Soyon+Kant+D

Script: Interview: Immanuel Kant Weekly Interview Brings You.... An Interview of One of the Most Influential Thinkers in Modern Europe...  Immanuel Kant Q: Hello everyone! Today, we are going to interview an famous enlightenment philosopher, Immanuel Kant! It's certainly nice to meet you sir. So sir, could you tell us a bit about yourself? A: Well, I was born in 18th-century Germany from the Prussian city Konigsburg as the fourth of eleven children. My mother saw my intellectual gift and sent me to school even though we were somewhat poor. Thanks to her I was able to attend to school and learn various subjects. I was particularly interested in philosophy. I was a quiet student, I enjoyed studying. Though I occasionally played cards and billards. To be honest, I was good at both games. After university education, I became professor after studying another 15 years. After I reached my desired position, my life was pretty much the same. Writing papers and writing more papers. Q: Wow, that was interesting know. Our next question is :what have you been trying to answer? What issues have you focused on? A: Well, I have been trying to answer many things. The issue of cognition deeply interested me a lot ever since I began studying philosophy. Through pursuing this topic, I was able to write my book, The Critique of Pure Reason. I believed that other philosophers focused too much on the idea of empirical knowledge and tried to ignore “pure knowledge,” what we have already proven and known. Through combining my opinions with the ideas of John Locke and René Descartes. I also focused on the issues of morality, education and individualism. Despite my religious upbringing, through studying the issue of cognition, I realized that morality and religion should be differentiated. Morality and religion are two different things and morality should be derived from cognition. Through my reasoning, I figured that people need sound intelligence, a merry heart, free will, disciplined living, hard work, and the rejection of hope in order for one to achieve happiness. I believe that hope is something irrational; it’s something that people shouldn’t cling to. Happiness is something that people need to work for, nature doesn’t throw it into your hands. Education is essential for an individual, people may learn morality from school but they need to apply those to society and their own life. Politics is also something that I am interested in. I was a strong supporter of the French and American revolution. Monarchist despotism is something that should disappear and that citizens (people) have the right of tatutory freedom, legal equality, and civil independence. Q: Thank you, nest up, what kind of influence did you have while you were alive and after your death? A: During my time, I influenced Enlightenment philosophers such as Reinhold, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and Novalis. This philosophical movement was known as German Idealism and it developed from my writings. Some philosophers tried to go against my ideas, and reverse my claim about unknowables and the unexperienced. Hegel thought that I was too formal, abstract, and ahistorical. But he shared some of the fundamental ideas of my philosophy such as freedom and morality. A lot of philosophers agreed about my theory about transcendental idealism. I changed the way people thought during the enlightenment period with my writings. Q: You certainly are an influential person aren’t you sir. And our last question is :what are some key or main points in your philosophy? A: First of all, pure knowledge and empirical knowledge are different things. We need to learn what we don’t know through experience. But things that we already know and have proven, such as the law of gravity, there’s no need to “experience” to understand it. Subjects such as math and science are things that we don’t need experience. Second, I strongly believe that religion and morality should be two separate things. Religion can hinder us from doing something that is morally right. I was an avid supporter of the French Revolution and the American Revolution. I believed that had rights to citizenship; the right to freedom, legal equality, and civil independence. Third, Education is something that everyone needs. I view education as something that helps develop one’s individual reason and work ethic. Fourth, happiness is something that people need to work for, nature doesn’t give it to you. \ The writings of German philosopher Immanuel Kant profoundly shaped the philosophical thought of Europe. The publication of Kant's treatises in late 18th-century Prussia gained him immediate renown as an influential scholar. Translations of his works into English and other languages quickly followed, and Kant's impact continued well after his death and in the development of Enlightenment and world philosophical discourse. Although subsequent observers have challenged aspects of Kant's method of philosophical inquiry, his contributions continue to be required reading for students of Western thought.

Kant was interested in the issue of cognition and led to his famous work, The Critique of Pure Reason. He combined his opinions about cognition with that of John Locke and Rene Descartes. He thought that pure knowledge (what we already know and is true), subjects such as math and science, and empirical knowledge (stuff we learn through experience) are different.  He also believed morality and religion should be separated because religion sometimes stopped people from doing what’s morally right. He believed that sound intelligence, a merry heart, free will, disciplined living, hard work, and the rejection of hope would help people achieve happiness. Kant saw hope as an irrational thing, something that hindered people from reality. He believed that happiness was something people needed to work for.  Kant was also interested in politics and education. He was an avid supporter of the French Revolution and the American Revolution. He hated despotism and thought that it should be destroyed. He also believed that people had the right to legal equality and civil independence. To him, politics, education, and morality were all interconnected. Individuals need education to use morality and morality was needed for good politics. He also thought that education helped the development of individual reason and work ethic.
 * ABC-CLIO**

Kant was the first philosopher to make philosophy scientific. In his most important work, The Critique of Pure Reason, Kant tried to show that although knowledge comes from experience (empirical knowledge), it’s possible that we have other knowledge in advance. He mentions a priori a lot, and a priori knowledge means knowledge that is independent from all experience. It’s something that is definitely true or wrong without empirical knowledge to prove it. Hume, a philosopher before Kant saidall propositions are synthetic and a posteriori or analytic and a priori. But Kant said that there is also a priori and synthetic. The older generation thought that Kant was outrageous but the younger generation thought of him as a leader. Philosophers such as Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel agreed with Kant. I. Of the difference between Pure and Empirical Knowledge
 * Books and Writers**
 * PRIMARY SOURCE: The Critque of Pure Reason**

That all our knowledge begins with experience there can be no doubt. For how is it possible that the faculty of cognition should be awakened into exercise otherwise than by means of objects which affect our senses, and partly of themselves produce representations, partly rouse our powers of understanding into activity, to compare to connect, or to separate these, and so to convert the raw material of our sensuous impressions into a knowledge of objects, which is called experience? In respect of time, therefore, no knowledge of ours is antecedent to experience, but begins with it.

But, though all our knowledge begins with experience, it by no means follows that all arises out of experience. For, on the contrary, it is quite possible that our empirical knowledge is a compound of that which we receive through impressions, and that which the faculty of cognition supplies from itself (sensuous impressions giving merely the occasion), an addition which we cannot distinguish from the original element given by sense, till long practice has made us attentive to, and skilful in separating it. It is, therefore, a question which requires close investigation, and not to be answered at first sight, whether there exists a knowledge altogether independent of experience, and even of all sensuous impressions? Knowledge of this kind is called a priori, in contradistinction to empirical knowledge, which has its sources a posteriori, that is, in experience.

But the expression, "a priori," is not as yet definite enough adequately to indicate the whole meaning of the question above started. For, in speaking of knowledge which has its sources in experience, we are wont to say, that this or that may be known a priori, because we do not derive this knowledge immediately from experience, but from a general rule, which, however, we have itself borrowed from experience. Thus, if a man undermined his house, we say, "he might know a priori that it would have fallen;" that is, he needed not to have waited for the experience that it did actually fall. But still, a priori, he could not know even this much. For, that bodies are heavy, and, consequently, that they fall when their supports are taken away, must have been known to him previously, by means of experience.

By the term "knowledge a priori," therefore, we shall in the sequel understand, not such as is independent of this or that kind of experience, but such as is absolutely so of all experience. Opposed to this is empirical knowledge, or that which is possible only a posteriori, that is, through experience. Knowledge a priori is either pure or impure. Pure knowledge a priori is that with which no empirical element is mixed up. For example, the proposition, "Every change has a cause," is a proposition a priori, but impure, because change is a conception which can only be derived from experience.

II. The Human Intellect, even in an Unphilosophical State, is in Possession of Certain Cognitions "a priori".

The question now is as to a criterion, by which we may securely distinguish a pure from an empirical cognition. Experience no doubt teaches us that this or that object is constituted in such and such a manner, but not that it could not possibly exist otherwise. Now, in the first place, if we have a proposition which contains the idea of necessity in its very conception, it is a if, moreover, it is not derived from any other proposition, unless from one equally involving the idea of necessity, it is absolutely priori. Secondly, an empirical judgement never exhibits strict and absolute, but only assumed and comparative universality (by induction); therefore, the most we can say is- so far as we have hitherto observed, there is no except n to this or that rule. If, on the other hand, a judgement carries with it strict and absolute universality, that is, admits of no possible exception, it is not derived from experience, but is valid absolutely a priori.

Empirical universality is, therefore, only an arbitrary extension of validity, from that which may be predicated of a proposition valid in most cases, to that which is asserted of a proposition which holds good in all; as, for example, in the affirmation, "All bodies are heavy." When, on the contrary, strict universality characterizes a judgement, it necessarily indicates another peculiar source of knowledge, namely, a faculty of cognition a priori. Necessity and strict universality, therefore, are infallible tests for distinguishing pure from empirical knowledge, and are inseparably connected with each other. But in the use of these criteria the empirical limitation is sometimes more easily detected than the contingency of the judgement, or the unlimited universality which we attach to a judgement is often a more convincing proof than its necessity, it may be advisable to use the criteria separately, each being by itself infallible.

Now, that in the sphere of human cognition we have judgements which are necessary, and in the strictest sense universal, consequently pure a priori, it will be an easy matter to show. If we desire an example from the sciences, we need only take any proposition in mathematics. If we cast our eyes upon the commonest operations of the understanding, the proposition, "Every change must have a cause," will amply serve our purpose. In the latter case, indeed, the conception of a cause so plainly involves the conception of a necessity of connection with an effect, and of a strict universality of the law, that the very notion of a cause would entirely disappear, were we to derive it, like David Hume, from a frequent association of what happens with that which precedes; and the habit thence originating of connecting representations- the necessity inherent in the judgement being therefore merely subjective. Besides, without seeking for such examples of principles existing a priori in cognition, we might easily show that such principles are the indispensable basis of the possibility of experience itself, and consequently prove their existence a priori. For whence could our experience itself acquire certainty, if all the rules on which it depends were themselves empirical, and consequently fortuitous? No one, therefore, can admit the validity of the use of such rule as first principles. But, for the present, we may content ourselves with having established the fact, that we do possess and exercise a faculty of pure a priori cognition; and, secondly, with having pointed out the proper tests of such cognition, namely, universality and necessity.

Not only in judgements, however, but even in conceptions, is an a priori origin manifest. For example, if we take away by degrees from our conceptions of a body all that can be referred to mere sensuous experience- colour, hardness or softness, weight, even impenetrability- the body will then vanish; but the space which it occupied still remains, and this it is utterly impossible to annihilate in thought. Again, if we take away, in like manner, from our empirical conception of any object, corporeal or incorporeal, all properties which mere experience has taught us to connect with it, still we cannot think away those through which we cogitate it as substance, or adhering o substance, although our conception of substance is more determined than that of an object. Compelled, therefore, by that necessity with which the conception of substance forces itself upon us, we must confess that it has its seat in our faculty of cognition a priori.

"Immanuel Kant." __ABC-CLIO__. 8 Dec. 2008 . So does Kant believe that morality is more important that religion or is he just saying that those two should be differentiated? What is pure knowledge? What are the subjects that Kant focused on?

"Immanuel Kant." __Books and Writers__. 8 Dec. 2008 . Who did Kant influence? Who was Kant influenced by? What kind of influence did Kant have to other philosopher's during the enlightenment?

"Modern History Sourceboook: Kant: Critique of Pure Reason 1781." __FORDHAM.EDU__. 8 Dec. 2008 . What is a priori? What does Kant think about pure knowledge and empirical knowledge? What is Kant's opinion on experience?

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