Immanuel Kant-Critique of Pure Reason

Famous German philosopher who lived between 1724-1804. His main works are: Kritik der Reinen Vernunft (Critique of Pure Reason), Kritik der Pratischen Vernunft (Critique of Practical Reason), and Kritik der Urteilkraft (Critique of Judgment).

Fundamentals: Kant, who brought epistemology to the fore in accordance with the development course of modern philosophy, was primarily influenced by Hume. In his own words, Hume was the philosopher who woke him from his dogmatic sleep and gave a new direction to his research in the field of speculative philosophy. On the other hand, he determined that Descartes' rationalism also contained some positive aspects, and was almost fascinated by the way our minds worked when dealing with mathematics. Kant was further influenced by science, especially physics, which made spectacular developments in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For Kant, science is a universal discipline whose premises are precise and whose methods can only be questioned when a philosophical skepticism like Hume's is adopted.

According to Kant, a scientist, on the one hand, accepts the conclusions of his predecessors; Again, when a scientist engages in new research in addition to these accepted results, he uses experimental methods. Science is unbiased and objective. On the other hand, the method of science, especially modern physics developed by Newton, which had very successful results, developed, according to Kant, by surpassing both rationalism and empiricism. In other words, physical science continues its development by falsifying both the results of rationalism and the results of empiricism. Accordingly, rationalism, which takes mathematics, which is considered to be the most solid knowledge model, as an example, reaches a priori conclusions about the things themselves, without turning to the things themselves, without making contact with the things themselves, only by connecting the thoughts to each other.

However, physics, using mathematics, turns to the things themselves, and successfully establishes the contact with the things themselves, which cannot be established by rationalism. According to Kant, the empiricism of the English philosopher Hume took a skeptical view of causality, arguing that we can never know with certainty that the same effect will always follow from a given cause. However, the science of physics, which has achieved very successful results, is almost entirely based on the principle of causality. In this context, Kant thought that his task was to ground science, especially physics, which could not be explained and justified by either rationalism or empiricism, and to find out how the human mind works when he thinks scientifically. In other words, he believed that his first and fundamental mission in philosophy was to ground science and then to defend the rationality of morality and religion. However, this is not an easy task at all, because science and religion have been in a relentless struggle against each other for centuries, and science has embarked on an absolute victory over the authority of religion.

According to Kant, this victory, while good and positive from the point of view of science, is a disaster from the point of view of morality and religion. There is no doubt that it is a good thing that science gains its autonomy from the interventions of religion, but the victory of science is a real disaster from the point of view of humanity, from the point of view of religion, if this means that all non-scientific beliefs, religion and morality are groundless and meaningless. Kant, then, has not only had to ground religion, science, and morality, but has had to show what it means to be a rational being. In order to realize this aim, he developed his own epistemological idealism, known as transcendental epistemological idealism, by taking the elements that he deems important from both Descartes' rationalism and Hume's empiricism, and after showing the philosophical foundations of ascendant science, he became a Christian based on the idea of ​​freedom and duty. He made an effort to defend his morality. Views of Knowledge: Immanuel Kant, who made a synthesis of rationalist philosophy and empiricist philosophy in his thought, argued that the contribution of both experience and mind in knowledge is inevitable. He first showed that even the simplest experience, sense impressions, contains an a priori element, an element which cannot derive from experience, but creates and enables experience. Kant, who named the time and space corresponding to the a priori elements in question, the transcendental conditions of the experiment, thus found the opportunity to reveal the synthetic nature of the judgments of mathematics about space and number, against Hume's view that mathematical sciences have a purely analytical structure. In other words, according to Kant, who defines the basic, separating activity of the mind in knowledge as synthesizing the raw and unprocessed material coming from experience and combining this material and giving it a unity, the mind first of all integrates our various experiences into certain patterns of intuition. by placing it. The said patterns of intuition are time and space.

Accordingly, we perceive things as necessarily occurring in time and space. However, time and space are not ideas, impressions, or concepts derived from sense-experience. According to Kant, time and space are encountered directly and unmediated in intuition. These are the a priori patterns of intuition, that is, prior to any experience, and which are the indispensable conditions of any experience. That is, these are the glasses through which we always perceive the objects in the sense-experience. After giving the name of transcendental aesthetics to this teaching of time and space, he moved on to transcendental analysis, the doctrine of categories, and showed that just as sensibility or experience contains a priori forms of perception, research and knowledge of nature include a priori principles such as relevance, substance, and causality. .

Existing in an unsystematic way, even in the most ordinary thought, these categories emerge as essential elements of a mathematical-mechanical natural science and make a rational conception of nature possible. In other words, according to Kant, who states that there are certain categories related to the thought or the human mind's bringing a unity to the material coming from the sense-experiment or putting the material in question through a synthesis, according to Kant, the mind uses the said synthesis or combining activity to make various judgments. so that these judgments form the essential components of our interpretation of the world.

In order for appearances and phenomena to be understood in some way, they must be given a structure through the categories of understanding. What does not fit into the categories of understanding cannot be known by the human mind. According to Kant, our sense-experience exhibits a certain structure and unity. This structure and unity exhibited by sense-experience can only be explained by the activity of the understanding, which organizes appearances according to their own categories. However, since categories are subjective conditions of thought or knowledge, the question arises how they can have objective validity, that is, provide the conditions under which our knowledge of objects is possible. According to Kant, the objective validity of categories as a priori concepts rests on the fact that human sense-experience with objects is possible only thanks to these categories. An object of sense-experience can be thought of only in these categories. A thought about an object, all judgments about it, and therefore knowledge about it, is possible only within the conceptual framework provided by the categories. The most important results of this understanding of knowledge of Kant, who said that the human mind can only know the phenomena to which it has given a structure through its categories, that things cannot know themselves by going beyond this, that objects in sense experience can only be known because they conform to the functioning of the human mind, and that all empirical laws are reduced to the laws of the human mind, an absolute determinism, the limitations of knowledge and the impossibility of metaphysics. Our knowledge is limited in two respects. Knowledge is, above all, confined to the world of sense-experience.

Second, our knowledge is constrained by the ways in which our perceptive and thinking faculties process and organize the raw material of experience. Kant, of course, does not doubt that the world that appears to us is not the ultimate and highest reality. Indeed, he made a distinction between phenomenal reality, that is, the non-sensuous and intelligible world. What is it when something is not detected? What does the thing itself mean? Metaphysics: of course we cannot know what we do not perceive. The things we know are not the noumena, the things themselves, but the phenomena, the appearances of things. The objects that we know are those that are perceived through the senses. We also know that the sensory world is not created by our mind.