The Critique of Judgment ( German : Kritik der Urteilskraft ), also translated as the Critique of the Power of Judgment , is a 1790 book by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant . Sometimes referred to as the "third critique", the Critique of Judgment follows the Critique of Pure Reason (1781) and the Critique of Practical Reason (1788).
192-641: Immanuel Kant 's Critique of Judgment is the third critique in Kant's Critical project begun in the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Practical Reason (the First and Second Critiques , respectively). The book is divided into two main sections: the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment and the Critique of Teleological Judgment , and also includes a large overview of the entirety of Kant's Critical system, arranged in its final form. The so-called First Introduction
384-500: A cause working according to design, i.e. a Being which is productive in a way analogous to the causality of an intelligence." In the former case I wish to establish something concerning the Object, and am bound to establish the objective reality of an assumed concept; in the latter, Reason only determines the use of my cognitive faculties, conformably to their peculiarities and to the essential conditions of their range and their limits. Thus
576-426: A certain manner by being wholeheartedly committed to this manner. Virtues contrast with vices , which are their harmful counterparts. Virtue theorists usually say that the mere possession of virtues by itself is not sufficient. Instead, people should manifest virtues in their actions. An important factor is the practical wisdom, also called phronesis , of knowing when, how, and which virtue to express. For example,
768-428: A certain standpoint. Moral standpoints may differ between persons, cultures, and historical periods. For example, moral statements like "Slavery is wrong" or "Suicide is permissible" may be true in one culture and false in another. Some moral relativists say that moral systems are constructed to serve certain goals such as social coordination. According to this view, different societies and different social groups within
960-399: A characterization of what is good and then define what is right in terms of what is good. For example, classical utilitarianism says that pleasure is good and that the action leading to the most overall pleasure is right. Consequentialism has been discussed indirectly since the formulation of classical utilitarianism in the late 18th century. A more explicit analysis of this view happened in
1152-428: A claim of "necessity". Kant himself regards it as uncontroversial that we do have synthetic a priori knowledge—most obviously, that of mathematics. That 7 + 5 = 12, he claims, is a result not contained in the concepts of seven, five, and the addition operation. Yet, although he considers the possibility of such knowledge to be obvious, Kant nevertheless assumes the burden of providing a philosophical proof that we have
1344-486: A conception of purpose which preceded them, this still does not justify us in assuming it to be objectively the case." This is in accordance with Kant's usual concern with the correspondence between subjectivity (the way that we think) and objectivity (the external world). Our minds want to think that natural bodies were made by a purposeful intelligence, like ours. Immanuel Kant Immanuel Kant (born Emanuel Kant ; 22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804)
1536-428: A connection to the spatial dimension of intuition to the categories it analyzes. The fourth chapter of this section, "The Analogies of Experience", marks a shift from "mathematical" to "dynamical" principles, that is, to those that deal with relations among objects. Some commentators consider this the most significant section of the Critique . The analogies are three in number: The fourth section of this chapter, which
1728-468: A debate about the values of the Enlightenment and the value of reason. Reinhold maintained in his letters that Kant's Critique of Pure Reason could settle this dispute by defending the authority and bounds of reason. Reinhold's letters were widely read and made Kant the most famous philosopher of his era. Kant published a second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason in 1787, heavily revising
1920-470: A diversity of viewpoints. A universal moral norm is seen as valid if all rational discourse participants do or would approve. This way, morality is not imposed by a single moral authority but arises from the moral discourse within society. This discourse should aim to establish an ideal speech situation to ensure fairness and inclusivity. In particular, this means that discourse participants are free to voice their different opinions without coercion but are at
2112-418: A form that can be analyzed. Garve and Feder also faulted the Critique for not explaining differences in perception of sensations. Its density made it, as Herder said in a letter to Johann Georg Hamann , a "tough nut to crack", obscured by "all this heavy gossamer". Its reception stood in stark contrast to the praise Kant had received for earlier works, such as his Prize Essay and shorter works that preceded
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#17327870834762304-479: A general standpoint of what is objectively right and wrong. In a slightly different sense, the term ethics can also refer to individual ethical theories in the form of a rational system of moral principles, such as Aristotelian ethics , and to a moral code that certain societies, social groups, or professions follow, as in Protestant work ethic and medical ethics . The English word ethics has its roots in
2496-403: A historically-grounded hermeneutics . Schopenhauer noted that Kant was concerned with the analysis of abstract concepts , rather than with perceived objects. "...he does not start from the beautiful itself, from the direct, beautiful object of perception, but from the judgement [someone’s statement] concerning the beautiful...." Kant was strongly interested, in all of his critiques, with
2688-402: A judgment of beauty is adherent if we do have such a determined concept in mind (e.g. a well-built horse that is recognized as such). The main difference between these two judgments is that purpose or use of the object plays no role in the case of free beauty. In contrast, adherent judgments of beauty are only possible if the object is not ill-suited for its purpose. The judgment that something
2880-465: A judgment that something is ethical — the judgment that something conforms with moral law, which, in the Kantian sense, is essentially a claim of modality — a coherence with a fixed and absolute notion of reason. It is in many ways the absolute opposite of the agreeable, in that it is a purely objective judgment — things are either moral or they are not, according to Kant. The remaining two judgments —
3072-515: A lack of practical wisdom may lead courageous people to perform morally wrong actions by taking unnecessary risks that should better be avoided. Different types of virtue ethics differ on how they understand virtues and their role in practical life. Eudaimonism is the original form of virtue theory developed in Ancient Greek philosophy and draws a close relation between virtuous behavior and happiness. It states that people flourish by living
3264-549: A means to promote their self-interest. Ethical egoism is often criticized as an immoral and contradictory position. Normative ethics has a central place in most religions . Key aspects of Jewish ethics are to follow the 613 commandments of God according to the Mitzvah duty found in the Torah and to take responsibility for societal welfare . Christian ethics puts less emphasis on following precise laws and teaches instead
3456-611: A more general principle. Many theories of normative ethics also aim to guide behavior by helping people make moral decisions . Theories in normative ethics state how people should act or what kind of behavior is correct. They do not aim to describe how people normally act, what moral beliefs ordinary people have, how these beliefs change over time, or what ethical codes are upheld in certain social groups. These topics belong to descriptive ethics and are studied in fields like anthropology , sociology , and history rather than normative ethics. Some systems of normative ethics arrive at
3648-704: A notable popular author, and wrote Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime ; he was second to Moses Mendelssohn in a Berlin Academy prize competition with his Inquiry Concerning the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morality (often referred to as "The Prize Essay"). In 1766 Kant wrote a critical piece on Emanuel Swedenborg 's Dreams of a Spirit-Seer . In 1770, Kant
3840-550: A person should tell the truth even in specific cases where lying would lead to better consequences. Another disagreement is between actual and expected consequentialism. According to the traditional view, only the actual consequences of an act affect its moral value. One difficulty of this view is that many consequences cannot be known in advance. This means that in some cases, even well-planned and intentioned acts are morally wrong if they inadvertently lead to negative outcomes. An alternative perspective states that what matters are not
4032-401: A pleasurable experience has a high value if it has a high intensity and lasts for a long time. A common criticism of Bentham's utilitarianism argued that its focus on the intensity of pleasure promotes an immoral lifestyle centered around indulgence in sensory gratification. Mill responded to this criticism by distinguishing between higher and lower pleasures. He stated that higher pleasures, like
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#17327870834764224-400: A priori knowledge in mathematics, the natural sciences, and metaphysics. It is the twofold aim of the Critique both to prove and to explain the possibility of this knowledge. Kant says "There are two stems of human cognition, which may perhaps arise from a common but to us unknown root, namely sensibility and understanding, through the first of which objects are given to us, but through
4416-417: A priori possible?" To understand this claim, it is necessary to define some terms. First, Kant makes a distinction between two sources of knowledge: Second, he makes a distinction in terms of the form of knowledge: An analytic judgement is true by nature of strictly conceptual relations. All analytic judgements are a priori since basing an analytic judgement on experience would be absurd. By contrast,
4608-434: A priori . This insight is known as Kant's "Copernican revolution", because, just as Copernicus advanced astronomy by way of a radical shift in perspective, so Kant here claims do the same for metaphysics. The second half of the Critique is the explicitly critical part. In this "transcendental dialectic", Kant argues that many of the claims of traditional rationalist metaphysics violate the criteria he claims to establish in
4800-404: A purpose, even though it does not have any apparent practical function. We also do not need to have a determinate concept for an object in order to find it beautiful (§9). In this regard, Kant further distinguishes between free and adherent beauty. Whereas judgments of free beauty are made without having one determinate concept for the object being judged (e.g. an ornament or well-formed line),
4992-453: A response to the central intellectual controversy of the era: the pantheism controversy . Friedrich Jacobi had accused the recently deceased Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (a distinguished dramatist and philosophical essayist) of Spinozism . Such a charge, tantamount to an accusation of atheism, was vigorously denied by Lessing's friend Moses Mendelssohn , leading to a bitter public dispute among partisans. The controversy gradually escalated into
5184-541: A rewarding social life; he was a popular teacher as well as a modestly successful author, even before starting on his major philosophical works. Kant showed a great aptitude for study at an early age. He first attended the Collegium Fridericianum , from which he graduated at the end of the summer of 1740. In 1740, aged 16, he enrolled at the University of Königsberg , where he would later remain for
5376-423: A sensory component, and thus that metaphysical claims that transcend the possibility of sensory confirmation can never amount to knowledge." One interpretation, known as the "two-world" interpretation, regards Kant's position as a statement of epistemological limitation, meaning that we are not able to transcend the bounds of our own mind, and therefore cannot access the " thing-in-itself ". On this particular view,
5568-427: A separate ontological domain but simply a way of considering objects by means of the understanding alone; this is known as the "two-aspect" view. On this alternative view, the same objects to which we attribute empirical properties like color, size, and shape are also, when considered as they are in themselves, the things-in-themselves, otherwise inaccessible to human knowledge. Following the "Transcendental Analytic"
5760-790: A single principle covering all possible cases. Others encompass a small set of basic rules that address all or at least the most important moral considerations. One difficulty for systems with several basic principles is that these principles may conflict with each other in some cases and lead to ethical dilemmas . Distinct theories in normative ethics suggest different principles as the foundation of morality. The three most influential schools of thought are consequentialism , deontology , and virtue ethics . These schools are usually presented as exclusive alternatives, but depending on how they are defined, they can overlap and do not necessarily exclude one another. In some cases, they differ in which acts they see as right or wrong. In other cases, they recommend
5952-464: A situation, regardless of their specific role or position. Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) is one of the most well-known deontologists. He states that reaching outcomes that people desire, such as being happy, is not the main purpose of moral actions. Instead, he argues that there are universal principles that apply to everyone independent of their desires. He uses the term categorical imperative for these principles, saying that they have their source in
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6144-425: A society construct different moral systems based on their diverging purposes. Emotivism provides a different explanation, stating that morality arises from moral emotions, which are not the same for everyone. Moral nihilists deny the existence of moral facts. They reject the existence of both objective moral facts defended by moral realism and subjective moral facts defended by moral relativism. They believe that
6336-418: A sort of philosophical "executioner", comparing him to Robespierre with the observation that both men "represented in the highest the type of provincial bourgeois. Nature had destined them to weigh coffee and sugar, but Fate determined that they should weigh other things and placed on the scales of the one a king, on the scales of the other a god." When his body was transferred to a new burial spot, his skull
6528-419: A synthetic judgement is one the content of which includes something new in the sense that it is includes something not already contained in the subject concept. The truth or falsehood of a synthetic statement depends upon something more than what is contained in its concepts. The most obvious form of synthetic judgement is a simple empirical observation. Philosophers such as David Hume believed that these were
6720-433: A term which refers to objects of pure thought that we cannot know, but to which we may still refer "in a negative sense". An Appendix to the section further develops Kant's criticism of Leibnizian-Wolffian rationalism by arguing that its "dogmatic" metaphysics confuses the "mere features of concepts through which we think things ... [with] features of the objects themselves". Against this, Kant reasserts his own insistence upon
6912-557: A virtuous life. Eudaimonist theories often hold that virtues are positive potentials residing in human nature and that actualizing these potentials results in leading a good and happy life. Agent-based theories, by contrast, see happiness only as a side effect and focus instead on the admirable traits and motivational characteristics expressed while acting. This is often combined with the idea that one can learn from exceptional individuals what those characteristics are. Feminist ethics of care are another form of virtue ethics. They emphasize
7104-487: Is a moral obligation to refrain from lying. Because it relies on consent, contractualism is often understood as a patient-centered form of deontology. Famous social contract theorists include Thomas Hobbes , John Locke , Jean-Jacques Rousseau , and John Rawls . Discourse ethics also focuses on social agreement on moral norms but says that this agreement is based on communicative rationality . It aims to arrive at moral norms for pluralistic modern societies that encompass
7296-495: Is able to prove opposing theses with equal plausibility: Kant further argues in each case that his doctrine of transcendental idealism is able to resolve the antinomy. The third chapter examines fallacious arguments about God in rational theology under the heading of the "Ideal of Pure Reason". (Whereas an idea is a pure concept generated by reason, an ideal is the concept of an idea as an individual thing . ) Here Kant addresses and claims to refute three traditional arguments for
7488-469: Is adopted, in Kant's view, by empirical scientists of all sorts; moreover, it led to the Idea (perhaps never fully to be realized) of a final science in which all empirical knowledge could be synthesized into a full and complete causal explanation of all events possible to the world. The second position, of spontaneous causality, is implicitly adopted by all people as they engage in moral behavior; this position
7680-468: Is an a priori conceptual truth that cannot be based on experience. This is only a bare sketch of one of the arguments that Kant presents. Kant's deduction of the categories in the "Analytic of Concepts", if successful, demonstrates its claims about the categories only in an abstract way. The task of the "Analytic of Principles" is to show both that they must universally apply to objects given in actual experience (i.e., manifolds of intuition) and how it
7872-420: Is beautiful or sublime, genius allows one to produce what is beautiful or sublime. The second half of the Critique discusses teleological judgement . This way of judging things according to their ends ( telos : Greek for end) is logically connected to the first discussion at least regarding beauty but suggests a kind of (self-) purposiveness (that is, meaningfulness known by one's self). Kant writes about
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8064-537: Is best known for his work in the philosophy of ethics and metaphysics, but he made significant contributions to other disciplines. In 1754, while contemplating on a prize question by the Berlin Academy about the problem of Earth's rotation, he argued that the Moon's gravity would slow down Earth's spin and he also put forth the argument that gravity would eventually cause the Moon's tidal locking to coincide with
8256-476: Is better than an unequal distribution even if the aggregate good is the same. There are disagreements about which consequences should be assessed. An important distinction is between act consequentialism and rule consequentialism. According to act consequentialism, the consequences of an act determine its moral value. This means that there is a direct relation between the consequences of an act and its moral value. Rule consequentialism, by contrast, holds that an act
8448-410: Is between naturalism and non-naturalism. Naturalism states that moral properties are natural properties accessible to empirical observation . They are similar to the natural properties investigated by the natural sciences , like color and shape. Some moral naturalists hold that moral properties are a unique and basic type of natural property. Another view states that moral properties are real but not
8640-447: Is concerned with establishing the universality and necessity of the pure concepts of the understanding (i.e., the categories). This section contains Kant's famous "transcendental deduction". The second, "Analytic of Principles", is concerned with the application of those pure concepts in empirical judgments. This second section is longer than the first and is further divided into many sub-sections. The "Analytic of Concepts" argues for
8832-456: Is embedded in and relative to social and cultural contexts. Pragmatists tend to give more importance to habits than to conscious deliberation and understand morality as a habit that should be shaped in the right way. Postmodern ethics agrees with pragmatist ethics about the cultural relativity of morality. It rejects the idea that there are objective moral principles that apply universally to all cultures and traditions. It asserts that there
9024-535: Is explored more fully in the Critique of Practical Reason . The Critique of Judgment constitutes a discussion of the place of Judgment itself, which must overlap both the Understanding ("Verstand") (whichsoever operates from within a deterministic framework) and Reason ("Vernunft") (which operates on the grounds of freedom). The first part of Kant's Critique of Aesthetic Judgement presents what Kant calls
9216-537: Is found in Jainism , which has non-violence as its principal virtue. Duty is a central aspect of Hindu ethics and is about fulfilling social obligations, which may vary depending on a person's social class and stage of life . Confucianism places great emphasis on harmony in society and sees benevolence as a key virtue. Taoism extends the importance of living in harmony to the whole world and teaches that people should practice effortless action by following
9408-606: Is further developed in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and the Critique of Practical Reason . The Critique of the Power of Judgment argues we may rationally hope for the harmonious unity of the theoretical and practical domains treated in the first two Critiques on the basis, not only of its conceptual possibility, but also on the basis of our affective experience of natural beauty and, more generally,
9600-477: Is impossible to prove that we have free will , and thus impossible to prove that we are bound under moral law . The beautiful and the sublime both seem to refer to some external noumenal order — and thus to the possibility of a noumenal self that possesses free will. In this section of the critique Kant also establishes a faculty of mind that is in many ways the inverse of judgment — the faculty of genius . Whereas judgment allows one to determine whether something
9792-450: Is interpreted, he wished to distinguish his position from the subjective idealism of Berkeley . Paul Guyer , although critical of many of Kant's arguments in this section, writes of the "Transcendental Aesthetic" that it "not only lays the first stone in Kant's constructive theory of knowledge; it also lays the foundation for both his critique and his reconstruction of traditional metaphysics. It argues that all genuine knowledge requires
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#17327870834769984-480: Is known that many will not. The force of this "ought" comes from a reference to a sensus communis — a community of taste. Hannah Arendt , in her Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy , suggests the possibility that this sensus communis might be the basis of a political theory that is markedly different from the one that Kant lays out in the Metaphysic of Morals . The central concept of Kant's analysis of
10176-408: Is left outside of this due to his faculty of reason. Kant claims that culture becomes the expression of this, that it is the highest teleological end, as it is the only expression of human freedom outside of the laws of nature. Man also garners the place as the highest teleological end due to his capacity for morality, or practical reason, which falls in line with the ethical system that Kant proposes in
10368-736: Is no one coherent ethical code since morality itself is irrational and humans are morally ambivalent beings. Postmodern ethics instead focuses on how moral demands arise in specific situations as one encounters other people. Ethical egoism is the view that people should act in their self-interest or that an action is morally right if the person acts for their own benefit. It differs from psychological egoism , which states that people actually follow their self-interest without claiming that they should do so. Ethical egoists may act in agreement with commonly accepted moral expectations and benefit other people, for example, by keeping promises, helping friends, and cooperating with others. However, they do so only as
10560-587: Is not an analogy, deals with the empirical use of the modal categories. That was the end of the chapter in the A edition of the Critique . The B edition includes one more short section, "The Refutation of Idealism". In this section, by analysis of the concept of self-consciousness, Kant argues that his transcendental idealism is a "critical" or "formal" idealism that does not deny the existence of reality apart from our subjective representations. The final chapter of "The Analytic of Principles" distinguishes phenomena , of which we can have genuine knowledge, from noumena ,
10752-425: Is not entirely destructive. He presents the speculative excesses of traditional metaphysics as inherent in our very capacity of reason. Moreover, he argues that its products are not without some (carefully qualified) regulative value. Kant calls the basic concepts of metaphysics "ideas". They are different from the concepts of understanding in that they are not limited by the critical stricture limiting knowledge to
10944-651: Is not interested in which actions are right but in what it means for an action to be right and whether moral judgments are objective and can be true at all. It further examines the meaning of morality and other moral terms. Metaethics is a metatheory that operates on a higher level of abstraction than normative ethics by investigating its underlying assumptions. Metaethical theories typically do not directly judge which normative ethical theories are correct. However, metaethical theories can still influence normative theories by examining their foundational principles. Metaethics overlaps with various branches of philosophy. On
11136-446: Is one of the earliest forms of consequentialism. It arose in the 5th century BCE and argued that political action should promote justice as a means to increase the welfare of the people. The most well-known form of consequentialism is utilitarianism. In its classical form, it is an act consequentialism that sees happiness as the only source of intrinsic value. This means that an act is morally right if it produces "the greatest good for
11328-428: Is one of the main branches of philosophy and investigates the nature of morality and the principles that govern the moral evaluation of conduct , character traits , and institutions . It examines what obligations people have, what behavior is right and wrong, and how to lead a good life. Some of its key questions are "How should one live?" and "What gives meaning to life ?". In contemporary philosophy, ethics
11520-422: Is primarily concerned with normative statements about what ought to be the case, in contrast to descriptive statements , which are about what is the case. Duties and obligations express requirements of what people ought to do. Duties are sometimes defined as counterparts of the rights that always accompany them. According to this view, someone has a duty to benefit another person if this other person has
11712-464: Is remarkably large and decidedly retreating." Kant's mausoleum adjoins the northeast corner of Königsberg Cathedral in Kaliningrad , Russia. The mausoleum was constructed by the architect Friedrich Lahrs and was finished in 1924, in time for the bicentenary of Kant's birth. Originally, Kant was buried inside the cathedral, but in 1880 his remains were moved to a neo-Gothic chapel adjoining
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#173278708347611904-438: Is right if it follows a certain set of rules. Rule consequentialism determines the best rules by considering their outcomes at a community level. People should follow the rules that lead to the best consequences when everyone in the community follows them. This implies that the relation between an act and its consequences is indirect. For example, if telling the truth is one of the best rules, then according to rule consequentialism,
12096-440: Is sublime is a judgment that it is beyond the limits of comprehension — that it is an object of fear. However, Kant makes clear that the object must not actually be threatening — it merely must be recognized as deserving of fear. Kant's view of the beautiful and the sublime is frequently read as an attempt to resolve one of the problems left following his depiction of moral law in the Critique of Practical Reason — namely that it
12288-408: Is that "The I think must be able to accompany all my representations; for otherwise something would be represented in me that could not be thought at all, which is as much as to say that the representation would either be impossible or else at least would be nothing for me." The necessary possibility of the self-ascription of the representations of self-consciousness, identical to itself through time,
12480-434: Is that codes of conduct in specific areas, such as business and environment, are usually termed ethics rather than morality, as in business ethics and environmental ethics . Normative ethics is the philosophical study of ethical conduct and investigates the fundamental principles of morality . It aims to discover and justify general answers to questions like "How should one live?" and "How should people act?", usually in
12672-519: Is the philosophical study of moral phenomena. Also called moral philosophy , it investigates normative questions about what people ought to do or which behavior is morally right. Its main branches include normative ethics , applied ethics , and metaethics . Normative ethics aims to find general principles that govern how people should act. Applied ethics examines concrete ethical problems in real-life situations, such as abortion , treatment of animals , and business practices . Metaethics explores
12864-461: Is the "Transcendental Logic". Whereas the former was concerned with the contributions of the sensibility, the latter is concerned, first, with the contributions of the understanding ("Transcendental Analytic") and, second, with the faculty of reason as the source of both metaphysical errors and genuine regulatory principles ("Transcendental Dialectic"). The "Transcendental Analytic" is further divided into two sections. The first, "Analytic of Concepts",
13056-506: Is the effect of x), it is absurd to hope for "another Newton " who could explain a blade of grass without invoking teleology, and so the organic must be explained "as if" it were constituted as teleological. This portion of the Critique is, from some modern theories, where Kant is most radical; he posits man as the ultimate end, that is, that all other forms of nature exist for the purpose of their relation to man, directly or not, and that man
13248-422: Is the only thing with intrinsic value is called ethical or evaluative hedonism . Classical utilitarianism was initially formulated by Jeremy Bentham at the end of the 18th century and further developed by John Stuart Mill . Bentham introduced the hedonic calculus to assess the value of consequences. Two key aspects of the hedonic calculus are the intensity and the duration of pleasure. According to this view,
13440-495: Is the source of morality , and that aesthetics arises from a faculty of disinterested judgment. Kant's religious views were deeply connected to his moral theory. Their exact nature remains in dispute. He hoped that perpetual peace could be secured through an international federation of republican states and international cooperation . His cosmopolitan reputation is called into question by his promulgation of scientific racism for much of his career, although he altered his views on
13632-404: Is then one thing to say, "the production of certain things of nature or that of collective nature is only possible through a cause which determines itself to action according to design"; and quite another to say, "I can according to the peculiar constitution of my cognitive faculties judge concerning the possibility of these things and their production, in no other fashion than by conceiving for this
13824-410: Is they do so. In the first book of this section on the " schematism ", Kant connects each of the purely logical categories of the understanding to the temporality of intuition to show that, although non-empirical, they do have purchase upon the objects of experience. The second book continues this line of argument in four chapters, each associated with one of the category groupings. In some cases, it adds
14016-401: Is to act according to rational moral principles. Kant's 1781 (revised 1787) Critique of Pure Reason has often been cited as the most significant volume of metaphysics and epistemology in modern philosophy. In the first Critique , and later on in other works as well, Kant frames the "general" and "real problem of pure reason" in terms of the following question: "How are synthetic judgments
14208-437: Is to have a good will. A person has a good will if they respect the moral law and form their intentions and motives in agreement with it. Kant states that actions motivated in such a way are unconditionally good, meaning that they are good even in cases where they result in undesirable consequences. Divine command theory says that God is the source of morality. It states that moral laws are divine commands and that to act morally
14400-489: Is to obey and follow God's will . While all divine command theorists agree that morality depends on God, there are disagreements about the precise content of the divine commands, and theorists belonging to different religions tend to propose different moral laws. For example, Christian and Jewish divine command theorists may argue that the Ten Commandments express God's will while Muslims may reserve this role for
14592-411: Is usually divided into normative ethics , applied ethics , and metaethics . Morality is about what people ought to do rather than what they actually do, what they want to do, or what social conventions require. As a rational and systematic field of inquiry, ethics studies practical reasons why people should act one way rather than another. Most ethical theories seek universal principles that express
14784-421: Is wrong to break a promise even if no harm comes from it. Deontologists are interested in which actions are right and often allow that there is a gap between what is right and what is good. Many focus on prohibitions and describe which acts are forbidden under any circumstances. Agent-centered deontological theories focus on the person who acts and the duties they have. Agent-centered theories often focus on
14976-399: Is wrong. This observation is sometimes taken as an argument against moral realism since moral disagreement is widespread in most fields. Moral relativists reject the idea that morality is an objective feature of reality. They argue instead that moral principles are human inventions. This means that a behavior is not objectively right or wrong but only subjectively right or wrong relative to
15168-612: The Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787), his best-known work. Kant drew a parallel to the Copernican Revolution in his proposal to think of the objects of experience as conforming to our spatial and temporal forms of intuition and the categories of our understanding, so that we have a priori cognition of those objects. These claims have proved especially influential in the social sciences, particularly sociology and anthropology, which regard human activities as pre-oriented by cultural norms. Kant believed that reason
15360-462: The Critique of Pure Reason that the understanding is the ability to judge, and after the forms of its judgements are made the foundation–stone of all philosophy, a quite peculiar power of judgement now appears which is entirely different from that ability." With regard to teleological judgement, Schopenhauer claimed that Kant tried to say only this: "...although organized bodies necessarily seem to us as though they were constructed according to
15552-667: The Ancient Greek word êthos ( ἦθος ), meaning ' character ' and ' personal disposition ' . This word gave rise to the Ancient Greek word ēthikós ( ἠθικός ), which was translated into Latin as ethica and entered the English language in the 15th century through the Old French term éthique . The term morality originates in the Latin word moralis , meaning ' manners ' and ' character ' . It
15744-499: The Coriolis force . In 1756, Kant also published three papers on the 1755 Lisbon earthquake . Kant's theory, which involved shifts in huge caverns filled with hot gases, though inaccurate, was one of the first systematic attempts to explain earthquakes in natural rather than supernatural terms. In 1757, Kant began lecturing on geography making him one of the first lecturers to explicitly teach geography as its own subject. Geography
15936-560: The Critique entitled "The transcendental aesthetic" introduces Kant's famous metaphysics of transcendental idealism . Something is "transcendental" if it is a necessary condition for the possibility of experience, and "idealism" denotes some form of mind-dependence that must be further specified. The correct interpretation of Kant's own specification remains controversial. The metaphysical thesis then states that human beings only experience and know phenomenal appearances, not independent things-in-themselves, because space and time are nothing but
16128-514: The Critique of Practical Reason and the Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals . Kant attempted to legitimize purposive categories in the life sciences, without a theological commitment. He recognized the concept of purpose has epistemological value for finality, while denying its implications about creative intentions at life and the universe's source. Kant described natural purposes as organized beings, meaning that
16320-605: The Königsberg City Museum ; however, the museum was destroyed during World War II . A replica of the statue of Kant that in German times stood in front of the main University of Königsberg building was donated by a German entity in the early 1990s and placed in the same grounds. After the expulsion of Königsberg 's German population at the end of World War II , the University of Königsberg where Kant taught
16512-540: The Logik using a copy of a textbook in logic by Georg Friedrich Meier entitled Excerpt from the Doctrine of Reason , in which Kant had written copious notes and annotations. The Logik has been considered of fundamental importance to Kant's philosophy, and the understanding of it. The great 19th-century logician Charles Sanders Peirce remarked, in an incomplete review of Thomas Kingsmill Abbott 's English translation of
16704-651: The Solar System had formed from a large cloud of gas, a nebula . Kant also correctly deduced that the Milky Way was a large disk of stars , which he theorized formed from a much larger spinning gas cloud. He further suggested that other distant "nebulae" might be other galaxies. These postulations opened new horizons for astronomy, for the first time extending it beyond the solar system to galactic and intergalactic realms. From then on, Kant turned increasingly to philosophical issues, although he continued to write on
16896-458: The biological as teleological , claiming that there are things, such as living beings, whose parts exist for the sake of their whole and their whole for the sake of their parts. This allows him to open a gap in the physical world: since these "organic" things cannot be brought under the rules that apply to all other appearances, what are we to do with them? Kant says explicitly that while efficiently causal explanations are always best (x causes y, y
17088-402: The medieval period , ethical thought was strongly influenced by religious teachings. In the modern period , this focus shifted to a more secular approach concerned with moral experience, reasons for acting , and the consequences of actions. An influential development in the 20th century was the emergence of metaethics. Ethics, also called moral philosophy, is the study of moral phenomena. It
17280-463: The pietist values of religious devotion, humility, and a literal interpretation of the Bible . The young Immanuel's education was strict, punitive and disciplinary, and focused on Latin and religious instruction over mathematics and science. In his later years, Kant lived a strictly ordered life. It was said that neighbors would set their clocks by his daily walks. He never married but seems to have had
17472-524: The principle of knowledge presupposes living creatures as purposive entities. He called this supposition the finality concept as a regulative use , which satisfies living beings specificity of knowledge. This heuristic framework claims there is a teleology principle at purpose's source and it is the mechanical devices of the individual original organism, including its heredity. Such entities appear to be self-organizing in patterns. Kant's ideas allowed Johann Friedrich Blumenbach and his followers to formulate
17664-485: The "metaphysical deduction", proceeds analytically from a table of the Aristotelian logical functions of judgment. As Kant was aware, this assumes precisely what the skeptic rejects, namely, the existence of synthetic a priori cognition. For this reason, Kant also supplies a synthetic argument that does not depend upon the assumption in dispute. This argument, provided under the heading "Transcendental Deduction of
17856-532: The 20th century, virtue ethics experienced a resurgence thanks to philosophers such as Elizabeth Anscombe , Philippa Foot , Alasdair MacIntyre , and Martha Nussbaum . There are many other schools of normative ethics in addition to the three main traditions. Pragmatist ethics focuses on the role of practice and holds that one of the key tasks of ethics is to solve practical problems in concrete situations. It has certain similarities to utilitarianism and its focus on consequences but concentrates more on how morality
18048-404: The 20th century, when the term was coined by G. E. M. Anscombe . Consequentialists usually understand the consequences of an action in a very wide sense that includes the totality of its effects. This is based on the idea that actions make a difference in the world by bringing about a causal chain of events that would not have existed otherwise. A core intuition behind consequentialism is that
18240-607: The Earth's rotation. The next year, he expanded this reasoning to the formation and evolution of the Solar System in his Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens . In 1755, Kant received a license to lecture in the University of Königsberg and began lecturing on a variety of topics including mathematics, physics, logic, and metaphysics. In his 1756 essay on the theory of winds, Kant laid out an original insight into
18432-576: The Faculties . He also wrote a number of semi-popular essays on history, religion, politics, and other topics. These works were well received by Kant's contemporaries and confirmed his preeminent status in eighteenth-century philosophy. There were several journals devoted solely to defending and criticizing Kantian philosophy. Despite his success, philosophical trends were moving in another direction. Many of Kant's most important disciples and followers (including Reinhold , Beck , and Fichte ) transformed
18624-529: The Kantian position. The progressive stages of revision of Kant's teachings marked the emergence of German idealism . In what was one of his final acts expounding a stance on philosophical questions, Kant opposed these developments and publicly denounced Fichte in an open letter in 1799. In 1800, a student of Kant named Gottlob Benjamin Jäsche (1762–1842) published a manual of logic for teachers called Logik , which he had prepared at Kant's request. Jäsche prepared
18816-689: The Modality of the Delight in the Object". After the presentation of the four moments of the Judgement of Taste, Kant then begins his discussion of Book 2 of the Third Critique titled Analytic of the Sublime . The first part of the book discusses the four possible aesthetic reflective judgments : the agreeable, the beautiful , the sublime , and the good . Kant makes it clear that these are
19008-521: The Pure Concepts of the Understanding", is widely considered to be both the most important and the most difficult of Kant's arguments in the Critique . Kant himself said that it is the one that cost him the most labor. Frustrated by its confused reception in the first edition of his book, he rewrote it entirely for the second edition. The "Transcendental Deduction" gives Kant's argument that these pure concepts apply universally and necessarily to
19200-639: The Second of the four Pieces of Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason , in the journal Berlinische Monatsschrift , met with opposition from the King's censorship commission, which had been established that same year in the context of the French Revolution . Kant then arranged to have all four pieces published as a book, routing it through the philosophy department at the University of Jena to avoid
19392-430: The actual consequences but the expected consequences. This view takes into account that when deciding what to do, people have to rely on their limited knowledge of the total consequences of their actions. According to this view, a course of action has positive moral value despite leading to an overall negative outcome if it had the highest expected value , for example, because the negative outcome could not be anticipated or
19584-472: The affection of the receptive sensibility and the actively synthesizing power of the understanding. Thus the statement: "Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind." Kant's basic strategy in the first half of his book will be to argue that some intuitions and concepts are pure—that is, are contributed entirely by the mind, independent of anything empirical. Knowledge generated on this basis, under certain conditions, can be synthetic
19776-529: The agent. It is controversial whether agent-relative moral theories, like ethical egoism , should be considered as types of consequentialism. There are many different types of consequentialism. They differ based on what type of entity they evaluate, what consequences they take into consideration, and how they determine the value of consequences. Most theories assess the moral value of acts. However, consequentialism can also be used to evaluate motives , character traits , rules, and policies . Many types assess
19968-570: The basic assumptions underlying moral claims are misguided. Some moral nihilists conclude from this that anything is allowed. A slightly different view emphasizes that moral nihilism is not itself a moral position about what is allowed and prohibited but the rejection of any moral position. Moral nihilism, like moral relativism, recognizes that people judge actions as right or wrong from different perspectives. However, it disagrees that this practice involves morality and sees it as just one type of human behavior. A central disagreement among moral realists
20160-410: The basis of all synthetic a priori cognition. According to Guyer and Wood , "Kant's idea is that just as there are certain essential features of all judgments, so there must be certain corresponding ways in which we form the concepts of objects so that judgments may be about objects." Kant provides two central lines of argumentation in support of his claims about the categories. The first, known as
20352-441: The beautiful and the sublime — differ from both the agreeable and the good. They are what Kant refers to as "subjective universal" judgments. This apparently oxymoronic term means that, in practice, the judgments are subjective, and are not tied to any absolute and determinate concept. However, the judgment that something is beautiful or sublime is made with the belief that other people ought to agree with this judgment — even though it
20544-417: The best action for someone with a good salary would be to donate 70% of their income to charity, it would be morally wrong for them to only donate 65%. Satisficing consequentialism, by contrast, only requires that an act is "good enough" even if it is not the best possible alternative. According to this view, it is possible to do more than one is morally required to do. Mohism in ancient Chinese philosophy
20736-407: The concept of suitableness . Schopenhauer stated that "[T]hus we have the queer combination of the knowledge of the beautiful with that of the suitableness of natural bodies into one faculty of knowledge called power of judgement , and the treatment of the two heterogeneous subjects in one book." Kant is inconsistent, according to Schopenhauer, because "...after it had been incessantly repeated in
20928-459: The conditions of possible experience and its objects. "Transcendental illusion" is Kant's term for the tendency of reason to produce such ideas. Although reason has a "logical use" of simply drawing inferences from principles, in "The Transcendental Dialectic", Kant is concerned with its purportedly "real use" to arrive at conclusions by way of unchecked regressive syllogistic ratiocination. The three categories of relation , pursued without regard to
21120-421: The consequences. A related approach is to characterize consequentialism not in terms of consequences but in terms of outcome, with the outcome being defined as the act together with its consequences. Most forms of consequentialism are agent-neutral. This means that the value of consequences is assessed from a neutral perspective, that is, acts should have consequences that are good in general and not just good for
21312-423: The deficient state of cowardice and the excessive state of recklessness . Aristotle held that virtuous action leads to happiness and makes people flourish in life. Stoicism emerged about 300 BCE and taught that, through virtue alone, people can achieve happiness characterized by a peaceful state of mind free from emotional disturbances. The Stoics advocated rationality and self-mastery to achieve this state. In
21504-566: The efforts of reason to arrive at knowledge independent of sensibility. This endeavor, Kant argues, is doomed to failure, which he claims to demonstrate by showing that reason, unbounded by sense, is always capable of generating opposing or otherwise incompatible conclusions. Like "the light dove, in free flight cutting through the air, the resistance of which it feels", reason "could get the idea that it could do even better in airless space". Against this, Kant claims that, absent epistemic friction, there can be no knowledge. Nevertheless, Kant's critique
21696-401: The error of subreption , and, as he says in the last chapter of the dissertation, only in avoiding this error does metaphysics flourish. It is often claimed that Kant was a late developer, that he only became an important philosopher in his mid-50s after rejecting his earlier views. While it is true that Kant wrote his greatest works relatively late in life, there is a tendency to underestimate
21888-546: The existence of God: the ontological argument , the cosmological argument , and the physio-theological argument (i.e., the argument from design). The results of the transcendental dialectic so far appear to be entirely negative. In an Appendix to this section, Kant rejects such a conclusion. The ideas of pure reason, he argues, have an important regulatory function in directing and organizing our theoretical and practical inquiry. Kant's later works elaborate upon this function at length and in detail. Ethical Ethics
22080-548: The first Critique . Recognizing the need to clarify the original treatise, Kant wrote the Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics in 1783 as a summary of its main views. Shortly thereafter, Kant's friend Johann Friedrich Schultz (1739–1805), a professor of mathematics, published Explanations of Professor Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (Königsberg, 1784), which was a brief but very accurate commentary on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason . Kant's reputation gradually rose through
22272-423: The first half of the Critique of Judgement also raise questions about the way the mind represents its objects to itself, and so are foundational for an understanding of the development of much late 20th-century continental philosophy : Jacques Derrida is known to have studied the book extensively. In Truth and Method (1960), Hans-Georg Gadamer rejects Kantian aesthetics as ahistorical in his development of
22464-426: The first parts of the book. Most of his subsequent work focused on other areas of philosophy. He continued to develop his moral philosophy, notably in 1788's Critique of Practical Reason (known as the second Critique ), and 1797's Metaphysics of Morals . The 1790 Critique of the Power of Judgment (the third Critique ) applied the Kantian system to aesthetics and teleology . In 1792, Kant's attempt to publish
22656-417: The first, "constructive" part of his book. As Kant observes, however, "human reason, without being moved by the mere vanity of knowing it all, inexorably pushes on, driven by its own need to such questions that cannot be answered by any experiential use of reason". It is the project of "the critique of pure reason" to establish the limits as to just how far reason may legitimately so proceed. The section of
22848-416: The following three questions: The Critique of Pure Reason focuses upon the first question and opens a conceptual space for an answer to the second question. It argues that even though we cannot strictly know that we are free, we can—and for practical purposes, must— think of ourselves as free. In Kant's own words, "I had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith." Our rational faith in morality
23040-413: The form of universal or domain-independent principles that determine whether an act is right or wrong. For example, given the particular impression that it is wrong to set a child on fire for fun, normative ethics aims to find more general principles that explain why this is the case, like the principle that one should not cause extreme suffering to the innocent , which may itself be explained in terms of
23232-519: The formation of character . Descriptive ethics describes the dominant moral codes and beliefs in different societies and considers their historical dimension. The history of ethics started in the ancient period with the development of ethical principles and theories in ancient Egypt , India , China , and Greece . This period saw the emergence of ethical teachings associated with Hinduism , Buddhism , Confucianism , Daoism , and contributions of philosophers like Socrates and Aristotle . During
23424-405: The former principle is an objective proposition for the determinant Judgment, the latter merely a subjective proposition for the reflective Judgment, i.e. a maxim which Reason prescribes to it. The agreeable is a purely sensory judgment — judgments in the form of "This steak is good," or "This chair is soft." These are purely subjective judgments, based on inclination alone. The good is essentially
23616-456: The four moments of the "Judgement of Taste ". These are given by Kant in sequence as the (1) First Moment. Of the Judgement of Taste: Moment of Quality"; (2) Second Moment. Of the Judgement of Taste: Moment of Quantity"; (3) Third Moment: Of Judgement of Taste: Moment of the Relation of the ends brought under Review in such Judgements"; and (4) Fourth Moment: Of the Judgement of Taste: Moment of
23808-405: The future should be shaped to achieve the best possible outcome. The act itself is usually not seen as part of the consequences. This means that if an act has intrinsic value or disvalue, it is not included as a factor. Some consequentialists see this as a flaw, saying that all value-relevant factors need to be considered. They try to avoid this complication by including the act itself as part of
24000-429: The greatest number" by increasing happiness and reducing suffering. Utilitarians do not deny that other things also have value, like health, friendship, and knowledge. However, they deny that these things have intrinsic value. Instead, they say that they have extrinsic value because they affect happiness and suffering. In this regard, they are desirable as a means but, unlike happiness, not as an end. The view that pleasure
24192-421: The human mind and culture rather than as subjective constructs or expressions of personal preferences and cultural norms . Moral realists accept the claim that there are objective moral facts. This view implies that moral values are mind-independent aspects of reality and that there is an absolute fact about whether a given action is right or wrong. A consequence of this view is that moral requirements have
24384-415: The importance of interpersonal relationships and say that benevolence by caring for the well-being of others is one of the key virtues. Influential schools of virtue ethics in ancient philosophy were Aristotelianism and Stoicism . According to Aristotle (384–322 BCE), each virtue is a golden mean between two types of vices: excess and deficiency. For example, courage is a virtue that lies between
24576-411: The intellectual satisfaction of reading a book, are more valuable than lower pleasures, like the sensory enjoyment of food and drink, even if their intensity and duration are the same. Since its original formulation, many variations of utilitarianism have developed, including the difference between act and rule utilitarianism and between maximizing and satisficing utilitarianism. Deontology assesses
24768-465: The introduction to Logik , that "Kant's whole philosophy turns upon his logic." Also, Robert Schirokauer Hartman and Wolfgang Schwarz wrote in the translators' introduction to their English translation of the Logik , "Its importance lies not only in its significance for the Critique of Pure Reason , the second part of which is a restatement of fundamental tenets of the Logic , but in its position within
24960-421: The judgment of beauty is what he called the ″free play″ between the cognitive powers of imagination and understanding. We call an object beautiful, because its form fits our cognitive powers and enables such a ″free play″ (§22) the experience of which is pleasurable to us. The judgment that something is beautiful is a claim that it possesses the "form of finality" — that is, that it appears to have been designed with
25152-563: The latter portion of the 1780s, sparked by a series of important works: the 1784 essay, " Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment? "; 1785's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (his first work on moral philosophy); and Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science from 1786. Kant's fame ultimately arrived from an unexpected source. In 1786, Karl Leonhard Reinhold published a series of public letters on Kantian philosophy. In these letters, Reinhold framed Kant's philosophy as
25344-403: The lazy mind". He also dissuaded Kant from idealism , the idea that reality is purely mental, which most philosophers in the 18th century regarded negatively. The theory of transcendental idealism that Kant later included in the Critique of Pure Reason was developed partially in opposition to traditional idealism. Kant had contacts with students, colleagues, friends and diners who frequented
25536-609: The level of ontology , it examines whether there are objective moral facts. Concerning semantics , it asks what the meaning of moral terms are and whether moral statements have a truth value . The epistemological side of metaethics discusses whether and how people can acquire moral knowledge. Metaethics overlaps with psychology because of its interest in how moral judgments motivate people to act. It also overlaps with anthropology since it aims to explain how cross-cultural differences affect moral assessments. Metaethics examines basic ethical concepts and their relations. Ethics
25728-413: The limits of possible experience, yield the three central ideas of traditional metaphysics: Although Kant denies that these ideas can be objects of genuine cognition, he argues that they are the result of reason's inherent drive to unify cognition into a systematic whole. Leibnizian-Wolffian metaphysics was divided into four parts: ontology, psychology, cosmology, and theology. Kant replaces the first with
25920-547: The local Masonic lodge . His father's stroke and subsequent death in 1746 interrupted his studies. Kant left Königsberg shortly after August 1748; he would return there in August 1754. He became a private tutor in the towns surrounding Königsberg, but continued his scholarly research. In 1749, he published his first philosophical work, Thoughts on the True Estimation of Living Forces (written in 1745–1747). Kant
26112-583: The mere thought of "I" in the proposition "I think" as the proper cognition of "I" as an object. In this way, he claims to debunk various metaphysical theses about the substantiality, unity, and self-identity of the soul. The second chapter, which is the longest, takes up the topic Kant calls the antinomies of pure reason—that is, the contradictions of reason with itself—in the metaphysical discipline of rational cosmology. Originally, Kant had thought that all transcendental illusion could be analyzed in antinomic terms. He presents four cases in which he claims reason
26304-481: The mind through a subjective, essentially illusory series of perceptions. Ideas such as causality , morality , and objects are not evident in experience, so their reality may be questioned. Kant felt that reason could remove this skepticism, and he set himself to solving these problems. Although fond of company and conversation with others, Kant isolated himself, and resisted friends' attempts to bring him out of his isolation. When Kant emerged from his silence in 1781,
26496-443: The modern mechanistic view of the world called into question the very possibility of morality; for, if there is no agency, there cannot be any responsibility. The aim of Kant's critical project is to secure human autonomy, the basis of religion and morality, from this threat of mechanism—and to do so in a way that preserves the advances of modern science. In the Critique of Pure Reason , Kant summarizes his philosophical concerns in
26688-569: The moral rightness of actions based on a set of norms or principles. These norms describe the requirements that all actions need to follow. They may include principles like telling the truth, keeping promises , and not intentionally harming others. Unlike consequentialists, deontologists hold that the validity of general moral principles does not directly depend on their consequences. They state that these principles should be followed in every case since they express how actions are inherently right or wrong. According to moral philosopher David Ross , it
26880-477: The moral value of acts only depends on the pleasure and suffering they cause. An alternative approach says that there are many different sources of value, which all contribute to one overall value. Before the 20th century, consequentialists were only concerned with the total of value or the aggregate good. In the 20th century, alternative views were developed that additionally consider the distribution of value. One of them states that an equal distribution of goods
27072-464: The most direct contested matter was Hume's argument against any necessary connection between causal events, which Hume characterized as the "cement of the universe." In the Critique of Pure Reason , Kant argues for what he takes to be the a priori justification of such necessary connection. Although now recognized as one of the greatest works in the history of philosophy, the Critique disappointed Kant's readers upon its initial publication. The book
27264-431: The motives and intentions behind people's actions, highlighting the importance of acting for the right reasons. They tend to be agent-relative, meaning that the reasons for which people should act depend on personal circumstances. For example, a parent has a special obligation to their child, while a stranger does not have this kind of obligation toward a child they do not know. Patient-centered theories, by contrast, focus on
27456-476: The natural flow of the universe . Indigenous belief systems, like Native American philosophy and the African Ubuntu philosophy , often emphasize the interconnectedness of all living beings and the environment while stressing the importance of living in harmony with nature. Metaethics is the branch of ethics that examines the nature, foundations, and scope of moral judgments , concepts, and values. It
27648-409: The necessity of a sensible component in all genuine knowledge. The second of the two Divisions of "The Transcendental Logic", "The Transcendental Dialectic", contains the "negative" portion of Kant's Critique , which builds upon the "positive" arguments of the preceding "Transcendental Analytic" to expose the limits of metaphysical speculation. In particular, it is concerned to demonstrate as spurious
27840-414: The need for theological censorship. This insubordination earned him a now-famous reprimand from the King. When he nevertheless published a second edition in 1794, the censor was so irate that he arranged for a royal order that required Kant never to publish or even speak publicly about religion. Kant then published his response to the King's reprimand and explained himself in the preface of The Conflict of
28032-501: The northeast corner of the cathedral. Over the years, the chapel became dilapidated and was demolished to make way for the mausoleum, which was built on the same location. The tomb and its mausoleum are among the few artifacts of German times preserved by the Soviets after they captured the city. Into the 21st century, many newlyweds bring flowers to the mausoleum. Artifacts previously owned by Kant, known as Kantiana , were included in
28224-431: The objects that are given in experience. According to Guyer and Wood, "He centers his argument on the premise that our experience can be ascribed to a single identical subject, via what he calls the 'transcendental unity of apperception,' only if the elements of experience given in intuition are synthetically combined so as to present us with objects that are thought through the categories." Kant's principle of apperception
28416-573: The observing subject's mind organizes and structures the sensory world. The end result of this inquiry in the First Critique is that there are certain fundamental antinomies in the dialectical use of Reason, most particularly that there is a complete inability to favor on the one hand the argument that all behavior and thought is determined by external causes, and on the other that there is an actual "spontaneous" causal principle at work in human behavior. The first position, of causal determinism,
28608-489: The only four possible reflective judgments, as he relates them to the Table of Judgments from the Critique of Pure Reason . "Reflective judgments" differ from determinative judgments (those of the first two critiques). In reflective judgment we seek to find unknown universals for given particulars; whereas in determinative judgment, we just subsume given particulars under universals that are already known, as Kant puts it: It
28800-441: The only possible kinds of human reason and investigation, which Hume called "relations of ideas" and "matters of fact". Establishing the synthetic a priori as a third mode of knowledge would allow Kant to push back against Hume's skepticism about such matters as causation and metaphysical knowledge more generally. This is because, unlike a posteriori cognition, a priori cognition has "true or strict ... universality" and includes
28992-466: The organization of the natural world. In Religion within the Bounds of Mere Reason , Kant endeavors to complete his answer to this third question. These works all place the active, rational human subject at the center of the cognitive and moral worlds. In brief, Kant argues that the mind itself necessarily makes a constitutive contribution to knowledge , that this contribution is transcendental rather than psychological, and that to act autonomously
29184-430: The people affected by actions and the rights they have. An example is the requirement to treat other people as ends and not merely as a means to an end. This requirement can be used to argue, for example, that it is wrong to kill a person against their will even if this act would save the lives of several others. Patient-centered deontological theories are usually agent-neutral, meaning that they apply equally to everyone in
29376-440: The person possesses and exercises certain capacities or some form of control . If a person is morally responsible then it is appropriate to respond to them in certain ways, for example, by praising or blaming them. A major debate in metaethics is about the ontological status of morality, questioning whether ethical values and principles are real. It examines whether moral properties exist as objective features independent of
29568-411: The person would want everyone to follow the same maxim as a universal law applicable to everyone. Another formulation states that one should treat other people always as ends in themselves and never as mere means to an end. This formulation focuses on respecting and valuing other people for their own sake rather than using them in the pursuit of personal goals. In either case, Kant says that what matters
29760-450: The positive results of the first part of the Critique . He proposes to replace the following three with his later doctrines of anthropology, the metaphysical foundations of natural science, and the critical postulation of human freedom and morality. In the second of the two Books of "The Transcendental Dialectic", Kant undertakes to demonstrate the contradictory nature of unbounded reason. He does this by developing contradictions in each of
29952-479: The practice of selfless love , such as the Great Commandment to "Love your neighbor as yourself". The Five Pillars of Islam constitute a basic framework of Muslim ethics and focus on the practice of faith , prayer , charity , fasting during Ramadan , and pilgrimage to Mecca . Buddhists emphasize the importance of compassion and loving-kindness towards all sentient entities. A similar outlook
30144-433: The relation between mental operations and external objects. "His attention is specially aroused by the circumstance that such a judgement is obviously the expression of something occurring in the subject, but is nevertheless as universally valid as if it concerned a quality of the object. It is this that struck him, not the beautiful itself." The book's form is the result of concluding that beauty can be explained by examining
30336-506: The relation between our sensible and intellectual faculties. He needed to explain how we combine what is known as sensory knowledge with the other type of knowledge—that is, reasoned knowledge—these two being related but having very different processes. Kant also credited David Hume with awakening him from a "dogmatic slumber" in which he had unquestioningly accepted the tenets of both religion and natural philosophy . Hume, in his 1739 Treatise on Human Nature , had argued that we only know
30528-586: The rest of his professional life. He studied the philosophy of Gottfried Leibniz and Christian Wolff under Martin Knutzen (Associate Professor of Logic and Metaphysics from 1734 until he died in 1751), a rationalist who was also familiar with developments in British philosophy and science and introduced Kant to the new mathematical physics of Isaac Newton . Knutzen dissuaded Kant from the theory of pre-established harmony , which he regarded as "the pillow for
30720-467: The result was the Critique of Pure Reason , printed by Johann Friedrich Hartknoch . Kant countered Hume's empiricism by claiming that some knowledge exists inherently in the mind, independent of experience. He drew a parallel to the Copernican revolution in his proposal that worldly objects can be intuited a priori , and that intuition is consequently distinct from objective reality . Perhaps
30912-468: The right to receive that benefit. Obligation and permission are contrasting terms that can be defined through each other: to be obligated to do something means that one is not permitted not to do it and to be permitted to do something means that one is not obligated not to do it. Some theorists define obligations in terms of values or what is good . When used in a general sense, good contrasts with bad . When describing people and their intentions,
31104-417: The same course of action but provide different justifications for why it is right. Consequentialism, also called teleological ethics, says that morality depends on consequences. According to the most common view, an act is right if it brings the best future. This means that there is no alternative course of action that has better consequences. A key aspect of consequentialist theories is that they provide
31296-401: The same ontological status as non-moral facts: it is an objective fact whether there is an obligation to keep a promise just as it is an objective fact whether a thing is rectangular. Moral realism is often associated with the claim that there are universal ethical principles that apply equally to everyone. It implies that if two people disagree about a moral evaluation then at least one of them
31488-423: The same time required to justify them using rational argumentation. The main concern of virtue ethics is how virtues are expressed in actions. As such, it is neither directly interested in the consequences of actions nor in universal moral duties. Virtues are positive character traits like honesty , courage , kindness , and compassion . They are usually understood as dispositions to feel, decide, and act in
31680-615: The science of types (morphology) and to justify its autonomy. Kant held that there was no purpose represented in the aesthetic judgement of an object's beauty . A pure aesthetic judgement excludes the object's purpose. Though Kant consistently maintains that the human mind is not an " intuitive understanding "—something that creates the phenomena which it cognizes—several of his readers (starting with Fichte , culminating in Schelling ) believed that it must be (and often give Kant credit). Kant's discussions of schema and symbol late in
31872-683: The sciences throughout his life. In the early 1760s, Kant produced a series of important works in philosophy. The False Subtlety of the Four Syllogistic Figures , a work in logic, was published in 1762. Two more works appeared the following year: Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy and The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God . By 1764, Kant had become
32064-426: The second of which they are thought ." Kant's term for the object of sensibility is intuition, and his term for the object of the understanding is concept. In general terms, the former is a non-discursive representation of a particular object, and the latter is a discursive (or mediate) representation of a general type of object. The conditions of possible experience require both intuitions and concepts, that is,
32256-409: The structure of practical reason and are true for all rational agents. According to Kant, to act morally is to act in agreement with reason as expressed by these principles while violating them is both immoral and irrational. Kant provided several formulations of the categorical imperative. One formulation says that a person should only follow maxims that can be universalized . This means that
32448-528: The subject in the last decade of his life. Immanuel Kant was born on 22 April 1724 into a Prussian German family of Lutheran faith in Königsberg , East Prussia. His mother, Anna Regina Reuter (1697–1737), was born in Königsberg to a father from Nuremberg . Her surname is sometimes erroneously given as Porter. Kant's father, Johann Georg Kant (1682–1746), was a German harness-maker from Memel , at
32640-509: The subjective forms of intuition that we ourselves contribute to experience. Nevertheless, although Kant says that space and time are "transcendentally ideal"—the pure forms of human sensibility, rather than part of nature or reality as it exists in-itself—he also claims that they are "empirically real", by which he means "that 'everything that can come before us externally as an object' is in both space and time, and that our internal intuitions of ourselves are in time". However Kant's doctrine
32832-595: The teachings of the Quran . Contractualists reject the reference to God as the source of morality and argue instead that morality is based on an explicit or implicit social contract between humans. They state that actual or hypothetical consent to this contract is the source of moral norms and duties. To determine which duties people have, contractualists often rely on a thought experiment about what rational people under ideal circumstances would agree on. For example, if they would agree that people should not lie then there
33024-455: The term evil rather than bad is often employed. Obligations are used to assess the moral status of actions, motives , and character traits . An action is morally right if it is in tune with a person's obligations and morally wrong if it violates them. Supererogation is a special moral status that applies to cases in which the agent does more than is morally required of them. To be morally responsible for an action usually means that
33216-400: The thing-in-itself is not numerically identical to the phenomenal empirical object. Kant also spoke, however, of the thing-in-itself or transcendent object as a product of the (human) understanding as it attempts to conceive of objects in abstraction from the conditions of sensibility. Following this line of thought, a different interpretation argues that the thing-in-itself does not represent
33408-447: The three metaphysical disciplines that he contends are in fact pseudosciences. This section of the Critique is long and Kant's arguments are extremely detailed. In this context, it not possible to do much more than enumerate the topics of discussion. The first chapter addresses what Kant terms the paralogisms —i.e., false inferences—that pure reason makes in the metaphysical discipline of rational psychology. He argues that one cannot take
33600-495: The time Prussia's most northeastern city (now Klaipėda , Lithuania ). It is possible that the Kants got their name from the village of Kantvainiai (German: Kantwaggen – today part of Priekulė ) and were of Kursenieki origin. Kant was baptized as Emanuel and later changed the spelling of his name to Immanuel after learning Hebrew . He was the fourth of nine children (six of whom reached adulthood). The Kant household stressed
33792-411: The title of "father of modern philosophy ". In his doctrine of transcendental idealism , Kant argued that space and time are mere "forms of intuition" that structure all experience and that the objects of experience are mere "appearances". The nature of things as they are in themselves is unknowable to us. Nonetheless, in an attempt to counter the philosophical doctrine of skepticism , he wrote
33984-450: The truth and keeping promises. Virtue ethics sees the manifestation of virtues , like courage and compassion , as the fundamental principle of morality. Ethics is closely connected to value theory , which studies the nature and types of value , like the contrast between intrinsic and instrumental value . Moral psychology is a related empirical field and investigates psychological processes involved in morality, such as reasoning and
34176-444: The underlying assumptions and concepts of ethics. It asks whether there are objective moral facts, how moral knowledge is possible, and how moral judgments motivate people. Influential normative theories are consequentialism , deontology , and virtue ethics . According to consequentialists, an act is right if it leads to the best consequences. Deontologists focus on acts themselves, saying that they must adhere to duties , like telling
34368-409: The universal and necessary validity of the pure concepts of the understanding, or the categories, for instance, the concepts of substance and causation. These twelve basic categories define what it is to be a thing in general —that is, they articulate the necessary conditions according to which something is a possible object of experience. These, in conjunction with the a priori forms of intuition, are
34560-430: The university formed a Kant Society, dedicated to the study of Kantianism . In 2010, the university was again renamed to Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University . Like many of his contemporaries, Kant was greatly impressed with the scientific advances made by Newton and others. This new evidence of the power of human reason called into question for many the traditional authority of politics and religion. In particular,
34752-399: The value of consequences based on whether they promote happiness or suffering. But there are also alternative evaluative principles, such as desire satisfaction, autonomy , freedom , knowledge , friendship , beauty , and self-perfection. Some forms of consequentialism hold that there is only a single source of value . The most prominent among them is utilitarianism , which states that
34944-444: The value of his earlier works. Recent Kant scholarship has devoted more attention to these "pre-critical" writings and has recognized a degree of continuity with his mature work. At age 46, Kant was an established scholar and an increasingly influential philosopher, and much was expected of him. In correspondence with his ex-student and friend Markus Herz , Kant admitted that, in the inaugural dissertation, he had failed to account for
35136-466: The whole of Kant's work." Kant's health, long poor, worsened. He died at Königsberg on 12 February 1804, uttering Es ist gut ("It is good") before expiring. His unfinished final work was published as Opus Postumum . Kant always cut a curious figure in his lifetime for his modest, rigorously scheduled habits, which have been referred to as clocklike. Heinrich Heine observed the magnitude of "his destructive, world-crushing thoughts" and considered him
35328-455: Was a German philosopher and one of the central Enlightenment thinkers. Born in Königsberg , Kant's comprehensive and systematic works in epistemology , metaphysics , ethics , and aesthetics have made him one of the most influential and controversial figures in modern Western philosophy . He has been called the "father of modern ethics", the "father of modern aesthetics", and for bringing together rationalism and empiricism, he has earned
35520-632: Was appointed Full Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at the University of Königsberg. In defense of this appointment, Kant wrote his inaugural dissertation On the Form and Principles of the Sensible and the Intelligible World This work saw the emergence of several central themes of his mature work, including the distinction between the faculties of intellectual thought and sensible receptivity. To miss this distinction would mean to commit
35712-555: Was introduced into the English language during the Middle English period through the Old French term moralité . The terms ethics and morality are usually used interchangeably but some philosophers distinguish between the two. According to one view, morality focuses on what moral obligations people have while ethics is broader and includes ideas about what is good and how to lead a meaningful life. Another difference
35904-487: Was long, over 800 pages in the original German edition, and written in a convoluted style. Kant was quite upset with its reception. His former student, Johann Gottfried Herder criticized it for placing reason as an entity worthy of criticism by itself instead of considering the process of reasoning within the context of language and one's entire personality. Similarly to Christian Garve and Johann Georg Heinrich Feder , he rejected Kant's position that space and time possess
36096-469: Was measured during the exhumation and found to be larger than the average German male's with a "high and broad" forehead. His forehead has been an object of interest ever since it became well known through his portraits: "In Döbler's portrait and in Kiefer's faithful if expressionistic reproduction of it—as well as in many of the other late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century portraits of Kant—the forehead
36288-446: Was not published during Kant's lifetime, for Kant wrote a replacement for publication. The Critical project, that of exploring the limits and conditions of knowledge, had already produced the Critique of Pure Reason , in which Kant argued for a Transcendental Aesthetic , an approach to the problems of perception in which space and time are argued not to be objects. The First Critique argues that space and time provide ways in which
36480-511: Was one of Kant's most popular lecturing topics and, in 1802, a compilation by Friedrich Theodor Rink of Kant's lecturing notes, Physical Geography , was released. After Kant became a professor in 1770, he expanded the topics of his lectures to include lectures on natural law, ethics, and anthropology, along with other topics. In the Universal Natural History , Kant laid out the nebular hypothesis , in which he deduced that
36672-562: Was replaced by the Russian-language Kaliningrad State University, which appropriated the campus and surviving buildings. In 2005, the university was renamed Immanuel Kant State University of Russia. The name change, which was considered a politically-charged issue due to the residents having mixed feelings about its German past, was announced at a ceremony attended by Russian president Vladimir Putin and German chancellor Gerhard Schröder , and
36864-475: Was unlikely. A further difference is between maximizing and satisficing consequentialism. According to maximizing consequentialism, only the best possible act is morally permitted. This means that acts with positive consequences are wrong if there are alternatives with even better consequences. One criticism of maximizing consequentialism is that it demands too much by requiring that people do significantly more than they are socially expected to. For example, if
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