Immanuel Kant

Happiness is not an ideal of reason, but of imagination.

Summary

Immanuel Kant (1724 - 1804) was an 18th-century German philosopher from the Prussian city of Königsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia). He is regarded as one of the most influential thinkers of modern Europe and of the late Age of Enlightenment.

His contributions to Metaphysics, Epistemology, Ethics, and Aesthetics have had a profound impact on almost every philosophical movement that followed him.

Like many Enlightenment thinkers he believed that it is reason that invests the world we experience with structure. In his works on Aesthetics and Teleology, he argued that it is our ability of judgment that enables us to experience beauty and to see those experiences as part of an ordered, natural world with purpose.

His foundation of a new Epistemology based on experience was to influence Wilhelm Dilthey, Humberto Maturana, Francisco Varela, etc.

Ideas

• Although all knowledge begins with experience, it does not all arise out of experience.
• Knowledge of an orderly world is made possible through the complementary activities of the senses and the mind.
• The matter of our experience is due to our senses and its form is contributed by the mind.
• The world we know is a phenomenal world; we have no knowledge of things-in-themselves.
• The only thing good without qualification is a good will.
• One ought to act only according to a principle of action that can be universalized.
• One ought to treat all rational beings as ends in themselves and never merely as means.
• The categorical imperative must be distinguished from hypothetical imperatives; the commands of the former are unexceptionable, but those of the latter are exceptionable.
• The autonomy of the self-legislating will is the basis of human dignity.
• Belief in God is a postulate of practical reason.