Who developed Kantian philosophy?
German idealism
Neo-Kantianism refers broadly to a revived type of philosophy along the lines of that laid down by Immanuel Kant in the 18th century, or more specifically by Schopenhauer's criticism of the Kantian philosophy in his work "The World as Will and Representation" (1818), as well as by other post-Kantian philosophers such as Jakob Friedrich Fries and Johann Friedrich Herbart. It has some more specific reference in later German philosophy.
Metaphor in philosophy
The major shift which occurs in Kantian continental philosophy, according to Cazeaux, is the departure 'from dualistic thought, i.e. thinking which remains within the boundaries created by oppositions, such as mind—body and subjective—objective' . The turn away from dualistic thought is made by Kant on account of his representing experience as the subjective determination of an objective world, thereby placing in a relationship terms which normally stand as opposites in a dualism. As a result of this shift, without conventional dualisms to fall back upon, the process of conceptual borrowing and cross-referral presented by metaphor becomes central as the means by which the textures and complexities of experience can be articulated. Theses to this effect, but with significant differences, can be found in Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Bachelard, Paul Ricoeur, and Derrida.
Jean Grondin
Jean Grondin, (born August 27, 1955) is a Canadian philosopher and professor. He is a specialist in the thought of Immanuel Kant, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Martin Heidegger. His research focuses on hermeneutics, phenomenology, German classical philosophy and the history of metaphysics.
Königsberg
Königsberg was the birthplace of the mathematician Christian Goldbach and the writer E.T.A. Hoffmann, as well as the home of the philosopher Immanuel Kant, who lived there virtually all his life and rarely travelled more than ten miles () away from the city. Kant entered the university of Königsberg at age 16 and was appointed to a chair in metaphysics there in 1770 at the age of 46. While working there he published his "Critique of Pure Reason" (arguing that knowledge arises from the application of innate concepts to sensory experience) and his "Metaphysics of Morals" which argues that virtue is acquired by the performance of duty for its own sake. In 1736, the mathematician Leonhard Euler used the arrangement of the city's bridges and islands as the basis for the Seven Bridges of Königsberg Problem, which led to the mathematical branches of topology and graph theory. In the 19th century Königsberg was the birthplace of the influential mathematician David Hilbert.
Immanuel Kant
Kant was born on April 22, 1724 into a Prussian German family of Lutheran Protestant faith in Königsberg, East Prussia. Baptized 'Emanuel', he later changed his name to 'Immanuel' after learning Hebrew. He was brought up in a Pietist household that stressed religious devotion, humility, and a literal interpretation of the Bible. His education was strict, punitive and disciplinary, and focused on Latin and religious instruction over mathematics and science. Kant maintained Christian ideals for some time, but struggled to reconcile the faith with his belief in science. In his "Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals", he reveals a belief in immortality as the necessary condition of humanity's approach to the highest morality possible. However, as Kant was skeptical about some of the arguments used prior to him in defence of theism and maintained that human understanding is limited and can never attain knowledge about God or the soul, various commentators have labelled him a philosophical agnostic.
German philosophy
In 1781, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) published his "Critique of Pure Reason", in which he attempted to determine what we can and cannot know through the use of reason independent of all experience. Briefly, he came to the conclusion that we could come to know an external world through experience, but that what we could know about it was limited by the limited terms in which the mind can think: if we can only comprehend things in terms of cause and effect, then we can only know causes and effects. It follows from this that we can know the form of all possible experience independent of all experience, but nothing else, but we can never know the world from the “standpoint of nowhere” and therefore we can never know the world in its entirety, neither via reason nor experience.
Felix Adler (professor)
Adler developed an original philosophy with a foundation in those of Immanuel Kant and G.W.F. Hegel that developed and transformed these roots. He considered philosophy not just a guide of life but key to improving society and the human condition appropriate to a respect for essential human dignity. Rejecting Kant's metaphysics he embraced his stress on the intrinsic worth and dignity of the person. Combining a supreme moral principle similar to Kant's with his own detailed ideas of self-realization, he emphasized free development of the individual in relation to societal concerns and fellowship. He preceded John Dewey in a concern for the "problems of men" instead of philosophical technicalities. While his ideas shared some aspects of pragmatism he was better described as "an ethical idealist with great practical reforming zeal" he promoted an idealist version of moral perfectionism. He was however realistic and not sentimental acknowledging that man has done evil knowingly and deliberately.
Immanuel Kant
Prominent recent Kantians include the British philosophers P.F. Strawson, Onora O'Neill, and Quassim Cassam and the American philosophers Wilfrid Sellars and Christine Korsgaard. Due to the influence of Strawson and Sellars, among others, there has been a renewed interest in Kant's view of the mind. Central to many debates in philosophy of psychology and cognitive science is Kant's conception of the unity of consciousness.
Age of Enlightenment
Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) tried to reconcile rationalism and religious belief, individual freedom and political authority, as well as map out a view of the public sphere through private and public reason. Kant's work continued to shape German thought and indeed all of European philosophy, well into the 20th century.
Political philosophy of Immanuel Kant
A distinctive feature of Kant's political philosophy is his conviction that the university should be a model of creative conflict: the philosopher's role within the university should be to "police" the higher faculties (which in his day were theology, law and medicine), making sure their teaching conforms to the principles of reason; likewise, the goal of perpetual peace in society can be achieved only when the rulers consult with philosophers on a regular basis.
Ethical intuitionism
While there were ethical intuitionists in a broad sense at least as far back as Thomas Aquinas, the philosophical school usually labelled as ethical intuitionism developed in Britain in the 17th and 18th centuries. Early intuitionists like John Balguy, Ralph Cudworth, and Samuel Clarke were principally concerned with defending moral objectivism against the theories of Thomas Hobbes. Later, their views would be revived and developed by Richard Price and pitted against the moral sense theory of Francis Hutcheson, himself sometimes considered a sentimentalist intuitionist. Immanuel Kant's moral philosophy would be received in Britain as a German analog to Price, though according to R. M. Hare it is questionable whether Kant is an intuitionist.
Immanuel Kant
Kant's notion of "Critique" has been quite influential. The Early German Romantics, especially Friedrich Schlegel in his "Athenaeum Fragments", used Kant's self-reflexive conception of criticism in their Romantic theory of poetry. Also in Aesthetics, Clement Greenberg, in his classic essay "Modernist Painting", uses Kantian criticism, what Greenberg refers to as "immanent criticism", to justify the aims of Abstract painting, a movement Greenberg saw as aware of the key limitiaton—flatness—that makes up the medium of painting. French philosopher Michel Foucault was also greatly influenced by Kant's notion of "Critique" and wrote several pieces on Kant for a re-thinking of the Enlightenment as a form of "critical thought". He went so far as to classify his own philosophy as a "critical history of modernity, rooted in Kant".
Immanuel Kant
Kant was among the first people of his time to introduce anthropology as an intellectual area of study long before the field gained popularity. As a result, his texts are considered to have advanced the field. Kant's point of view also influenced the works of philosophers after him such as Martin Heidegger, Paul Ricoeur, and Jean Greisch.
Wilhelm Dilthey
Dilthey's ideas should be examined in terms of his similarities and differences with Wilhelm Windelband and Heinrich Rickert, members of the Baden School of Neo-Kantianism. Dilthey was not a Neo-Kantian, but had a profound knowledge of Immanuel Kant's philosophy, which deeply influenced his thinking. But whereas Neo-Kantianism was primarily interested in epistemology on the basis of Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason", Dilthey took Kant's "Critique of Judgment" as his point of departure. An important debate between Dilthey and the Neo-Kantians concerned the "human" as opposed to "cultural" sciences, with the Neo-Kantians arguing for the exclusion of psychology from the cultural sciences and Dilthey for its inclusion as a human science.
Mou Zongsan
Mou Zongsan (, 1909–1995) was a Chinese New Confucian philosopher. He was born in Shandong province and graduated from Peking University. In 1949 he moved to Taiwan and later to Hong Kong, and he remained outside of mainland China for the rest of his life. His thought was heavily influenced by Immanuel Kant, whose three Critiques he translated, possibly first, into Chinese, and above all by Tiantai Buddhist philosophy.
Intuition
Immanuel Kant finds intuition is thought of as basic sensory information provided by the cognitive faculty of sensibility (equivalent to what might loosely be called perception). Kant held that our mind casts all of our external intuitions in the form of space, and all of our internal intuitions (memory, thought) in the form of time. Intuitionism is a position advanced by Luitzen Egbertus Jan Brouwer in philosophy of mathematics derived from Kant's claim that all mathematical knowledge is knowledge of the pure forms of the intuition – that is, intuition that is not empirical. Intuitionistic logic was devised by Arend Heyting to accommodate this position (and has been adopted by other forms of constructivism in general). It is characterized by rejecting the law of excluded middle: as a consequence it does not in general accept rules such as double negation elimination and the use of reductio ad absurdum to prove the existence of something.
Immanuel Kant
Kant published a second edition of the "Critique of Pure Reason" ("Kritik der reinen Vernunft") in 1787, heavily revising 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 Judgment" (the third "Critique") applied the Kantian system to aesthetics and teleology. It was in this critique where Kant wrote one of his most popular statements, ""it is absurd to hope that another Newton will arise in the future who will make comprehensible to us the production of a blade of grass according to natural laws"".
History of Germany
In remote Königsberg philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) tried to reconcile rationalism and religious belief, individual freedom, and political authority. Kant's work contained basic tensions that would continue to shape German thought – and indeed all of European philosophy – well into the 20th century.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
At the age of eighteen, Hegel entered the Tübinger Stift (a Protestant seminary attached to the University of Tübingen), where he had as roommates the poet and philosopher Friedrich Hölderlin and the philosopher-to-be Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling. Sharing a dislike for what they regarded as the restrictive environment of the Seminary, the three became close friends and mutually influenced each other's ideas. All greatly admired Hellenic civilization and Hegel additionally steeped himself in Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Lessing during this time. They watched the unfolding of the French Revolution with shared enthusiasm. Schelling and Hölderlin immersed themselves in theoretical debates on Kantian philosophy, from which Hegel remained aloof. Hegel at this time envisaged his future as that of a "Popularphilosoph", i.e. a "man of letters" who serves to make the abstruse ideas of philosophers accessible to a wider public; his own felt need to engage critically with the central ideas of Kantianism did not come until 1800.
Immanuel Kant
Kant defines his theory of perception in his influential 1781 work the "Critique of Pure Reason", which has often been cited as the most significant volume of metaphysics and epistemology in modern philosophy. Kant maintains that our understanding of the external world had its foundations not merely in experience, but in both experience and "a priori" concepts, thus offering a "non-empiricist critique of rationalist philosophy", which is what has been referred to as his Copernican revolution.
Wilhelm Gottlieb Tennemann
He was born and educated at Erfurt. In 1788, he became a lecturer on the history of philosophy at the University of Jena. Ten years later he became a professor at the same university, where he remained till 1804. His great work is an eleven-volume history of philosophy ("Geschichte der Philosophie"), which he began at Jena and finished at the University of Marburg, where he was professor of philosophy from 1804 till his death. He was one of the numerous German philosophers who accepted the Kantian theory as a revelation.
Feminist Jewish ethics
Hermann Cohen was a philosopher who lived from 1842-1918 who held many of the same philosophical beliefs as Immanuel Kant, but applied to Judaism. Cohen also sees ethics as what "ought to be" in the social world, as opposed to seeing what "is" as a current state of affairs that is unchangeable. According to Cohen, only God falls into both categories of what "is" and what "ought to be". According to Cohen, ethics are equivalent to what ought to be. Jewish feminist ethicists have use Cohen's Kantian ideas by expressing their ideals for equality for women in Judaism as what ought to be.
John Cantius
John Cantius was born in Kęty, a small town near Oświęcim, Poland, to Stanisław and Anna Kanty. He attended the Kraków Academy at which he attained bachelor, and licentiate. In 1418 he became a Doctor of Philosophy. Upon graduation he spent the next three years conducting philosophy classes at the university, while preparing for the priesthood.
Western philosophy
Late modern philosophy is usually considered to begin around the pivotal year of 1781, when Gotthold Ephraim Lessing died and Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason" appeared.
Mou Zongsan
Mou's philosophy develops as a critique and transformation of Kant's critical philosophy. Mou believes in the compatibility of Chinese thought and Kantian philosophy because both are backed by the Way, where the Way is essentially truth and different philosophies manifest different aspects it. Mou's analysis of Kant centers on Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason". One of Mou's major criticisms of Kant involves Kant's regard for free will as theoretical. Herein lies one of Mou's fundamental beliefs, that morality and the moral life are, contrary to what Kant posits, really real. This presumption stems from Mou's belief in the metaphysical necessity of the capability of improving one's moral praxis, and thus Mou develops a moral metaphysics within the tenet of subjectivism. While Kant believes that intellectual intuition is only possible for God, Mou ascribes human beings equal capability of this intuition, which Mou finds superior to Heidegger’s fundamental ontology. Mou rejects Heidegger because according to Kant, true metaphysics is transcendent. Mou further departs from Kant’s philosophy, eventually transforming it into what is commonly referred to as New Confucianism or Mind Confucianism.
Immanuel Kant
Kant believed that mathematical truths were forms of synthetic a priori knowledge, which means they are necessary and universal, yet known through intuition. Kant's often brief remarks about mathematics influenced the mathematical school known as intuitionism, a movement in philosophy of mathematics opposed to Hilbert's formalism, and Frege and Bertrand Russell's logicism.
Critique of Pure Reason
The "Critique of Pure Reason" was the first of Kant's works to become famous. According to Frederick C. Beiser, the work helped to discredit rationalist metaphysics of the kind associated with Leibniz and Wolff which had appeared to provide "a priori" knowledge of the existence of God, although Beiser notes that this school of thought was already in decline by the time the "Critique of Pure Reason" was published. In his view, Kant's philosophy became successful in the early 1790s partly because Kant's doctrine of "practical faith" seemed to provide a justification for moral, religious, and political beliefs without an "a priori" knowledge of God. However, the "Critique of Pure Reason" received little attention when it was first published. Kant did not expect reviews from anyone qualified to appraise the work, and initially heard only complaints about its obscurity. The theologian and philosopher Johann Friedrich Schultz wrote that the public saw the work as "a sealed book" consisting in nothing but "hieroglyphics". The first review appeared in the "Zugaben zu den Göttinger gelehrte Anzeigen" in 1782. The review, which denied that there is any distinction between Kant's idealism and that of Berkeley, was anonymous and became notorious. Kant reformulated his views because of it, redefining his transcendental idealism in the "Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics" (1783) and the second edition of the "Critique of Pure Reason". The review was denounced by Kant, but defended by Kant's empiricist critics, and the resulting controversy drew attention to the "Critique of Pure Reason".
Ontological argument
Although a version of the ontological argument appears explicitly in the writings of the ancient Greek philosopher Xenophanes and variations appear in writings by Parmenides, Plato, and the Neoplatonists, the mainstream view is that the ontological argument was first clearly stated and developed by Anselm of Canterbury. Some scholars argued that the Islamic philosopher Avicenna (Ibn Sina) developed a special kind of ontological argument before Anselm, but other scholars have doubted this position. Daniel Dombrowski marked three major stages in the development of the argument: Anselm's initial explicit formulation; the eighteenth-century criticisms of Kant and Hume; and the identification of a second ontological argument in Anselm's "Proslogion" by twentieth-century philosophers.
Erich Adickes
Erich Adickes (29 June 1866, Lesum – 8 July 1928, Tübingen) - German philosopher who wrote many important works on Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) and the Kantian philosophy. Adickes was a critical empiricist (moderate Kantian).
Psychological nativism
The philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) argued in his "Critique of Pure Reason" that the human mind knows objects in innate, "a priori" ways. Kant claimed that humans, from birth, must experience all objects as being successive (time) and juxtaposed (space). His list of inborn categories describes predicates that the mind can attribute to any object in general. Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) agreed with Kant, but reduced the number of innate categories to one—causality—which presupposes the others.
Kantian ethics
German philosopher Jürgen Habermas has proposed a theory of discourse ethics that he claims is a descendant of Kantian ethics. He proposes that action should be based on communication between those involved, in which their interests and intentions are discussed so they can be understood by all. Rejecting any form of coercion or manipulation, Habermas believes that agreement between the parties is crucial for a moral decision to be reached. Like Kantian ethics, discourse ethics is a cognitive ethical theory, in that it supposes that truth and falsity can be attributed to ethical propositions. It also formulates a rule by which ethical actions can be determined and proposes that ethical actions should be universalisable, in a similar way to Kant's ethics.
German philosophy
Since the publication of his "Critique", Immanuel Kant has been considered one of the greatest influences in all of western philosophy. In the late 18th and early 19th century, one direct line of influence from Kant is German Idealism.
Immanuel Kant
In one of Kant's major works, the "Critique of Pure Reason" (1781), he attempted to explain the relationship between reason and human experience and to move beyond the failures of traditional philosophy and metaphysics. Kant wanted to put an end to an era of futile and speculative theories of human experience, while resisting the skepticism of thinkers such as David Hume. Kant regarded himself as showing the way past the impasse between rationalists and empiricists which philosophy had led to, and is widely held to have synthesized both traditions in his thought.
Critique of Pure Reason
The Critique of Pure Reason () is a 1781 book by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, in which the author seeks to determine the limits and scope of metaphysics. A heavily-revised second edition was published in 1787. Also referred to as Kant's "First Critique", it was followed by the "Critique of Practical Reason" (1788) and the "Critique of Judgment" (1790). In the preface to the first edition, Kant explains that by a "critique of pure reason" he means not "a critique of books and systems, but of the faculty of reason in general, in respect of all knowledge after which it may strive "independently of all experience"" and that he aims to reach a decision about "the possibility or impossibility of metaphysics". The First Critique is often viewed as culminating several centuries of early-modern philosophy, and inaugurating modern philosophy.
Martin Knutzen
It was Knutzen who introduced Kant to the scientific literature of the era and especially the works of Isaac Newton, who had such a powerful influence on the development of Kant's own philosophy. Knutzen, however, did not consider Kant to be one of his best students, and favoured (1722–1786) or Johann Friedrich Weitenkampf (1726–1758). Moreover, the name of Kant never appeared in the profuse correspondence between Knutzen and Leonhard Euler, which is evidence of in what little esteem Knutzen held Kant.
Philipp Albert Stapfer
Together with Degérando, who introduced Kant studies in France, he was one of Maine de Biran's main sources on the philosophy of Immanuel Kant whose work he followed in its development by one of Kant's pupils: Friedrich Bouterwek (1766-1828), professor in Philosophy at the Georg August University in Göttingen. "Meyers Lexicon" Mannheim 1990 links Bouterwek with Maine de Biran. Bouterwek was already lecturing on Kant at Göttingen when Stapfer studied there in 1789-1790.
Dietrich Tiedemann
Tiedemann had strong disagreements in regard to the philosophic beliefs of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), of which he critiqued in two publications; "On the Nature of Metaphysics: An Examination of Professor Kant's Principles-Against the Aesthetic" and "Continuation of the Examination of Professor Kant's Thoughts About the Nature of Metaphysics-Against the Analytic". Kant dismissed Tiedemann's arguments, which he reasoned were caused by a lack of understanding.
Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics
Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics () is a 1929 book about Immanuel Kant by the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. It is often referred by Heidegger to simply as the "Kantbuch" ("Kantbook"). This book published as volume 3 of the "Gesamtausgabe".
Éric Weil
Éric Weil (/veɪl/; French: [vɛjl]; 4 June 1904 - 1 February 1977) was a French-German philosopher noted for the development of a theory that places the effort to understand violence at the center of philosophy. Calling himself a post-Hegelian Kantian, Weil was a key figure in the 20th century reception of Hegel in France, as well as the renewed interest in Kant in that country that has continued to this day. The author of major original works, critical studies, and numerous essays in French his adopted language, as well as German and English, Weil was both an active academic as well as public intellectual. Involved in various fecund moments of French intellectual life, Weil was, for example, a participant in the famous lectures given by Alexandre Kojève on Hegel's "Phenomenology of Spirit", and would go on to play an instrumental role at the journal "Critique" during its start and then serve as one of its editors for a number of years. An influential teacher, his students, such as Bourdieu, have noted Weil's formative role in their intellectual development. This influence was also at the origin of the creation of the "Institut Éric Weil", a foundation and research library created by a group of his former students after his death.
Cartesianism
Cartesianism is the philosophical and scientific system of René Descartes and its subsequent development by other seventeenth century thinkers, most notably Nicolas Malebranche and Baruch Spinoza. Descartes is often regarded as the first thinker to emphasize the use of reason to develop the natural sciences. For him, the philosophy was a thinking system that embodied all knowledge, and expressed it in this way:
T. K. Seung
"Kant: A Guide for the Perplexed" (2007) provides an overview of Kant's philosophical development. This development has been understood as his struggle to reconcile continental rationalism and British empiricism, which has produced his a priori formalism. But this is only one half of the story, according to Seung; the other half is Kant's normative Platonism. In Kant's own language, Seung says, his philosophy consists of two types of elements: transcendent and transcendental. The transcendental elements are a priori and innate to the subject of experience. The transcendent elements transcend the world of experience. The former was Kant's appropriation of the Cartesian legacy; the latter was his adaptation of the Platonic legacy.
Immanuel Kant
Philosophy of religion
Kantianism
The Formulations of the Categorical Imperative:In political philosophy, Kant has had wide and increasing influence with major political philosophers of the late twentieth century. For example, John Rawls drew heavily on his inspiration in setting out the basis for a liberal view of political institutions. The nature of Rawls' use of Kant has engendered serious controversy but has demonstrated the vitality of Kantian considerations across a wider range of questions than was once thought plausible.
Henri Bergson
The foundation of Henri Bergson's philosophy, his theory of Duration, he discovered when trying to improve the inadequacies of Herbert Spencer's philosophy. Bergson introduced Duration as a theory of time and consciousness in his doctoral thesis "Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness" as a response to another of his influences: Immanuel Kant.
Kantian ethics
The social contract theory of political philosopher John Rawls, developed in his work "A Theory of Justice", was influenced by Kant's ethics. Rawls argued that a just society would be fair. To achieve this fairness, he proposed a hypothetical moment prior to the existence of a society, at which the society is ordered: this is the original position. This should take place from behind a veil of ignorance, where no one knows what their own position in society will be, preventing people from being biased by their own interests and ensuring a fair result. Rawls' theory of justice rests on the belief that individuals are free, equal, and moral; he regarded all human beings as possessing some degree of reasonableness and rationality, which he saw as the constituents of morality and entitling their possessors to equal justice. Rawls dismissed much of Kant's dualism, arguing that the structure of Kantian ethics, once reformulated, is clearer without it—he described this as one of the goals of "A Theory of Justice".
Ancient aesthetics
As a philosophy, aesthetics was developed in 18th century Germany by Emmanuel Kant. However, Greek and Roman philosophers such as Aristotle and Plato engaged in the rhetorical debate of aesthetic perception and properties as a separate branch of philosophy in defining the parameters of art and beauty. Ancient aesthetics shows the origin of aesthetic debate and influences modern aesthetic definitions.
Mark Sacks
Mark D. Sacks (29 December 1953 – 17 June 2008) was a British philosopher best known for his work on Kant, Post-Kantian idealism, and the epistemological tradition in European Philosophy. He was one of the few philosophers in Britain who sought to integrate the Analytic philosophy tradition with Continental philosophy.
History of philosophy in Poland
Jan Śniadecki's younger brother, however, Jędrzej Śniadecki, was the first respected Polish scholar to declare (1799) for Kant. And in applying Kantian ideas to the natural sciences, he did something new that would not be undertaken until much later by Johannes Müller, Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz and other famous scientists of the nineteenth century.
Theodor Birt
When Birt was a professor in classics at Marburg University, its philosophy department was among the most important in Europe. Hermann Cohen and Paul Natorp there developed what came to be known as Neo-Kantianism. As the name suggests, this aimed to develop Kant's philosophy and apply it to a wide range of contemporary issues. In addition to Cohen and Natorp, Marburg's philosophy department was home during Birt's career to such important figures as Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, Paul Friedlander, Ernst Cassirer, and José Ortega y Gasset. Birt contributed a section to one of Natorp's books, who thanked him as a 'great friend and colleague.' A letter from Kurt Wolff, who became a well-known German publisher, to the writer Boris Pasternak shows that Birt and the philosophers were part of the same social circle:
Andrew Brook
"Kant and the Mind" was first published in 1994 by Cambridge University Press: in 1996 a paperback edition appeared. As Brook notes in the preface, Kant and the Mind was written for two audiences. First, cognitive scientists, philosophers of mind, and students of cognition. Second, Kant scholars. The book thus has two parts: the first four chapters provide an overview of Kant's model of the mind for general audiences. The second part, written primarily for Kant scholars, attempts to justify the reading given in the first four chapters. Brook emphasizes in the book that Kant had something to offer contemporary psychology, cognitive science and philosophy of mind. he writes, "I think that the discoveries he made about the mind not only were a contribution in their time, but continue to be important now."
Brook attributes the following discoveries to Kant: 1) the mind has the ability to synthesize a single coherent representation of self and the world. 2) The mind has a unity that is necessary to produce representation. 3) The mind's awareness of itself has unique features stemming from the semantic apparatus that it uses to achieve this awareness. He also suggests that three of Kant's insights have been adopted by cognitive science: the transcendental method (inference to the best explanation), that experience requires both concepts and percepts; and his general picture of the mind as a system of concept-using functions for manipulating representations. He explains that Kant distrusted introspection as a means of revealing the structure of the mind, yet also had deep reservations about Cartesian "a priori" arguments. The theory of mind that Brook finds in Kant is not based on either approach, but instead explores what powers the mind must have in order to have experiences and representations that it has.
Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose
"Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose" or "The Idea of a Universal History on a Cosmopolitical Plan" () is a 1784 essay by Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), a lecturer in anthropology and geography at Königsberg University.
Immanuel Kant
Kant is best known for his work in the philosophy of ethics and metaphysics, but he made significant contributions to other disciplines. He won the Berlin Academy Prize in 1754 for his argument that the Moon's gravity would eventually cause its tidal locking to coincide with 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 the "Universal Natural History", Kant laid out the Nebular hypothesis, in which he deduced that 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. According to Thomas Huxley (1867), Kant also made contributions to geology in his "Universal Natural History", and according to Lord Kelvin (1897), he made contributions useful to mathematicians and astronomers.
Immanuel Kant
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.
Philosophical skepticism
Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) tried to provide a ground for empirical science against David Hume's skeptical treatment of the notion of cause and effect. Hume (1711–1776) argued that for the notion of cause and effect no analysis is possible which is also acceptable to the empiricist program primarily outlined by John Locke (1632–1704). But, Kant's attempt to give a ground to knowledge in the empirical sciences at the same time cut off the possibility of knowledge of any other knowledge, especially what Kant called "metaphysical knowledge". So, for Kant, empirical science was legitimate, but metaphysics and philosophy was mostly illegitimate. The most important exception to this demarcation of the legitimate from the illegitimate was ethics, the principles of which Kant argued can be known by pure reason without appeal to the principles required for empirical knowledge. Thus, with respect to metaphysics and philosophy in general (ethics being the exception), Kant was a skeptic. This skepticism as well as the explicit skepticism of G. E. Schulze gave rise to a robust discussion of skepticism in classical German philosophy, especially by Hegel. Kant's idea was that the real world (the "noumenon" or thing-in-itself) was inaccessible to human reason (though the empirical world of nature can be known to human understanding) and therefore we can never know anything about the ultimate reality of the world. Hegel argued against Kant that although Kant was right that using what Hegel called "finite" concepts of "the understanding" precluded knowledge of reality, we were not constrained to use only "finite" concepts and could actually acquire knowledge of reality using "infinite concepts" that arise from self-consciousness.
Philosopher
Many philosophers still emerged from the Classical tradition, as saw their philosophy as a way of life. Among the most notable are René Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, Nicolas Malebranche, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. With the rise of the university, the modern conception of philosophy became more prominent. Many of the esteemed philosophers of the eighteenth century and onward have attended, taught, and developed their works in university. Early examples include: Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.
Transcendence (philosophy)
Contemporary transcendental philosophy is developed by German philosopher Harald Holz with a holistic approach. Holz liberated transcendental philosophy from the convergence of neo-Kantianism, he critically discussed transcendental pragmatism and the relation between transcendental philosophy, neo-empiricism and the so-called postmodernism.
Kanada (philosopher)
Kanada (Sanskrit: कणाद, IAST: 'Kaṇāda), also known as Kashyapa, Uluka, Kananda and Kanabhuk, was an ancient Indian natural scientist and philosopher who founded the Vaisheshika school of Indian philosophy that also represents the earliest Indian physics.
Metaphysics
Christian Wolff had theoretical philosophy divided into an ontology or "philosophia prima" as a general metaphysics, which arises as a preliminary to the distinction of the three "special metaphysics" on the soul, world and God: rational psychology, rational cosmology and rational theology. The three disciplines are called empirical and rational because they are independent of revelation. This scheme, which is the counterpart of religious tripartition in creature, creation, and Creator, is best known to philosophical students by Kant's treatment of it in the "Critique of Pure Reason". In the "Preface" of the 2nd edition of Kant's book, Wolff is defined "the greatest of all dogmatic philosophers."
Otto Liebmann
A forerunner of Neo-Kantianism, in his best-known book, "Kant und die Epigonen", he deals with the philosophy after Kant, discussing Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Fries, Herbart and Schopenhauer. Having credited Kant's philosophy (though criticizing it on the vital point of accepting a thing-in-itself), he focuses on what he sees as the shortcomings in the approaches of Kants successors. He frequently ends a section with the statement that one should return to Kant.
Space
In the eighteenth century the German philosopher Immanuel Kant developed a theory of knowledge in which knowledge about space can be both "a priori" and "synthetic". According to Kant, knowledge about space is "synthetic", in that statements about space are not simply true by virtue of the meaning of the words in the statement. In his work, Kant rejected the view that space must be either a substance or relation. Instead he came to the conclusion that space and time are not discovered by humans to be objective features of the world, but imposed by us as part of a framework for organizing experience.
History of anthropology
It took Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) 25 years to write one of the first major treatises on anthropology, "Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View" (1798), which treats it as a branch of philosophy. Kant is not generally considered to be a modern anthropologist, as he never left his region of Germany, nor did he study any cultures besides his own. He did, however, begin teaching an annual course in anthropology in 1772.
Developments in the systematic study of ancient civilizations through the disciplines of Classics and Egyptology informed both archaeology and eventually social anthropology, as did the study of East and South Asian languages and cultures. At the same time, the Romantic reaction to the Enlightenment produced thinkers, such as Johann Gottfried Herder and later Wilhelm Dilthey, whose work formed the basis for the "culture concept", which is central to the discipline.
German idealism
Kant's work purported to bridge the two dominant philosophical schools in the 18th century: 1) rationalism, which held that knowledge could be attained by reason alone "a priori" (prior to experience), and 2) empiricism, which held that knowledge could be arrived at only through the senses "a posteriori" (after experience), as expressed by philosopher David Hume, whom Kant sought to rebut. Kant's solution was to propose that while we can know, via sensory experience, particular facts about the world (which he termed phenomena), we cannot know the "form" they must take prior to any experience (which he called noumena). That is, we cannot know "what" objects we will encounter, but we can know "how" we will encounter them. Kant called his mode of philosophising "critical philosophy", in that it was supposedly less concerned with setting out positive doctrine than with critiquing the limits to the theories we "can" set out. The conclusion he presented, as above, he called "transcendental idealism". This distinguished it from classical idealism and subjective idealism such as George Berkeley's, which held that external objects have actual being or real existence only when they are perceived by an observer. Kant said that there are things-in-themselves, noumena, that is, things that exist other than being merely sensations and ideas in our minds. Kant held in the "Critique of Pure Reason" that the world of appearances (phenomena) is empirically real and transcendentally ideal. The mind plays a central role in influencing the way that the world is experienced: we perceive phenomena through time, space and the categories of the understanding. It is this notion that was taken to heart by Kant's philosophical successors.
19th-century philosophy
One of the first philosophers to attempt to grapple with Kant's philosophy was Johann Gottlieb Fichte, whose development of Kantian metaphysics became a source of inspiration for the Romantics. In "Wissenschaftslehre", Fichte argues that the self posits itself and is a self-producing and changing process.
Kantian ethics
Biographer of Kant, Manfred Kuhn, suggested that the values Kant's parents held, of "hard work, honesty, cleanliness, and independence”, set him an example and influenced him more than their Pietism did. In the "Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy", Michael Rohlf suggests that Kant was influenced by his teacher, Martin Knutzen, himself influenced by the work of Christian Wolff and John Locke, and who introduced Kant to the work of English physicist Isaac Newton.
Karl Vorländer
Karl Vorländer (2 January 1860, Marburg – 6 December 1928, Münster) was a German neo-Kantian philosopher who taught in Solingen. He published various studies and editions of the works of Kant, including studies of the relation between Kantian thought and socialist thought, and of the influence of Kant on the work of Johann Wolfgang Goethe. His 1924 biography of Kant became a classic of Kant scholarship for much of the twentieth century.
Immanuel Kant
These ideas have largely framed or influenced all subsequent philosophical discussion and analysis. The specifics of Kant's account generated immediate and lasting controversy. Nevertheless, his thesesthat the mind itself necessarily makes a constitutive contribution to its knowledge, that this contribution is transcendental rather than psychological, that philosophy involves self-critical activity, that morality is rooted in human freedom, and that to act autonomously is to act according to rational moral principleshave all had a lasting effect on subsequent philosophy.
Fabian Freyenhagen
Fabian Freyenhagen (born 1 September 1978) is a British philosopher and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Essex.
He is known for his expertise on critical theory and Kantian ethics.
Immanuel Kant
From then on, Kant turned increasingly to philosophical issues, although he continued to write on 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". In 1764, Kant wrote "Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime" and then 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 "Dreams of a Spirit-Seer" which dealt with the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg. The exact influence of Swedenborg on Kant, as well as the extent of Kant's belief in mysticism according to "Dreams of a Spirit-Seer", remain controversial. On 31 March 1770, aged 45, Kant was finally appointed Full Professor of Logic and Metaphysics ("Professor Ordinarius der Logic und Metaphysic") at the University of Königsberg. In defense of this appointment, Kant wrote his inaugural dissertation ("Inaugural-Dissertation") "De Mundi Sensibilis atque Intelligibilis Forma et Principiis" ("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 the error of subreption, and, as he says in the last chapter of the dissertation, only in avoiding this error does metaphysics flourish.
Meaning of life
Kantianism is a philosophy based on the ethical, epistemological, and metaphysical works of Immanuel Kant. Kant is known for his deontological theory where there is a single moral obligation, the "Categorical Imperative", derived from the concept of duty. Kantians believe all actions are performed in accordance with some underlying maxim or principle, and for actions to be ethical, they must adhere to the categorical imperative.
David Hume
Hume influenced utilitarianism, logical positivism, Immanuel Kant, the philosophy of science, early analytic philosophy, cognitive science, theology, and other movements and thinkers. Kant himself credited Hume as the spur to his philosophical thought who had awakened him from his "dogmatic slumbers".
Contemporary philosophy
The history of continental philosophy is taken to begin in the early 1900s because its institutional roots descend directly from those of phenomenology. As a result, Edmund Husserl has often been credited as the founding figure in continental philosophy. Although, since analytic and continental philosophy have such starkly different views of philosophy after Kant, continental philosophy is also often understood in an extended sense to include any post-Kant philosophers or movements important to continental philosophy but not analytic philosophy.
Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics
Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Present Itself as a Science () is a book by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, published in 1783, two years after the first edition of his "Critique of Pure Reason". One of Kant's shorter works, it contains a summary of the "Critique"‘s main conclusions, sometimes by arguments Kant had not used in the "Critique". Kant characterizes his more accessible approach here as an "analytic" one, as opposed to the "Critique"‘s "synthetic" examination of successive faculties of the mind and their principles.
Immanuel Kant
With the success and wide influence of Hegel's writings, Kant's influence began to wane, though there was in Germany a movement that hailed a return to Kant in the 1860s, beginning with the publication of "Kant und die Epigonen" in 1865 by Otto Liebmann. His motto was "Back to Kant", and a re-examination of his ideas began (See Neo-Kantianism). During the turn of the 20th century there was an important revival of Kant's theoretical philosophy, known as the Marburg School, represented in the work of Hermann Cohen, Paul Natorp, Ernst Cassirer, and anti-Neo-Kantian Nicolai Hartmann.
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
Johann Gottlieb Fichte (; ; 19 May 1762 – 27 January 1814) was a German philosopher who became a founding figure of the philosophical movement known as German idealism, which developed from the theoretical and ethical writings of Immanuel Kant. Recently, philosophers and scholars have begun to appreciate Fichte as an important philosopher in his own right due to his original insights into the nature of self-consciousness or self-awareness. Fichte was also the originator of "thesis–antithesis–synthesis", an idea that is often erroneously attributed to Hegel. Like Descartes and Kant before him, Fichte was motivated by the problem of subjectivity and consciousness. Fichte also wrote works of political philosophy; he has a reputation as one of the fathers of German nationalism.
Immanuel Kant
Kant's influence on Western thought has been profound. Over and above his influence on specific thinkers, Kant changed the framework within which philosophical inquiry has been carried out. He accomplished a paradigm shift; very little philosophy is now carried out in the style of pre-Kantian philosophy. This shift consists in several closely related innovations that have become foundational in philosophy itself and in the social sciences and humanities generally:
Age of Enlightenment
In remote Königsberg, philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) tried to reconcile rationalism and religious belief, individual freedom and political authority. Kant's work contained basic tensions that would continue to shape German thought – and indeed all of European philosophy – well into the 20th century.
Immanuel Kant
Practical philosophy
Józef Kalasanty Szaniawski
Szaniawski especially urged the study of Kant; but, having accepted the fundamental points of the critical theory of knowledge, he still hesitated between Kant's metaphysical agnosticism and the new metaphysics of Idealism. He owed a particular debt to Schelling. Thus this one man introduced to Poland both the anti-metaphysical Kant and the post-Kantian metaphysics.
Rachel Zuckert
Rachel Elizabeth Zuckert is an American philosopher and associate professor of philosophy at the Northwestern University. 
She is known for his expertise on Kantian philosophy. Zuckert is the president of North American Kant Society.
Joseph Green (merchant)
Around 1764 Green met Kant and became a close member of his circle of friends. Kant went often to Green's house outside of Königsberg in Juditten. Green shared with Kant a deep appreciation of the ideas of David Hume and Jean-Jaques Rousseau, in addition, Green could provide as perspective of the outside world that was helpful for Kant. Meeting on a regular basis, Kant discussed his work with him, so every sentence of his "Critique of Pure Reason" prior to the 1781 publication. Kant also entrusted Green with his money.
Critique of Pure Reason
Feder's campaign against Kant was unsuccessful and the "Philosophische Bibliothek" ceased publication after only a few issues. Other critics of Kant continued to argue against the "Critique of Pure Reason", with Gottlob August Tittel, who was influenced by Locke, publishing several polemics against Kant, who, although worried by some of Tittel's criticisms, addressed him only in a footnote in the preface to the "Critique of Practical Reason". Tittel was one of the first to make criticisms of Kant, such as those concerning Kant's table of categories, the categorical imperative, and the problem of applying the categories to experience, that have continued to be influential. The philosopher Adam Weishaupt, founder and leader of the secret society the Illuminati, and an ally of Feder, also published several polemics against Kant, which attracted controversy and generated excitement. Weishaupt charged that Kant's philosophy leads to complete subjectivism and the denial of all reality independent of passing states of consciousness, a view he considered self-refuting. Herman Andreas Pistorius was another empiricist critic of Kant. Kant took Pistorius more seriously than his other critics and believed that he had made some of the most important objections to the "Critique of Pure Reason". Beiser writes that many sections of the "Critique of Practical Reason" are "disguised polemics against Pistorius". Pistorius argued that, if Kant were consistent, his form of idealism would not be an improvement over that of Berkeley, and that Kant's philosophy contains internal contradictions.
Culture of Germany
German philosophers have helped shape western philosophy from as early as the Middle Ages (Albertus Magnus). Later, Leibniz (17th century) and most importantly Kant played central roles in the history of philosophy. Kantianism inspired the work of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche as well as German idealism defended by Fichte and Hegel. Marx and Engels developed communist theory in the second half of the 19th century while Heidegger and Gadamer pursued the tradition of German philosophy in the 20th century. A number of German intellectuals were also influential in sociology, most notably Adorno, Elias, Habermas, Horkheimer, Luhmann, Marcuse, Simmel, Tönnies, and Weber. The University of Berlin founded in 1810 by linguist and philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt served as an influential model for a number of modern western universities.
Immanuel Kant
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 spent his whole career. He studied the philosophy of Gottfried Leibniz and Christian Wolff under Martin Knutzen (Associate Professor of Logic and Metaphysics from 1734 until his death 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 the lazy mind". He also dissuaded Kant from idealism, the idea that reality is purely mental, which most philosophers in the 18th century regarded in a negative light. The theory of transcendental idealism that Kant later included in the "Critique of Pure Reason" was developed partially in opposition to traditional idealism.
Roberto Torretti
Torretti has been greatly influenced by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant and has dedicated many of his works to Kant’s thought. His work "Manuel Kant: estudio sobre los fundamentos de la filosofia critica" is considered one of the most important literary works on the thoughts of the 18th century German philosopher. Publications such as "Philosophy of Geometry from Riemann to Poincaré" (1978), "Relativity and geometry" (1983) and "El paraíso de Cantor" (1998) have made Torretti a leading authority on the philosophy of science. Much of Torretti’s work has dealt with physics and mathematics, with a major focus on relativity theory and 19th century geometry. He has devoted the book "El Paraíso de Cantor" to the set-theoretical tradition in logic and philosophy of mathematics. Together with Jesús Mosterín, he has written an original and comprehensive dictionary of logic and philosophy of science.
Immanuel Kant
Contemporary philosophy with a Kantian influence
List of liberal theorists
Immanuel Kant (Germany, 1724–1804)
Salomo Friedlaender
Between 1894 and 1902, Friedlaender studied medicine, philosophy, German literature, archaeology, and art history in Munich, Berlin, and Jena. He wrote his dissertation on Arthur Schopenhauer and Kant. He approached the contemporary problems of his day through the lens of Kantian philosophy, in the footsteps of his teacher, the neo-Kantian Ernst Marcus. His most philosophical work, "Die schoepferische Indifferenz" (1918), Friedlaender built upon Kant's ideas to move beyond the classical dualism of subject and object in a purified, absolute self.
Immanuel Kant
Kant wrote a book discussing his theory of virtue in terms of independence which he believed was "a viable modern alternative to more familiar Greek views about virtue". This book is often criticized for its hostile tone and for not articulating his thoughts about autocracy comprehensibly. In the self-governance model of Aristotelian virtue, the non-rational part of the soul can be made to listen to reason through training. Although Kantian self-governance appears to involve "a rational crackdown on appetites and emotions" with lack of harmony between reason and emotion, Kantian virtue denies requiring "self-conquest, self-suppression, or self-silencing". They dispute that "the self-mastery constitutive of virtue is ultimately mastery over our tendency of will to give priority to appetite or emotion unregulated by duty, it does not require extirpating, suppressing, or silencing sensibility in general".
Hans Vaihinger
Hans Vaihinger (; September 25, 1852 – December 18, 1933) was a German philosopher, best known as a Kant scholar and for his "Die Philosophie des Als Ob" ("The Philosophy of 'As if'"), published in 1911 although its statement of basic principles had been written more than thirty years earlier.
Ethnocentrism
Scholars are generally agreed that Boas developed his ideas under the influence of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Legend has it that, on a field trip to the Baffin Islands in 1883, Boas would pass the frigid nights reading Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason". In that work, Kant argued that human understanding could not be described according to the laws that applied to the operations of nature, and that its operations were therefore free, not determined, and that ideas regulated human action, sometimes independent of material interests. Following Kant, Boas pointed out, for instance, the starving Eskimos who, because of their religious beliefs, would not hunt seals to feed themselves, thus showing that no pragmatic or material calculus determined their values.
Mou Zongsan
Following his teacher Xiong Shili, Mou Zongsan sought to articulate and justify a moral metaphysics. A moral metaphysics asserts the interconnectedness of ontology and morality, implying the moral value of all objects including the self. Mou's philosophy attempts to demonstrate the limits of Kant, suggesting instead the ways in which Chinese thought may surpass Kantian morality. Several of Mou's titles directly reveal his engagement with Kant – "Intellectual Intuition and Chinese Philosophy", "Phenomenon and Thing-in-Itself", and "Treatise of the Perfect Good" – a commitment that is reflected in Mou's decision to express his philosophy in Kantian terms. For example, Mou's philosophy inherits the Kantian concepts of autonomy, intellectual intuition, and Thing-in-Itself, although Confucianism inspires Mou to transform these concepts. The reason behind this decision to use Kantian terms remains unknown, but some scholars argue that Mou's use of certain terminologies aims to facilitate a dialogue between the East and West, pointing to Mou's comparison of Mencius and Kant, whereby he demonstrates the compatibility of Chinese and Western philosophies.
Lumières
In Germany, Emmanuel Kant (like Rousseau, defining himself among the Lumières) heavily criticised the limitations of pure reason in his work "Critique of Pure Reason" (), but also that of English empiricism in "Critique of Practical Reason" (). Compared with the rather subjective metaphysics of Descartes, Kant developed a more objective viewpoint in this branch of philosophy.
Kantian ethics
Philosopher Onora O'Neill, who studied under John Rawls at ￼Harvard University, is a contemporary Kantian ethicist who supports a Kantian approach to issues of social justice. O'Neill argues that a successful Kantian account of social justice must not rely on any unwarranted idealizations or assumption. She notes that philosophers have previously charged Kant with idealizing humans as autonomous beings, without any social context or life goals, though maintains that Kant's ethics can be read without such an idealization. O'Neill prefers Kant's conception of reason as practical and available to be used by humans, rather than as principles attached to every human being. Conceiving of reason as a tool to make decisions with means that the only thing able to restrain the principles we adopt is that they could be adopted by all. If we cannot will that everyone adopts a certain principle, then we cannot give them reasons to adopt it. To use reason, and to reason with other people, we must reject those principles that cannot be universally adopted. In this way, O'Neill reached Kant's formulation of universalisability without adopting an idealistic view of human autonomy. This model of universalisability does not require that we adopt all universalisable principles, but merely prohibits us from adopting those that are not.
Critique of Pure Reason
Kant decided to find an answer and spent at least twelve years thinking about the subject. Although the "Critique of Pure Reason" was set down in written form in just four to five months, while Kant was also lecturing and teaching, the work is a summation of the development of Kant's philosophy throughout that twelve-year period.
Continental philosophy
The history of continental philosophy (taken in its narrower sense) is usually thought to begin with German idealism. Led by figures like Fichte, Schelling, and later Hegel, German idealism developed out of the work of Immanuel Kant in the 1780s and 1790s and was closely linked with romanticism and the revolutionary politics of the Enlightenment. Besides the central figures listed above, important contributors to German idealism also included Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, Gottlob Ernst Schulze, Karl Leonhard Reinhold, and Friedrich Schleiermacher.
Józef Kalasanty Szaniawski
From 1802 to 1808 Szaniawski published his philosophical works in rapid succession. He expounded Kant's philosophy, but with a special purpose—to turn people's minds toward learning; and, in learning, to break with Enlightenment philosophy, which he condemned for dogmatic unbelief and morally damaging hedonism. He was the first to lead the campaign against the Enlightenment in Poland. He became an apostle of German philosophy and was the first to introduce it into Poland.
Kantian ethics
Kantian ethics refers to a deontological ethical theory ascribed to the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. The theory, developed as a result of Enlightenment rationalism, is based on the view that the only intrinsically good thing is a good will; an action can only be good if its maximthe principle behind itis duty to the moral law. Central to Kant's construction of the moral law is the categorical imperative, which acts on all people, regardless of their interests or desires. Kant formulated the categorical imperative in various ways. His principle of universalizability requires that, for an action to be permissible, it must be possible to apply it to all people without a contradiction occurring. If a contradiction occurs the act violates Aristotle's "Non-contradiction" concept which states that just actions cannot lead to contradictions. Kant's formulation of humanity, the second section of the Categorical Imperative, states that as an end in itself humans are required never to treat others merely as a means to an end, but always, additionally, as ends in themselves. The formulation of autonomy concludes that rational agents are bound to the moral law by their own will, while Kant's concept of the Kingdom of Ends requires that people act as if the principles of their actions establish a law for a hypothetical kingdom. Kant also distinguished between perfect and imperfect duties. A perfect duty, such as the duty not to lie, always holds true; an imperfect duty, such as the duty to give to charity, can be made flexible and applied in particular time and place.
Goethean science
Immanuel Kant in Prussia undertook a major rescue operation to preserve the validity of knowledge derived via reason (science), as well as of knowledge going beyond the rational mind, that is of human liberty and of life beyond simply an expression of 'the chance whirlings of unproductive particles' (Coleridge). Kant's writings had an immediate and major impact on Western philosophy and triggered a philosophical movement known as German idealism (Fichte, Hegel, Schelling), which sought to overcome and transcend the chasm Kant had formalized between the sense-based and the super-sensible worlds, in his attempt to 'save the appearances' (Owen Barfield), that is, to preserve the validity of scientific or rational knowledge as well as that of faith.
Ernst Cassirer
Donald Phillip Verene, who published some of Cassirer's papers kept at Yale University, gave this overview of his ideas:
“Cassirer as a thinker became an embodiment of Kantian principles, but also of much more, of an overall movement of spirit stretching from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, and on to Herder’s conception of history, Goethe’s poetry, Wilhelm von Humboldt’s study of the Kavi language, Schelling’s "Philosophie Der Mythologie," Hegel’s "Phenomenology of Spirit," and Vischer’s conception of the aesthetic symbol, among many others. Cassirer’s own position is born through a mastery of the whole development of this world of the humanistic understanding, which included the rise of the scientific world view — a mastery evident both in his historical works and in his systematic philosophy.”
Hans Kelsen
As summarized by Sandrine Baume in her recent book on Kelsen, "In 1927 [Kelsen] recognized his debt to Kantianism on this methodological point that determined much of his pure theory of law: 'Purity of method, indispensable to legal science, did not seem to me to be guaranteed by any philosopher as sharply as by Kant with his contrast between Is and Ought. Thus for me, Kantian philosophy was from the very outset the light that guided me.'" Kelsen's high praise of Kant in the absence of any specific neo-Kantians is matched among more recent scholars by John Rawls of Harvard University. Both Kelsen and Rawls also have made strong endorsements of Kant's books on "" (1795) and "Idea for a Universal History" (1784). In his book titled "What is Justice?", Kelsen indicated his position concerning social justice stating, "[S]uppose that it is possible to prove that the economic situation of a people can be improved so essentially by so-called planned economy that social security is guaranteed to everybody in an equal measure; but that such an organization is possible only if all individual freedom is abolished. The answer to the question whether planned economy is preferable to free economy depends on our decision between the values of individual freedom and social security. Hence, to the question of whether individual freedom is a higher value than social security or vice versa, only a subjective answer is possible," Five principle areas of concern for Kelsen in the area of political philosophy can be identified among his many interests for their centrality and the effect which they exerted over virtually his entire lifetime. These are; (i) Sovereignty, (ii) Law-state identity theory, (iii) State-society dualism, (iv) Centralization-decentralization, and (v) Dynamic theory of law.
Wilhelm Wundt
In the introduction to his "Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie" in 1874, Wundt described Immanuel Kant and Johann Friedrich Herbart as the philosophers who had the most influence on the formation of his own views. Those who follow up these references will find that Wundt critically analysed both these thinkers’ ideas. He distanced himself from Herbart's science of the soul and, in particular, from his "mechanism of mental representations" and pseudo-mathematical speculations. While Wundt praised Kant's critical work and his rejection of a "rational" psychology deduced from metaphysics, he argued against Kant's epistemology in his publication "Was soll uns Kant nicht sein?" (What Kant should we reject?) 1892 with regard to the forms of perception and presuppositions, as well as Kant's category theory and his position in the dispute on causal and teleological explanations.