of it. This is, naturally, a case for my maxim. Now I want only to know whether that maxim could also hold as a universal practical law. I therefore apply the maxim to the present case and ask whether it could indeed take the form of a law, and consequently whether I could through my maxim at the same time give such a law as this: that everyone may deny a deposit which no one can prove has been made. I at once become aware that such a principle, as a law, would annihilate itself since it would bring it about that there would be no deposits at all.

The highest good and practical postulates Kant holds that reason unavoidably produces not only consciousness of the moral law but also the idea of a world in which there is both complete virtue and complete happiness, which he calls the highest good. The unity of nature and freedom This final section briefly discusses how Kant attempts to unify the theoretical and practical parts of his philosophical system in the Critique of the Power of Judgment.

Guyer and A. Wood eds. Its individual volumes are: Allison, H. Ameriks, K. Gregor, M. Guyer, P. Heath, P. Louden, R. Rauscher, F. Walford, D. Watkins, E. Wood, A. Young, J. Zweig, A. Other Primary Sources Jacobi, F. Fichte, J.

Green ed. Locke, J. Nidditch ed. Reinhold, K. Ameriks ed. Sassen, B. Tetens, J. Secondary Literature Allais, L. Allison, H. Altman, M. Aquila, R. Beck, L. Robinson ed. Beiser, F. Bennett, J. Bird, G. Engstrom, S. Friedman, M. Gardner, S. Grier, M. Ginsborg, H. Herman, C. Korsgaard, and T. Hill eds. Watkins ed. Henrich, D. Velkley ed. Hill, T. The metaphysical facts about the ultimate nature of things in themselves must remain a mystery to us because of the spatiotemporal constraints on sensibility.

When we think about the nature of things in themselves or the ultimate ground of the empirical world, Kant has argued that we are still constrained to think through the categories, we cannot think otherwise, but we can have no knowledge because sensation provides our concepts with no content. So, reason is put at odds with itself because it is constrained by the limits of its transcendental structure, but it seeks to have complete knowledge that would take it beyond those limits. Freedom is an idea of reason that serves an indispensable practical function.

Without the assumption of freedom, reason cannot act. If we think of ourselves as completely causally determined, and not as uncaused causes ourselves, then any attempt to conceive of a rule that prescribes the means by which some end can be achieved is pointless. I cannot both think of myself as entirely subject to causal law and as being able to act according to the conception of a principle that gives guidance to my will. We cannot help but think of our actions as the result of an uncaused cause if we are to act at all and employ reason to accomplish ends and understand the world.

So reason has an unavoidable interest in thinking of itself as free. That is, theoretical reason cannot demonstrate freedom, but practical reason must assume it for the purpose of action. Having the ability to make judgments and apply reason puts us outside that system of causally necessitated events. It is dissatisfying that he cannot demonstrate freedom; nevertheless, it comes as no surprise that we must think of ourselves as free. In a sense, Kant is agreeing with the common sense view that how I choose to act makes a difference in how I actually act.

Even if it were possible to give a predictive empirical account of why I act as I do, say on the grounds of a functionalist psychological theory, those considerations would mean nothing to me in my deliberations. When I make a decision about what to do, about which car to buy, for instance, the mechanism at work in my nervous system makes no difference to me.

I still have to peruse Consumer Reports , consider my options, reflect on my needs, and decide on the basis of the application of general principles. My first person perspective is unavoidable, hence the deliberative, intellectual process of choice is unavoidable. The question of moral action is not an issue for two classes of beings, according to Kant. The animal consciousness, the purely sensuous being, is entirely subject to causal determination.

It is part of the causal chains of the empirical world, but not an originator of causes the way humans are. Hence, rightness or wrongness, as concepts that apply to situations one has control over, do not apply. We do not morally fault the lion for killing the gazelle, or even for killing its own young. The actions of a purely rational being, by contrast, are in perfect accord with moral principles, Kant says. Its will always conforms with the dictates of reason.

Humans are between the two worlds. We are both sensible and intellectual, as was pointed out in the discussion of the first Critique. We are neither wholly determined to act by natural impulse, nor are we free of non-rational impulse. Hence we need rules of conduct. We need, and reason is compelled to provide, a principle that declares how we ought to act when it is in our power to choose.

Since we find ourselves in the situation of possessing reason, being able to act according to our own conception of rules, there is a special burden on us.

Other creatures are acted upon by the world. But having the ability to choose the principle to guide our actions makes us actors. We must exercise our will and our reason to act. Will is the capacity to act according to the principles provided by reason. Reason assumes freedom and conceives of principles of action in order to function. Two problems face us however. First, we are not wholly rational beings, so we are liable to succumb to our non-rational impulses.

Second, even when we exercise our reason fully, we often cannot know which action is the best. The fact that we can choose between alternate courses of actions we are not determined to act by instinct or reason introduces the possibility that there can be better or worse ways of achieving our ends and better or worse ends, depending upon the criteria we adopt.

The presence of two different kinds of object in the world adds another dimension, a moral dimension, to our deliberations. Roughly speaking, we can divide the world into beings with reason and will like ourselves and things that lack those faculties.

We can think of these classes of things as ends-in-themselves and mere means-to-ends, respectively. Ends-in-themselves are autonomous beings with their own agendas; failing to recognize their capacity to determine their own actions would be to thwart their freedom and undermine reason itself.

When we reflect on alternative courses of action, means-to-ends, things like buildings, rocks, and trees, deserve no special status in our deliberations about what goals we should have and what means we use to achieve them. The class of ends-in-themselves, reasoning agents like ourselves, however, do have a special status in our considerations about what goals we should have and the means we employ to accomplish them.

Moral actions, for Kant, are actions where reason leads, rather than follows, and actions where we must take other beings that act according to their own conception of the law into account. The will, Kant says, is the faculty of acting according to a conception of law.

When we act, whether or not we achieve what we intend with our actions is often beyond our control, so the morality of our actions does not depend upon their outcome. What we can control, however, is the will behind the action. That is, we can will to act according to one law rather than another. The morality of an action, therefore, must be assessed in terms of the motivation behind it. We must consider them on equal moral ground in terms of the will behind their actions.

The only thing that is good without qualification is the good will, Kant says. All other candidates for an intrinsic good have problems, Kant argues. Courage, health, and wealth can all be used for ill purposes, Kant argues, and therefore cannot be intrinsically good. Happiness is not intrinsically good because even being worthy of happiness, Kant says, requires that one possess a good will. The good will is the only unconditional good despite all encroachments. Misfortune may render someone incapable of achieving her goals, for instance, but the goodness of her will remains.

Goodness cannot arise from acting on impulse or natural inclination, even if impulse coincides with duty. A shopkeeper, Kant says, might do what is in accord with duty and not overcharge a child. The selfishly motivated shopkeeper and the naturally kind person both act on equally subjective and accidental grounds. What matters to morality is that the actor think about their actions in the right manner. We might be tempted to think that the motivation that makes an action good is having a positive goal—to make people happy, or to provide some benefit.

But that is not the right sort of motive, Kant says. No outcome, should we achieve it, can be unconditionally good. Fortune can be misused, what we thought would induce benefit might actually bring harm, and happiness might be undeserved. Hoping to achieve some particular end, no matter how beneficial it may seem, is not purely and unconditionally good. It is not the effect or even the intended effect that bestows moral character on an action.

So it is the recognition and appreciation of duty itself that must drive our actions. What is the duty that is to motivate our actions and to give them moral value?

Kant distinguishes two kinds of law produced by reason. Given some end we wish to achieve, reason can provide a hypothetical imperative , or rule of action for achieving that end. A hypothetical imperative says that if you wish to buy a new car, then you must determine what sort of cars are available for purchase. Conceiving of a means to achieve some desired end is by far the most common employment of reason. But Kant has shown that the acceptable conception of the moral law cannot be merely hypothetical.

Our actions cannot be moral on the ground of some conditional purpose or goal. And in fact, reason produces an absolute statement of moral action.

Kant believes that reason dictates a categorical imperative for moral action. He gives at least three formulations of the Categorical Imperative. First, consider an example. Consider the person who needs to borrow money and is considering making a false promise to pay it back.

The borrower makes a promise, willing that there be no such thing as promises. Thus such an action fails the universality test.

The argument for the first formulation of the categorical imperative can be thought of this way. We have seen that in order to be good, we must remove inclination and the consideration of any particular goal from our motivation to act.

The act cannot be good if it arises from subjective impulse. Nor can it be good because it seeks after some particular goal which might not attain the good we seek or could come about through happenstance. We must abstract away from all hoped for effects. If we remove all subjectivity and particularity from motivation we are only left with will to universality.

In the earlier discussion of nature, we saw that the mind necessarily structures nature. And reason, in its seeking of ever higher grounds of explanation, strives to achieve unified knowledge of nature.