Kant

Critique is a complex endeavour which involves, on the one hand, probing the limits of human capacity for knowledge, reflection and action, and on the other hand, seeking to bring to the surface of our thinking its underlying assumptions, values and beliefs which are implicit. In other words, it is the uncovering of the basis of knowledge. There have been different lines of philosophical descent from Kant, and philosophical 'turns' - many away from some of his fundamental propositions.

Immanuel Kant was born into a working class family in the Prussian port of Konigsberg (now Kaliningrad).

He called his own way of philosophizing the "critical" method and thus created Critical Philosophy. The titles of the three main books in which he developed his system each begin with the word "critique".

In each of his three Critiques, Kant performed a distinct type of self- examination of reason: he searched, respectively, for the boundaries between

He said these three concerns can be summarized as an attempt to understand who man is.

They remain the focus of the Society for the Furtherance of Critical Philosophy today.

For Kant experience starts inside the mind and is not created by the world outside. Kant claimed we don't know about "things-in-themselves," objects as they exist apart from perception.

The term "thing in itself" is a technical term he used to talk about the nature of ultimate reality; it means "the things in the world, considered apart from the conditions which make it possible to know anything about them".

But at the same time Kant thought he was vindicating both a scientific realism, where science really knows the world, and a moral realism, where there is objective moral obligation, for both of which a connection to external existence is essential. And there were also terribly important features of things-in-themselves that we do have some notion about and that are of fundamental importance to human life, not just morality but what he called the three "Ideas" of reason: God, freedom, and immortality.

The Critical method is, in fact, a new form of the Socratic method. Socrates' main concern was to examine thoroughly himself and others in the search for wisdom. Kant's Critical method requires the self-examination of reason itself. In other words, a true "critique", for Kant, is a process by which reason asks itself about the extent and limits of its own powers.

The purpose of such self-examination is to discover once and for all the boundary between what human reason can and cannot achieve.

In each case the "knowledge" we gain of the boundary line informs us about what Kant called the "transcendental conditions" for empirical knowledge. Hence, his Critical method requires "transcendental reflection", which simply means thinking about the necessary conditions for the possibility of experience.

Something transcendental is something that must be true, otherwise our experience itself would be impossible.

Whatever is outside the boundary, Kant called "transcendent": since we can never have any experience of such things, called "noumena", they can never be known by human reason.
But whatever is inside the boundary line defines the things open to discovery by ordinary, "empirical reflection". Kant called such empirically knowable objects "phenomena".

"Thoughts without content are empty; intuitions without concepts are blind," A 51

Physical sensation precipitates an application of reason to experience, producing the perception of phenomenal objects. The supreme rational expression of this is science.

The sense of moral duty precipitates an application of reason that generates ethics and religion. The supreme rational expression of this is the "Postulates of Practical Reason," the "Ideas" of God, freedom, and immortality which, to Kant, are required as conditions of the Moral Law.

The differences between reality as seen in science and reality as seen in morality and religion reveal that there are aspects to existence that are not revealed by either datum alone. The two sources are also unequal in the magnitude and ultimate significance of their content.

What science can investigate and know is apparently all but endless, but it still leaves us wondering,

Morality and religion have a far more limited rational content, returning to many of the same issues over and over again, but such issues happen to include, not just the questions about how to live, but the ultimate questions about the meaning of life and existence ("Life, the Universe and Everything," in the memorable formula of Douglas Adams).

The reality revealed by morality is thus for Kant a matter of faith (Glaube), an inference from the Moral Law which is itself present to us with an inexplicable authority. "Transcendental idealism" is thus profoundly different from other forms of "idealism," like the "subjective idealism" of Berkeley (what Kant called "empirical idealism") or the "objective idealism" of Hegel, both of which offer speculative certainties about the ultimate nature of things, which Kant does not do. The nature of things that we can know about concretely, for Kant, is revealed by science. Hence, Kantian transcendental idealism is equally attended by empirical realism.

All that the Transcendental Deduction aimed at was showing that particular concepts, like causality or substance, are

Jakob Fries another German philosopher wanted to save this generality of Kant's theory without falling back, like Hegel, into speculative metaphysics.

That brings us back to the datum of morality. Indeed, Kant's whole system does seem to come down to the

If the existence of morality is as evident as the existence of physical objects, then both Kant's dualism empirical existence and transcendental knowledge are required.

The only other option is to question the existence of morality, as with Nietzsche and currently fashionable nihilism. But this was an option that Kant refused to take and why he remains important for those of us today who still believe there is a moral referent by which to judge our actions.

The German Enlightenment philosopher, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), is viewed as the founder of the movement in 'Critical Philosophy'.