Kant: Reasons and Freedom, History and Grace

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) – recognized as the greatest philosopher

since Plato and Aristotle
Christianity – became dominant ideology in Europe after the fall of the
Roman Empire
Islam – the rise of it led to a flowering of Islamic theology, philosophy,
science and medicine
Byzantium – the heir to the Eastern half of the Roman Empire
French Philosophers (Voltaire, Diderot, Condorcet) – laid the
intellectual foundations of the French revolution of 1789
*Kant received a wide-raging education and attained a thorough knowledge
of the science of his day
*Kant had a well-grounded humanistic education
Works of Kant (critical philosophy):
1. Critique of pure reason

2. Groundwork of the metaphysic of morals

3. The Critique practical Reason
4. Critique of judgment
5. Religion within the boundaries of mere reason
6. Anthropology from a pragmatic point of view
*Kant repeatedly expressed his faith in the free democratic use of reason to
examine everything, however traditional, authoritative or sacred
God – omnipotent, omniscient, benevolent
Copernican Revolution – Kant’s doctrine that “objects” must conform to
our knowledge means that certain basic features of the objects of our
knowledge are due to the nature of our human cognitive faculties
Transcendental idealism – shook the foundations of all previous
philosophy and the reverberations have been felt ever since
*Kant believed that sufficient causes for all material events can always be
found among other material event
1st Analogy – all events in the world have to be seen as changes in
persisting “substance” – matter
2nd Analogy – Universal determinism is the principle that every event has a
preceding cause, a state of affairs that makes that event necessarily happen
3rd Analogy – everything in the world must be part of a single interacting
system of reality
*Kant believed that sufficient causes for all material events can always be
found among other material event
CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON (THE DIALECT) – Kant claims to diagnose
how and why we tend to claim illusory metaphysical knowledge of things as
they are in themselves

THEORY OF HUMAN NATURE

Fundamental sources of the mind
1. Capacity for receiving representations – the object is already given to
us
2. The power of knowing an object through these representations – the
object is thought
*Without sensibility no object would be given us, without understanding no
object would be thought.
*Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.
Interaction Factors
1. Caused by objects outside the mind
2. The way the mind actively
*Animals do not have concept of sensations or emotions.
Synthesis – almost entirely unconsciousness and attributes it to the
imagination
*We do not just make lots of particular judgment about the world but we try
to integrate all these lies of knowledge into a unified system
*We cannot know what we are “in ourselves”
Apperception – different from both outer and inner sense
*We can never make any perfectly just judgment but we can never make
even a reasonably well justified judgment about the moral aspects of an
action
Religion within the boundaries of Mere Reason – ‘radical evil’ in human
nature using almost biblical language
Radically Evil – Not our naturally given desires or it is the tension between
these desires and duty
Depravity – the freely chosen subordination of duty to inclination, the
deliberate preference for one’s own happiness over obligations to other
people
Freedom – is the idea which is most directly in own deliberations about
what to do
Interests of Reason
1. What can I do? – depth in the first critique
2. What ought I to do? – about moral duty
3. What may I hope? – theoretical and practical
*Kant is deeply concerned about the relation between the virtue and
happiness
Highest good – a combination of virtue and happiness for all rational beings
Supreme reason – underlying nature who governs according to moral rules
and who will reward everyone appropriately in a future life beyond this world
HEAVEN and HELL – representations powerful enough without any
necessity to presuppose dogmatically, as an item to doctrine that an eternity
of good and evil is the human lot also objectively