Immanuel Kant: The Power Of Knowledge

The act of knowledge is a factor that is widely misunderstood in many ways. Humans have trouble understanding how we acquire knowledge. The fact is that our mind plays an active role interpreting knowledge and how categorize it has been a debate for many centuries. We know what the world that our mind represents to us but we cannot know reality in itself. At first, we thought that knowledge is actually based on experience and that through these experiences we can understand how the world works. However, knowledge can also be reasoned with rational thoughts that are built in our mind as well in order to start off a beginning to understand further experiences. In this paper, I will look at the two different arguments about a method of acquiring

Kant takes a middle road between empiricism and rationalism in order to fully understand how knowledge works. He further explains it is impossible for humans to have experience through time and space. He states, “ Space is a necessary representation, a priori, which is the ground of all outer intuitions... It is therefore to be regarded as the condition of the possibility of appearances, not as a determination dependent on them,” (Kant 2010). There is nothing definitional about space or time. The concept of space and time is already in our mind and it could not be explained through experience and reasons.This leads him to the synthetic a priori concept in which that ideas are raw matter of knowledge and that the mind imposes and organizes ideas into categories of space, time, and causality. Therefore, space and time are properties that we attribute to the mind in order to perceive the world and that they are form of intuitions or priori. This leads to his argument on Transcendental Idealism in which that humans construct knowledge based on the sense of impressions and universal categories. In this case, our mind is able perceive the knowledge that we obtain through different aspects but we must understand how it got this way. Kant believed that we view the world through these experiences and that the world is independent from these experience which therefore allows the limitation on what we know. He goes further beyond Hume’s empiricism and Descartes’ rationalism and states that, “Skepticism is thus a resting-place for human reason….But it is no dwelling-place for permanent settlement. Such can be obtained only through perfect certainty in our knowledge, alike of the objects themselves and of the limits within which all our