Thomas Nenon, "Immanuel Kant’s Turn to Transcendental Philosophy" (Summary)

Kant's work in 1781 marked a significant turning point in the history of philosophy. His first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason introduced a "critical" philosophy with a radical new approach to traditional questions in epistemology and metaphysics, completely reshaping the philosophical landscape. He would produce significant and original contributions to philosophical ethics in his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), Critique of Practical Reason (1788), and the second part of his Metaphysics of Morals (1797).

Kant's early works are commonly referred to as "precritical writings," which give little hint of the scope, originality, and significance of the work that followed. Born into a modest atmosphere influenced by Pietism, Kant was strongly influenced by theology professor Franz Albert Schultz and philosophy professor Martin Knutzen, who took seriously the work of Leibnizian Christian Wolff. Other prominent influences included Aristotelian philosophy and Christian Thomasius's eclecticism.

Kant's earliest publications deal with questions at the intersection of natural science and philosophy and on methodological issues in philosophy and theology. His first book, Th oughts on the True Estimation of Living Force, written in 1746 and published in 1749 when Kant was still a young student, and his dissertation Succinct Exposition of Some Meditations on Fire and his General History of Nature and Theory of the Heavens from the same year are examples of the former. Prime examples of the latter include his 1755 essay A New Exposition of the First Principles of Metaphysical Knowledge, his essay on The Only Possible Basis of a Demonstration of the Existence of God, his Investigations of the Clarity of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morals, and the inaugural dissertation On the Form and Principles of the Sensible and the Intelligible World, which he defended in conjunction with his appointment to the rank of professor in 1770.

Much of the Critique hinges on Kant's analysis of the notion of "experience" itself. He tries to show that experience involves more than just having sense impressions, and that positive knowledge is possible only on the basis of experience, which necessarily involves both sense experience (intuitions) and the operations of the intellect (concepts). Kant distinguishes between those functions of the mind involved in the organization and unification of intuitions into knowledge from the functions that involve the higher-order unifying operations of seeking overarching unities or ultimate grounds for knowledge in objects that lie outside the realm of sense experience.

Kant's primary focus is on reason only in its theoretical function, that is, in its claims to knowledge. He concludes that the intellect in conjunction with the senses can provide us with more or less reliable, empirical knowledge of sense objects, but that reason alone cannot yield theoretical knowledge.

Kant's philosophy emphasizes the importance of understanding the categories of thought and the role of concepts in recognizing and organizing the material provided by intuition. He presents twelve categories of thinking that correspond to the forms of judgment: quantity (universal, particular, or individual), quality (reality, negation, limitation), relation (inherence and substance, cause and effect, mutual interaction), and modality (possibility, actuality, necessity). These categories are called the "metaphysical deduction" of the categories and are necessary conditions for the possibilities of experience and any object of experience for us.

Kant argues that experience, objects of experience, and even the consciousness of the subjects who experience objects are unities, not just aggregates of data that come and go over time. Each of these categories has a fundamental unity across time in spite of the specific changes in the state of experience, in objects, and in the subjects of experience over time. Knowledge involves recognition of patterns and the assumption that there are patterns within experience. The fact that we must assume that we can and do organize our intuitions according to these patterns for knowledge to be possible is the core insight that Kant advances in these sections.

However, the general arguments about the nature and necessity of the categories leave open the question of how specific they apply to objects. Kant's philosophy and approach to understanding nature involve identifying three categories of relation: substance, causality, and modality. The categories of relation have temporal schemata, such as simultaneity according to substance and succession according to causality. Modality is characterized by its relationship to the conditions of experience, such as possibility, actuality, and necessity.

Attaining knowledge involves organizing the material provided by the senses according to the general rules of what things are "always" given together or "always" succeed each other. Intuition provides not only the raw material for knowledge but also a guide for how to arrange them in terms of their formal temporal relationships and the measure and corrective of empirical knowledge through what Kant calls the "further course of experience." Empirical knowledge is always open to revision because the rules that we are attempting to discern through the course of specific experiences given to us are intended as holding "always."

Kant's philosophy has been criticized for its close tie to modern natural science, its focus on "objectivity," and its narrow notion of human cognition. Subsequent developments in mathematics and natural science raise the question whether Kant's orientation on Euclidean geometry and Newtonian physics as paradigms of knowledge is evidence that his universal and unchangeable a priori principles are actually assumptions that hold only relative to these specific systems.

The Critique of Pure Reason by Augustus Kant is a philosophical treatise that argues that philosophy can identify a priori, nonempirical, or "metaphysical" principles for practical reason. Kant's moral theory begins with an analysis of common intuitions about the nature of moral obligation, asserting that there is nothing in the world that could be considered good without any qualification except for a good will. He defines "duty" as the necessity of an action done out of respect for the law.

Kant's answer to everyday common sense is that all of us experience cases where our inclinations conflict with what we know we ought to do (our duty). We become aware of our moral obligations when we ask what any reasonable person must admit is the right thing to do in this situation. Pure practical rationality distinguishes itself from pure practical rationality by its general principles or maxims being traced back not to some specific inclination or desire but rather to one's own rational awareness of one's duty as such. The will of the moral individual is therefore "autonomous," since the good will is not determined by anything outside itself, making it in the fullest sense "free."

Kant's theory of morality is based on the concept of "imperatives," which are commands that dictate what we must do to achieve certain ends. He formulates the categorical imperative as follows: "Act only according to that maxim that you can at the same time thereby will that it become a universal law." He emphasizes the need for a single categorical imperative, but offers four alternative formulations. The first formulation states that one should act as if the maximum of their action should become through their will a natural law, expresses the lawfulness and universality of the good will as pure practical reason. The second formulation states that one should treat humanity, both in one's own person and in the person of every other, as an end and never merely as a means. The third formulation explicitly draws on this notion of autonomy: "Act in such a way that the will can view itself in its maxim as at the same making a universal law." Finally, the fourth formulation brings together the notions of universality and the notion of human beings as ends in themselves.

Kant's critique of practical reason addresses the ontological implications of his new theory, focusing on the question of freedom and how it can be reconciled with the idea of natural causality. He asserts that freedom is the cornerstone of a system of pure, even speculative reason, and that all other concepts, such as God and immortality, follow from freedom and receive content and objective reality through it.

Kant believes that the Stoics fail to appreciate actual human psychology if they believe that we can (or should) extinguish any hopes for material happiness and well-being in this life. He believes that the only thing that can be said to be good without qualification is a good will, but we can envisage a more comprehensive good that would entail a coincidence between happiness and moral worth.

Kant's metaphysical grounds of a doctrine of virtue focus on things we cannot know or count on, but that a moral person must hope for when acting in conformity with the moral law. He emphasizes that this resolve is always in danger and must be constantly and consistently renewed because human motivation never eliminates heteronomous inclinations that even the smallest moral resolve cannot completely extinguish.

Kant's philosophical reflections on judgments of taste have significant implications for theories of art, artistic creativity, and philosophical determinations of concepts such as beauty and sublimity. His Critique of Judgment from 1790 examines the nature of these judgments and the validity of various teleological claims. Aesthetic judgments are subjective and dependent on individual sensibilities and preferences, while moral claims are based on pure practical reason and absolute obligation.

Judgments of taste, specifically judgments about what is and is not beautiful, resemble moral claims and theoretical claims about truth in that they claim universal assent even without an objective basis. They share the characteristic that they seem to be made from the standpoint of an impartial observer, as one can judge an object beautiful without necessarily having an interest in possessing that object. The feeling of pleasure (lust) awakens in the person who experiences the object, and Kant concludes that it must be something about the experiencing of the object that gives rise to the judgment.

In his analysis of the beautiful, Kant focuses on the concept of the sublime, which he believes is a transcendent object beyond our grasp. Experiences of the sublime serve as symbols of transcendent objects that lie beyond our intellect, helping to foster an appropriate sensitivity to nonnatural objects such as duty and human beings as persons. Prime examples of the sublime are overwhelming natural phenomena like the vastness of the sea, the majesty of mountains, or the ferocity of a storm.

Kant develops a theory of genius in the Critique of Judgment, which has been influential not only in philosophical aesthetics but also in the self-understanding of many artists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Beauty is not simply a matter of the intellect, and there are no rules for what makes an article beautiful or not.

Kant's philosophy of right has been a subject of significant debate and analysis, with his metaphysics of morals receiving more attention. He posits that "persons" are entities who possess practical reason that makes them morally accountable and endows them with rights. In a state of nature, only physical goods, including one's own bodily well-being, can be reliably secured only if there is an enforcement mechanism that makes it in everyone's self-interest to observe the rights of others, namely a civil society with recognized laws and institutions that enforce them.