Life and Work
The 18thcentury German thinker, the last famous philosopher of Enlightenment.
He spent all his life (80 years) in his native city Königsberg (Prussia) where worked as the university professor and wrote many books on epistemology, religion, law, natural history, physics, pedagogy, logic, astronomy, theory of beauty and so on.
Kant’s grave is one of the main tourist attractions in the Kaliningrad.
Storchevoy M. A. Corporate Social Responsibility. 2013
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) Topic 2 (2). Normative Analysis: Deontology
2.8. Rational Choice: Kant Critique of Pure Reason (1)
By 1770, he was already an established professor of philosophy he read David Hume’s argumentation about empiricism and rationalism, “awakened from his dogmatic slumber” and started to search a new synthesis. He published nothing for the next 11 years but in 1781 the world have seen Critique of Pure Reason – one of the most famous books in philosophy.
Empiricism is the approach stating that all human knowledge is derived from the experience. (As Hume said, the newborn man is tabula rasa).
Rationalism is the approach stating that all human knowledge may be and should be derived and checked logically, by reasoning (Descartes and others).
What had Kant added to this dispute?
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)
Storchevoy M. A. Corporate Social Responsibility. 2013 Topic 2 (2). Normative Analysis: Deontology
2.8. Rational Choice: Kant Critique of Pure Reason (2)
1. The idea of phenomenology. We can not know the things as such. We can know only their images (phenomena) in our mind. But how the mind does construct these images? It has some built-in structures to percept time, space and so on.
2. Analytic and synthetic propositions. Analytic propositions (all widows are unmarried) are true by nature of the meaning of the words from the sentence. Synthetic propositions (all widows are unhappy) should be proven, they are not automatically true.
Which synthetic propositions are possible a priori? - the main research question of this book.
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