Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kantwas a German philosopher who is considered the central figure of modern philosophy. Kant argued that fundamental concepts of the human mind structure human experience, that reason is the source of morality, that aesthetics arises from a faculty of disinterested judgment, that space and time are forms of our sensibility, and that the world as it is "in-itself" is unknowable. Kant took himself to have effected a Copernican revolution in philosophy, akin to Copernicus' reversal of the age-old belief...
NationalityGerman
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth22 April 1724
CountryGermany
All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.
The schematicism by which our understanding deals with the phenomenal world ... is a skill so deeply hidden in the human soul that we shall hardly guess the secret trick that Nature here employs.
A science of all these possible kinds of space [the higher dimensional ones] would undoubtedly be the highest enterprise which a finite understanding could undertake in the field of geometry... If it is possible that there could be regions with other dimensions, it is very likely that God has somewhere brought them into being.
Beauty presents an indeterminate concept of Understanding, the sublime an indeterminate concept of Reason.
Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind... The understanding can intuit nothing, the senses can think nothing. Only through their union can knowledge arise.
Aristotle can be regarded as the father of logic. But his logic is too scholastic, full of subtleties, and fundamentally has not been of much value to the human understanding. It is a dialectic and an organon for the art of disputation.
To be fully comfortable to the principle of right, the form of government must be representative. This is the only one that permits republicanism, without which the government is arbitrary and despotic, whatever the constitution may be.
So act that your principle of action might safely be made a law for the whole world.
The possession of power unavoidably spoils the free use of reason
Reason does not work instinctively, but requires trial, practice, and instruction in order to gradually progress from one level of insight to another
A man who has tasted with profound enjoyment the pleasure of agreeable society will eat with a greater appetite than he who rode horseback for two hours. An amusing lecture is as useful for health as the exercise of the body.
Two things awe me most, the starry sky above me and the moral law within me.
The possession of power inevitably spoils the free use of reason.
There can be no doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience.