All 29 Uses
Immanuel Kant
in
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
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- A fragment of memory is preserved of him sitting in a room at three and four in the morning with Immanuel Kant's famous Critique of Pure Reason, studying it as a chess player studies the openings of the tournament masters, trying to test the line of development against his own judgment and skill, looking for contradictions and incongruities.†
Part 2Immanuel Kant = Immanuel Kant -- German philosopher generally considered the last major philosopher of the Enlightenment
- Phaedrus is a bizarre person when contrasted to the twentieth-century Midwestern Americans who surround him, but when he is seen studying Kant he is less strange.†
Part 2Kant = German philosopher generally considered the last major philosopher of the Enlightenment
- For this eighteenth-century German philosopher he feels a respect that rises not out of agreement but out of appreciation for Kant's formidable logical fortification of his position.†
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- Kant is always superbly methodical, persistent, regular and meticulous as he scales that great snowy mountain of thought concerning what is in the mind and what is outside the mind.†
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- It is, for modern climbers, one of the highest peaks of all, and I want now to magnify this picture of Kant and show a little about how he thought and how Phaedrus thought about him in order to give a clearer picture of what the high country of the mind is like and also to prepare the way for an understanding of Phaedrus' thoughts.†
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- To follow Kant one must also understand something about the Scottish philosopher David Hume.†
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- This Kant would not do.†
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- Thus it was Hume, Kant said, who "aroused me from my dogmatic slumbers" and caused him to write what is now regarded as one of the greatest philosophical treatises ever written, the Critique of Pure Reason, often the subject of an entire University course.†
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- Kant is trying to save scientific empiricism from the consequences of its own self-devouring logic.†
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- As a result of this difference, Kant skirts right around the abyss of solipsism that Hume's path leads to and proceeds on an entirely new and different path of his own.†
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- Kant says there are aspects of reality which are not supplied immediately by the senses.†
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- Time is what Kant calls an "intuition," which the mind must supply as it receives the sense data.†
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- Now stop and apply some of the concepts Kant has put forth to this strange machine, this creation that's been bearing us along through time and space.†
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- See our relation to it now, as Kant reveals it to us.†
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- Kant comes to our rescue.†
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- But, as Kant says, we are not that person.†
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- The bulk of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is concerned with how this a priori knowledge is acquired and how it is employed.†
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- Kant called his thesis that our a priori thoughts are independent of sense data and screen what we see a "Copernican revolution."†
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- Or, to put it in Kantian terms, the objective world producing our sense data did not change, but our a priori concept of it was turned inside out.†
Part 2 *Kantian = related to the German philosopher, Immanuel Kant
- Kant felt he had done the same thing in metaphysics.†
Part 2Kant = German philosopher generally considered the last major philosopher of the Enlightenment
- Kant and his millions of followers have maintained that as a result of this inversion you get a much more satisfying understanding of how we know things.†
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- Kant's metaphysics thrilled Phaedrus at first, but later it dragged and he didn't know exactly why.†
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- He read Kant's esthetics with disappointment and then anger.†
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- It seemed woven right into the whole fabric of Kant's world so deeply there was no escape from it.†
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- He didn't jump from Immanuel Kant to Bozeman, Montana.†
Part 2Immanuel Kant = Immanuel Kant -- German philosopher generally considered the last major philosopher of the Enlightenment
- He wished Kant were alive.†
Part 3Kant = German philosopher generally considered the last major philosopher of the Enlightenment
- Kant would have appreciated it.†
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- This refutation of scientific materialism, however, seemed to put him in the camp of philosophic idealism...Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Bradley, Bosanquet...good company all, logical to the last comma, but so difficult to justify in "common sense" language they seemed a burden to him in his defense of Quality rather than an aid.†
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- Are they synthetic a priori judgments, as Kant said?†
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Definitions:
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(1)
(Immanuel Kant) German Enlightenment philosopher who argued that our minds shape how we experience the world and that true morality must follow a strict inner duty (the categorical imperative) (1724–1804)Key Ideas
Bridging Reason and Experience: Kant tried to settle the long debate between rationalists (who trusted pure reason) and empiricists (who trusted sensory experience). He argued that experience gives us the raw material of knowledge, while the mind organizes it to make universal knowledge (like mathematics) possible.
Limits of Knowledge: In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant concluded that we cannot know reality as it truly is. We can only know things as they appear to us through our mind's filter.
Ethics: The Moral Law: Kant's ethics centered on the Categorical Imperative—an unconditional moral command to act only on principles we would want everyone to follow, and always treat people as ends in themselves, not just as means to an end.
Moral Faith: Kant rejected proofs of God's existence, but argued that moral reason pushes to accept God, free will, and afterlife as real in a practical sense, even though they remain matters of faith rather than knowledge. -
(2)
(meaning too rare to warrant focus) Much less commonly, Kant can refer to other people, places, and things with that name.