Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

Well, there are manipulators of turgid prose, in which every word seems as stultifying as boiling alcohol, and then there's Kant. Certainly not for the skim reading school of cognitive thought, Kant makes some interesting observations on morality and reason, once you slog through his leaden verbiage.

Ushered in a whole new view of the psyche.

A French Review proposes a philosopher a week for holiday-makers. Low quality but I think a mano a mano should be fun. This 23rd week, Kant, poorly treated. I'll try to translate as soon as possible but sophers are rushing, (24th week Hegel, NULL!) Chhers Guy *** http://www.prosopautism.com/KantKhan.htm *** Article precededent, sur Descartes et Spinoza : *** http://www.prosopautism.com/DescSpin.htm *** Had I taught 'satammism' to Roosevelt, the present history would be different!!! *** http://www.prosopautism.com/fSatamm.htm

Most important philosopher since Aristotle. It is no exaggeration to say that the last 200 years of philosophy has been a series of footnotes to Kant.

A terribly dull writer with a terribly dogmatic viewpoint. His philosophy was essentially an attempt to rationalize his pre-conceived notions of god and morality.

One of Kant's main contributions to political theory was the establishment of an 18th Century form of democratic stability theory. Basically, what he says is that when nations become republics they become less inclined to fight wars with each other. By following this line of logic, world peace would become a real possibility once the republican-democratic ideal becomes worldwide. There is a similiar line of logic in all of Kant's works. Essentially, he was a universalist. He worked from the assumption that natural law could not be broken at any time and place. On a more practical level (which is the way I like to apply philosophy) he assumes that the average middle class citizens would usually decide whether a war was just or not. Power that is concentrated like it was during the age of the monarchs would lead to war because decisionmaking didn't take into the account the collective will of the whole. I don't agree with the general application of Kant's theory. First of all, elites st... Read more

What I think he is trying to say is that there is no objective description of reality. We can only descibe objects and things the way our mind interprets them to exist, but that is not nescassarily the way they exist in the real world, the world independent of out perceptions of reality. For example, atoms and molecules are independent of our perception because we dont see them directly. Strange, yet true. Then again the true philosopher is capable of attacking even the concept of truth!

I Kant read another page of this guy! Aagh! No seriously, Kant is not your beach-reading material. His Critique of Pure Reason is eye opening enough, once you can slog through his drier than a dehydrated Triscut style of writing. A very serious man, he introduced the idea of an inate sense of human morality and rejected Locke's notion of tabula rasa by stating that the mind has an inherent structure of morality that filters our experiences and influences our sense of reality. Gives you a lot to chew on if you can handle his style.

Great mind ,good writter.

Some people have been grossely misinformed as Kant was a Liberal and Karl Marx if you read his 'Das Capital' (The Capital) found Kant repulsive as he did other Liberals like Locke and Adam Smith. Kant influenced Hegal who influenced Marx who although inspired by Hegal's work also found many of his ideas repulsive. Kant was Soft-line, Hegal and Marx were Hard-line.

Called a Trancendental Idealist. Center winger who belives in the Absolute God. He catogerised the mind into diffrent functions. Used mini thiesis, antithiesis and synthisis, favoured Science. Another translation of the above quote: "From the croked wood of society nothing good can come." I think he was against violence.

Kant is one of our best philosophers because he wanted to unite the world entirely so peace could be established, starting with un uniting the European states, including more & more countries from other continents untill the eternal peace was established. Sounds like the European Union? It does for me! That's why a pacifist like me love Immanuel Kant from Kaliningrad! :-)

My knowledge of Kant comes only from reading Ayn Rand's vitrolic assaults on him: "No, Kant did not destroy reason; he merely did as thorough a job of undercutting it as anyone could ever do. If you trace the roots of all our current philosophies... that announce happily that you cannot PROVE that you exist -- you'll find they grew out of Kant." Ouch! But I know fair-minded people who say Kant made some great contributions, so let's call it a wash and move on...

From what I understand, Kant's primary contribution to philosophy was a reconciliation between the Newtonian school of thought (that natural laws could be determined by looking at particular instances and drawing conclusions) and Hume's argument that people can only truly know the phenomenal (individual events you can perceive with your senses). Kant recognized that Newton had in fact discovered non-phenomenal truths, which contradicted Hume's theories. And Kant's explanation was that the human mind can draw conclusions from the natural world because the mind and the world are inherently structured in the same way. The mind doesn't just take in data, it organizes things according to its rules. So the world Newton could make laws about matched the reality people could perceive because both were filtered through the mind's structuring process. Clever, I guess, but so what? It doesn't do all that much for me.