All 29 Uses of

Immanuel Kant
in
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

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.†
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Kant = 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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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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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.†
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Kantian = related to the German philosopher, Immanuel Kant

Kant felt he had done the same thing in metaphysics.†
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Kant = 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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It seemed woven right into the whole fabric of Kant's world so deeply there was no escape from 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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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.†
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Definitions:

(1) (Immanuel Kant)
German philosopher generally considered the last major philosopher of the Enlightenment; emphasized the categorical imperative; criticized proofs of God, but believed God's existence must be assumed by rational, moral individuals (1724-1804)

In his Critique of Pure Reason Kant distinguishes between knowledge from experience and universal knowledge from reason such as mathematics. He distinguishes between human perception and objective reality to the point of saying that time, space, and causation may not exist outside the human mind. Still, he disagrees with those who say no universal truth can be found through experience. While experience can lead to universal understandings, it cannot lead to understanding of metaphysics. Instead, metaphysics should be studied through a critique of human reason.

The book is said to have moved philosophy beyond the debate between the rationalists and empiricists.
(2) (meaning too rare to warrant focus)
meaning too rare to warrant focus:

Much less commonly, Kant can refer to other people, places, and things with that name.