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Epistemology & Moral Philosophy
Immanuel Kant
1724 – 1804
“Two things fill the mind with ever-new and increasing admiration and awe: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.”
The architect of the Copernican Revolution in philosophy. Kant synthesised rationalism and empiricism, arguing that the mind actively structures experience.
Biography
Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) was born and died in Königsberg, Prussia, rarely leaving the city. He spent eleven years writing the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), one of the most difficult and consequential books in the philosophical canon.
Kant's "Copernican revolution": just as Copernicus moved the sun to the centre of the solar system, Kant moved the mind to the centre of experience. We do not passively receive a world; we actively constitute it through the forms of intuition (space and time) and the categories of the understanding.
In ethics, the Groundwork argues that the moral worth of an action lies entirely in its motive — specifically, the motive of duty. The supreme principle is the Categorical Imperative.
Important Works
Critique of Pure Reason
1781The synthesis of empiricism and rationalism: the mind constitutes experience through its own a priori structures.
Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals
1785The Categorical Imperative as the supreme principle of morality.
Critique of Judgement
1790Aesthetics and teleology: the beautiful, the sublime, and purposiveness in nature.
Key Takeaways
- The mind constitutes experience; space, time, and causality are mental frameworks.
- We can know phenomena, never things-in-themselves (noumena).
- The Categorical Imperative: act only on maxims you could will to be universal laws.
- Moral worth lies in acting from duty, not from inclination or consequences.
- The three ideas of reason — God, freedom, immortality — are beyond theoretical knowledge.