scholarly journals KANT’S CRITICAL EPISTEMOLOGY AND ITS BORDERLINES WITH METAPHYSICS: A CRITIQUE

Author(s):  
Edward Uzoma Ezedike

This paper focuses extensively on Kant’s critical epistemology as postulated in his Critique of Pure Reason. It grapples with the problem of identifying and harmonizing these borderlines of empirical and rational knowledge with that of metaphysical knowledge. Kant argues that the mind is so structured and empowered that it imposes interpretative categories on our experience so that we do not simply experience the world, as the empiricists claim, but interpret it through the categorizing mechanism of the mind. In ruling out indifference to metaphysical questions, Kant posits that if metaphysics is not science, yet still as natural disposition, human reason is driven on ‘by an inward need’ and not by mere ‘idle desire’ to ask metaphysical questions. Furthermore, Kant posits that what makes skepticism about metaphysics unsustainable is that metaphysics cannot be discarded in isolation from cognition in general. Kant, therefore, is of the view that the very same principles of reasoning as are employed in empirical judgments about physical objects are also used in a purified form, in metaphysical judgments about God, the soul and other non-empirical entities. However, the paper criticizes Kant for being too anxious to prove the subjectivity of space, as an escape route from materialism. Kant was quite averse to the argument that if space is objective and universal, God must exist in space, and hence, be spacial and material in nature. Thus, Kant might have been satisfied with the critical idealism which holds that all reality is known to us as our sensations and ideas.

1991 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 173-190
Author(s):  
Fergus Kerr

In a footnote to the preface to the second edition of his Critique of Pure Reason (1787) Kant remarked that ‘it still remains a scandal to philosophy and to human reason in general that the existence [Dasein] of things outside us … must be accepted on faith, and that if anyone thinks good to doubt their existence, we are unable to counter his doubts by any satisfactory proof’ (B XL). In Being and Time (1927) Heidegger remarks, somewhat less famously, that the scandal of philosophy, far from being the continuing absence of philosophically satisfactory proof of the existence of the world outside human subjectivity, is rather-the-very idea that such proof need be sought at all: ‘If Dasein is understood correctly, it defies such proofs, because, in its being, it already is what subsequent proofs deem necessary to demonstrate for it’ (BT, 205).


Author(s):  
Jauhan Budiwan

Immanuel Kant is one of the most influential philosophers in the history of Western philosophy. His contributions to metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics have had a profound impact on almost every philosophical movement that followed him. This portion will focus on his metaphysics and epistemology in one of his most important works. The Critique of Pure Reason, A large part of Kant’s work addresses the question “What can we know?” The answer, if it can be stated simply, is that our knowledge is constrained to mathematics and the science of the -natural, empirical world. It is impossible, Kant argues, to extend knowledge to the supersensible realm of speculative metaphysics. The reason that knowledge has these constraints, Kant argues, is that the mind plays an active role in constituting the features of experience and limiting the mind's access to the empirical realm of space and time. In order to understand Kant's position, we must understand the philosophical background that he was reacting to. First, 1 will present a brief overview of his predecessor's positions with a brief statement of Kant's objections, then I will return to a more detailed exposition of Kant's arguments. There are two major historical movements in the early modem period of philosophy that had a significant impact on Kant; Empiricism and Rationalism,


2019 ◽  
pp. 161-176

La potencia de la ficción en el pensamiento nietzscheano Resumen analítico.-El presente trabajo analiza las implicancias de la ficción sobre la posibilidad del conocimiento y la razón. Partiendo desde la obra de Nietzsche, se recorrerá las diferentes valencias de la ficción tanto en sus obras tempranas como tardías. En tanto el conocimiento, se partirá de la propedéutica realizada por Kant en La crítica de la razón pura haciendo al distinguir entre el mundo fenoménico y el mundo nouménico. Clarificando la metodología kantiana en la obra citada se puede observar cómo las ideas de la razón poseen una faceta ficcional. En el eje de la Razón como nuevo Dios, emerge la propuesta arkhica de un ordenamiento que es la raíz de la metafísica occidental. La mitologización de la razón, tal como lo menciona Adorno, es la creación de una nueva ficción que da sentido a la existencia. Por ello, la logicización del lenguaje, como lo detecta Cacciari, es la respuesta encontrada por Nietzsche en la propia razón para la formulación de un sentido aprehensible de mundo. Palabras claves: Ficción -Razón -Conocimiento -Mitologización –Arkhé The power of fiction in the nietzschean thought Abstract.-This paper analyzes the implications of fiction on the possibility of knowledge and reason. Starting from Nietzsche's work, the different valences of fiction will be traversed in both his early and late works. Concerning knowledge, it will be based on the propaedeutic realized by Kant in Critique of pure reason, distinguishing between the phenomenal world and the noumenal world. Clarifying the Kantian methodology in the cited work, one can see how the ideas of reason have a fictional facet. Being Reason the new God, the arkhica proposal of an order that is the root of western metaphysics emerges. The mythologization of reason, as Adorno mentions it, is the creation of a new fiction that gives meaning to existence. Therefore, the logicization of language, as Cacciari mentions, is the answer found by Nietzsche in his own reason for the formulation of an apprehensive sense of the world. Keywords: Fiction -Reason -Knowledge -Mythologization -Arkhé


2019 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-113
Author(s):  
Samuel A. Stoner ◽  

This essay investigates Kant’s understanding of the philosopher’s proper activity. It begins by examining Kant’s well-known claim in the Critique of Pure Reason that the philosopher is the legislator of human reason. Subsequently, it explicates Kant’s oft-overlooked description of the transcendental philosopher as an admirer of nature’s logical purposiveness, in the ‘First Introduction’ to the Critique of the Power of Judgment. These two accounts suggest very different ways of thinking about the philosopher’s character and concerns. For, while Kant’s philosopher-legislator pursues the practical, world-transformative task of furthering reason’s moral vocation, the transcendental philosopher’s admiration of nature’s purposiveness is a form of a contemplative openness to the contingent but wonderful orderliness of things. I conclude that Kant ultimately recognizes that the tension between legislation and admiration is characteristic of the philosopher and that it is the heart of philosophy’s vitality.


Kant-Studien ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 109 (1) ◽  
pp. 124-146
Author(s):  
Daniel Elon

Abstract: In 1792, Gottlob E. Schulze published one of the most important treatises in the era of the early critical reception of Kant’s transcendental philosophy: the skeptical treatise Aenesidemus. One of Schulze’s later students was the young Arthur Schopenhauer, whose examination of Kant’s philosophy was significantly influenced by Schulze. In this paper, it shall be established that this influence isn’t limited solely to the details of Schopenhauer’s critique of Kantian thinking, but rather extends to the systematic unfolding of Schopenhauer’s philosophy as a whole. In this respect, Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation can be understood as a direct, positive answer to the questions left open by Schulze’s debate on the internal problems of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.


2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 454 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abidin Nurdin ◽  
Sri Astuti A. Samad ◽  
Munawwarah A. Samad

Epistemology is the study of the source of knowledge or theories about science. Islamic epistemology views everything in a holistic manner that is not separate between aspects of the world and the hereafter, besides containing worldly values but also contains aspects of the afterlife. Epistemologically, knowledge in Islam is based on two things; first, through rational knowledge; secondly, through religious knowledge and experience, first is knowledge about beings and second is Divine reality. Therefore, in the philosophy of Islamic education, the source of knowledge is revelation over reason and the five senses. Revelation as the source of knowledge is what gives certainty to human reason about truth. Crisis of morality or human behavior is now an important factor occupying the epistemology base of true Islamic education, because education that is only able to educate intellectually and good skills is clearly considered a failure without being decorated with noble character.


Author(s):  
Thomas Baldwin

McTaggart was one of the last of the ‘British Idealists’, the group of British philosophers, such as B. Bosanquet and F.H. Bradley, who took their inspiration from Hegel. In his early writings from the 1890s, McTaggart gave a critical exposition of themes from Hegel’s logic before advancing his own distinctive idealist positions concerning time, the mind, and reality in general. But in his writings from 1910 he developed an independent account of the structure of existence from which he then argued for the same idealist positions as before. The thesis for which McTaggart is now most famous is that of the unreality of time; what is even more difficult to come to terms with is his thesis that the ultimate reality of the world comprises a community of selves wholly constituted by their loving perceptions of each other. This thesis is a manifestation of a mysticism that is an essential element in McTaggart’s philosophy; yet this mysticism is combined with a rationalist determination, reminiscent of Spinoza, to vindicate mystical insights by the light of pure reason alone.


Author(s):  
Karin Nisenbaum

In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant argued that human reason is inherently conflicted, because it demands a form of unconditioned knowledge that transcends its capacity; his solution to this conflict of reason relies on the idea that reason’s quest for the unconditioned can only be realized practically. This book proposes to view the conflict of reason, and Kant’s solution to this conflict, as the central problem shaping the contours of post-Kantian German Idealism. I contend that the rise and fall of German Idealism is to be told as a story about the different interpretations, appropriations, and radicalization of Kant’s prioritizing of the practical. The first part of the book explains why Kant’s critics and followers came to understand the aim of Kant’s critical philosophy in light of the conflict of reason. I argue that F. H. Jacobi and Salomon Maimon set the stage for the reception of Kant’s critical philosophy by conceiving its aim in terms of meeting reason’s demand for unconditioned knowledge, and by understanding the conflict of reason as a conflict between thinking and acting, or knowing and willing. The manner in which the post-Kantian German Idealists radicalized Kant’s prioritizing of the practical is the central topic of the second part of the book, which focuses on works by J. G. Fichte and F. W. J. Schelling. The third part of the book clarifies why, in order to solve the conflict of reason, Schelling and Rosenzweig developed the view that human experience is grounded in three irreducible elements—God, the natural world, and human beings—which relate in three temporal dimensions: Creation, Revelation, and Redemption.


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