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He synthesized early modern rationalism and empiricism, set the terms for much of nineteenth and twentieth century philosophy, and continues to exercise a significant influence today in metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, political philosophy, aesthetics, and other fields.
Immanuel Kant, German philosopher who was one of the foremost thinkers of the Enlightenment and who inaugurated a new era of philosophical thought. His comprehensive and systematic work in epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics greatly influenced all subsequent philosophy.
Kant believed that reason is the source of morality, and that aesthetics arises from a faculty of disinterested judgment. Kant's religious views were deeply connected to his moral theory. Their exact nature remains in dispute.
Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) argued that the supreme principle of morality is a principle of practical rationality that he dubbed the “Categorical Imperative” (CI). Kant characterized the CI as an objective, rationally necessary and unconditional principle that we must follow despite any natural desires we may have to the contrary.
Immanuel Kant is known for being a German Enlightenment philosopher who tried to find a middle ground between metaphysics and empiricism. Kant believed that philosophers must carefully and critically examine the concepts they use to explain what is and what is not knowable.
After discovering and being shaken by the radical skepticism of Hume’s empiricism in the early 1770s, Kant undertook a massive project to respond to Hume. He realized that this response would require a complete reorientation of the most fundamental approaches to metaphysics and epistemology.
Kant’s most distinctive contribution to ethics was his insistence that one’s actions possess moral worth only when one does his duty for its own sake. Kant first introduced this idea as something accepted by the common moral consciousness of human beings and only later tried to show that it is an essential element of any rational morality.
Kant wrote his social and political philosophy in order to champion the Enlightenment in general and the idea of freedom in particular. His work came within both the natural law and the social contract traditions.
Kantianism, either the system of thought contained in the writings of the epoch-making 18th-century philosopher Immanuel Kant or those later philosophies that arose from the study of Kant’s writings and drew their inspiration from his principles.
Kant believed we experience terror in the face of nature when it reminds us of our own small and fleeting place on earth. Kant’s theory of the sublime inspired a generation of...