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A posteriori reasoning depends upon experience or contingent events in the world to provide us with information. The Rationalists attempted to use a priori reasoning to build the necessary bridge. The Empiricists sought to accomplish this through the senses and a posteriori reasoning.

A central epistemological problem for philosophers in both movements was determining how we can escape from within the confines of the human mind and the immediately knowable content of our own thoughts to acquire knowledge of the world outside of us. Kant argues that both the method and the content of these philosophers’ arguments contain serious flaws. There are two major historical movements in the early modern period of philosophy that had a significant impact on Kant: Empiricism and Rationalism. First, this article presents a brief overview of his predecessor’s positions with a brief statement of Kant’s objections, then I will return to a more detailed exposition of Kant’s arguments. In order to understand Kant’s position, we must understand the philosophical background that he was reacting to.

Kant’s Copernican Revolution: Mind Making Nature.

The categorical imperative is Kant’s famous statement of this duty: “Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.” Table of Contents And the only motive that can endow an act with moral value, he argues, is one that arises from universal principles discovered by reason. In Kant’s view, the sole feature that gives an action moral worth is not the outcome that is achieved by the action, but the motive that is behind the action.

He is the most important proponent in philosophical history of deontological, or duty based, ethics. Kant’s contributions to ethics have been just as substantial, if not more so, than his work in metaphysics and epistemology. These two theses constitute Kant’s famous transcendental idealism and empirical realism. These categories cannot be circumvented to get at a mind-independent world, but they are necessary for experience of spatio-temporal objects with their causal behavior and logical properties. Reason itself is structured with forms of experience and categories that give a phenomenal and logical structure to any possible object of empirical experience. Kant responded to his predecessors by arguing against the Empiricists that the mind is not a blank slate that is written upon by the empirical world, and by rejecting the Rationalists’ notion that pure, a priori knowledge of a mind-independent world was possible. The reason that knowledge has these constraints, Kant argues, is that the mind plays an active role in constituting the features of experience and limiting the mind’s access only to the empirical realm of space and time. It is impossible, Kant argues, to extend knowledge to the supersensible realm of speculative metaphysics. A large part of Kant’s work addresses the question “What can we know?” The answer, if it can be stated simply, is that our knowledge is constrained to mathematics and the science of the natural, empirical world. This article focuses on his metaphysics and epistemology in one of his most important works, The Critique of Pure Reason. His contributions to metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics have had a profound impact on almost every philosophical movement that followed him. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) is one of the most influential philosophers in the history of Western philosophy.