The Rediscovery of the Inner Life: From Spinoza to Kant

2005 ◽  
pp. 273-298
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Great Part ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
Spiritual Experience ◽  
Apparent Depth ◽  
Pure Reason ◽  
Critique Of Pure Reason ◽  
Inner Life ◽  
Philosophical Work ◽  
Historical Tradition

This chapter considers stages of growing intelligence, and even of growing spiritual knowledge, marked by an inevitable and lamentable decline in apparent depth and vitality of spiritual experience. In such stages, the greatest concerns of our lives are somehow for a while hidden, even forgotten. We become more knowing, more clever, more critical, more wary, more skeptical, but we seemingly do not grow more profound or more reverent. Such a stage in human experience is represented, in great part, by the philosophical thinkers who flourished between the time of Spinoza's death, in 1677 and the appearance of Kant's chief philosophical work, “The Critique of Pure Reason” in 1781. It is the period which has been especially associated, in historical tradition, with the eighteenth century.

Mendelssohn, Kant, and Idealism

2020 ◽  
pp. 167-202
Author(s):  
Paul Guyer
Keyword(s):  
Transcendental Idealism ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
Necessary Condition ◽  
Pure Reason ◽  
Transcendental Argument ◽  
Critique Of Pure Reason ◽  
External Objects ◽  
Self Knowledge ◽  
Refutation Of Idealism ◽  
Empirical Realism

After examining the dispute between Mendelssohn and Kant over the ideality of time in 1770, this chapter argues that Kant’s addition of a “Refutation of Idealism” to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason in 1787 is a response to Mendelssohn’s treatment of idealism in his 1785 Morning Hours. Both defend the position that Kant calls empirical realism, but only Kant defends it by means of a transcendental argument that knowledge of external objects is a necessary condition of empirical self-knowledge, although only within the framework of transcendental idealism. Mendelssohn accepts that human experience can never tell us how things are in themselves, but does not accept Kant’s outright denial of the non-spatiality and non-temporality of things in themselves.

Kant on the Spontaneity of Mind

1987 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 449-475 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert B. Pippin
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Theory Of Mind ◽  
The Self ◽  
Pure Reason ◽  
Critique Of Pure Reason ◽  
Secondary Literature ◽  
General Issue ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Recent Attention

In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant refers often and with no apparent hesitation or sense of ambiguity to the mind (das Gemüt). He does so not only in his justly famous destruction of rationalist proofs of immaterialism, but throughout his own, positive, ‘transcendental’ account in the Transcendental Aesthetic and Transcendental Analytic. In the first edition of the Critique, he even proposed what he adventurously called a ‘transcendental psychology’ and, although this strange discipline seemed to disappear in the second edition, he left in that edition all his frequent references to forms ‘lying in the mind,’ and to the mind, or the self, or the subject of experience, or the ego, doing this or that. Curiously, though, despite an extensive secondary literature, there is in that literature relatively little discussion of what these expressions, in a proper, strictly Kantian sense, are supposed to refer to. There are two imaginative, extremely suggestive articles by Sellars, some hints at connections with eighteenth century psychology offered by Weldon, a tenebrous book by Heidemann, and some recent attention to the general issue of ‘Kant's theory of mind’ by Ameriks and Kitcher.

Kant's Criticism of Metaphysics—I

Philosophy ◽  
1939 ◽  
Vol 14 (55) ◽  
pp. 313-325
Author(s):  
W. H. Walsh
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Pure Reason ◽  
Critique Of Pure Reason ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Individual Trees ◽  
Objective Validity

What is the Critique of Pure Reason about? The terminology of the work is so perplexing, its argument so obscurely expressed, that the ordinary reader may be forgiven if he puts it down at the end very much in the dark as to what it all means. He will have seen that in it Kant has attempted to establish certain conclusions: the subjectivity of space and time, the existence and objective validity of a number of a priori concepts or categories, the falsity of the arguments used to defend the metaphysical system most widely favoured in German learned circles in the eighteenth century; but though he has grasped all this he may yet have failed to make sense of the work as a whole. It is the old story of not seeing the wood for trees; and in this case the fault is more excusable than in most, for the individual trees each demand so much attention and are so difficult to get round that it is all too easy to forget the very existence of the wood. At the worst, one may think that there is no wood at all; only a miscellaneous aggregate of individual trees which have nothing to do with each other.

Kants kritische Psychologie als Aufklärung

2020 ◽  
Vol 74 (2) ◽  
pp. 253-273
Author(s):  
Hyeongjoo Kim ◽  
Carina Pape
Keyword(s):  
Important Change ◽  
Pure Reason ◽  
Human Soul ◽  
Critique Of Pure Reason ◽  
Ongoing Process ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Complete Rejection ◽  
Age Of Enlightenment

In his famous essay from 1784, Kant denied that we "live in an enlightened age"; yet he claimed that we "live in an age of enlightenment". If we should answer the question if we live in an enlightened age now, we could basically give the same answer. The enlightenment as an ongoing process can be found throughout Kant's whole work. This article focuses on how the concept of enlightenment can be applied to the Kantian psychology, which marks an important change of theory of the soul within modern western metaphysics. Kant's idea of enlightenment and 'critique' will be illustrated with reference to the "Paralogisms" of the Critique of Pure Reason. Finally, an analysis of some passages of the "Paralogisms" shall demonstrate that Kant's critique of the previous metaphysical doctrine of the human soul should not be understood as a complete rejection of this doctrine; rather, Kant's critique of what is called rational psychology should be understood as a critical transformation.

Kant’s Material Condition of Real Possibility

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica Leech
Keyword(s):  
Pure Reason ◽  
Critique Of Pure Reason ◽  
Real Possibility ◽  
Rational Theology ◽  
Material Condition

In the Postulates of Empirical Thinking, a section of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant presents an account of the content and role of our concept of real possibility in terms of formal conditions of experience. However, much later in the Critique he introduces the idea of a material condition of possibility. What is this material condition of possibility, and how does it fit with the conception of possibility in terms of formal conditions? This essay argues that the key to answering these questions—as well as to understanding Kant’s criticism of rational theology, in which the discussion of the material condition of possibility appears—is Kant’s account of how we can individuate objects.

Epilogue

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Henning
Keyword(s):  
Historical Context ◽  
Pure Reason ◽  
Critique Of Pure Reason ◽  
Transcendental Deduction

This brief chapter summarizes central findings regarding the role of parenthetical sentences in practical discourse. But it also provides historical context. It suggests that a precursor of parentheticalism may be found in Kant, especially in Kant’s views about the “I think,” especially as they are expressed in the B-Version of the “Transcendental Deduction” and the B-Version of the chapter on Paralogisms in the Critique of Pure Reason.

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