Immanuel Kant’s philosophical treatises during the Enlightenment focused on logic, empirical evidence, sensory input, and epistemology. He developed “transcendental idealism” and encouraged individuals to take responsibility for determining their own truths. Kant argued that we are constrained in our perception of the world by our senses and the organization of our thoughts. He believed that all objects are fundamentally unknowable as independent of our involvement in their observation.
Immanuel Kant wrote philosophical treatises during the Enlightenment that dealt with logic, empirical evidence, sensory input and epistemology, or how we learn what we know. We can place his thoughts in an age concerned with the scientific method, with religion and metaphysics, with ethical societies and rival belief systems. Kant responded to the empiricists and rationalists by affirming his thesis that everything we believe in must be filtered through our senses and our mind. Thus, truth is determined by how we understand and orient our knowledge of an object, regardless of what other “independent” characteristics the object might possess.
During his long life, from 1724 to 1804, Immanuel Kant made numerous contributions to modern philosophy, developing what he called “transcendental idealism”. He spent his entire life in his hometown of East Prussia working at the local university, reading contemporary Enlightenment philosophers and writing treatises in German. He has commented on everything from the existence of God to the aesthetics of beauty, as well as examining how established, established bodies of knowledge affect the average person. Always wanting to promote freedom, independence, and equality, his theories encouraged individuals to take responsibility for determining their own truths.
Kant synthesized the philosophies of two opposing schools of thought to lay the foundation for transcendental idealism. In many ways, his theories anticipated how 20th-century physics understands observation, as well as how neurologists understand consciousness today. Empiricists, especially David Hume, believed that we can rely on what we know about the world only through direct, experiential information, including emotions and frames of reference. However, rationalists encouraged logical knowledge that was accumulated, inferred, or concluded from other abstract knowledge, because this was independent of person-to-person variation.
A direct response to David Hume, Kant wrote The Critique of Pure Reason in 1781. In this seminal work, he argued that we are, by necessity, constrained in our perception of the world. These constraints, or filters, are mainly our senses and the organization of our thoughts determined by the physiology of our brain. We acquire knowledge both organically and abstractly, but the process of acquiring cannot be separated from the knowledge itself.
The constraints Kant spoke of do not have a negative connotation. They can be thought of as filters, patterns, language, tools, consciousness, or limits of our imagination that structure the tenacity of beliefs. It follows that if there are metaphysical or supersensory phenomena, human beings do not have access to them. Without arguing that the world is an illusion, Kant still reasons that all of his objects are fundamentally unknowable as independent of our involvement in their observation.
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