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IMMANUEL KANT

Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher. He was born at Konigsberg in 1724 and died in 1804. His first education, which was of a strictly religious character, he received under the paternal roof, his father, whose family is believed to have been of Scottish origin, being a saddler of limited means. He early ahowed great application to study, and was sent to the Collegium Fredericianum, and then (in 1740) to the university of Konigsberg.

His progress at college and at the university was rapid and brilliant, his studies embracing in particular mathematics and physics, as well as philosophy. Leaving the university after three years, he engaged in tuition, and it was not until 1755 that he took his degree. Soon after this he was appointed one of the teachers in the Konigsberg University, and lectured on logic, metaphysics, mathematics, and natural philosophy, to which, at subsequent periods, he added natural law, moral philosophy, natural theology, and physical geography. In 1770 he became a full professor, obtaining the chair of logic and metaphysics, a post that he occupied until 1797.

Dissatisfied with the dogmatisms of Wolff and the scepticism of Hume, he set himself to investigate the field of metaphysics for himself, and in the first place proceeded to the examination of the origin, extent, and limits of human knowledge.

According to Kant, part of our knowledge is knowledge a priori, or original, transcendental, and independent of experience; part of it is a posteriori, or based on experience. What he calls the 'pure reason' has to do with the former.

His great work named the Kritik der reinen Vernunft - Critique of Pure Reason (first edition, Riga, 1781), contains the foundation for his whole system of philosophy. In the preface to a later work, the Kritik der Urtheilskraft - Critique of the Power of Judgment (Berlin, 1790), he defines 'pure reason' thus:

Pure reason is the faculty to understand by a priori principles; and the discussion of the possibility of these principles, and the delimitation of this faculty, constitutes the critique of pure reason. In the first rank of such ideas as we do not derive from experience are space and time.

Kant shows that all our perceptions are submitted to these two forms, hence he concludes that they are within us, and not in the objects; they are necessary and pure intuitions of the internal sense. The three original faculties, through the medium of which we acquire knowledge, are sense, understanding, reason. Sense, a passive and receptive faculty, has, as already stated, for its forms or conditions space and time. Understanding is an active or spontaneous faculty, and consists in the power of forming conceptions according to such categories as unity, plurality, causality, etc, which categories are applied to objects of experience through the medium of the two forms of perception, space and time. Reason is the third or highest degree of mental spontaneity, and consists in the power of forming ideas. As it is the province of the understanding to form the intuitions of sense into conceptions, so it is the business of reason to form conceptions into ideas. Far from rejecting experience, Kant considers the work of all our life but the action of our innate faculties on the conceptions which come to us from without. He proceeds in a similar way with morality; the idea of good and bad is a necessary condition, an original basis of morals, which is supposed in every one of our moral reflections, and not obtained by experience. He treats this part of his philosophy in his Kritik der praktischen Vernunft-Critique of Practical Eeason (1788).
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