Immanuel Kant's Ideas

Picture a society where there are no conflicts between nations. A ‘perpetual peace’ occurs, where states enter an agreement to renounce force. However, in an ideal Kantian society, there would be no one world government, because that would sap an individual’s will to know. Since he believed that knowledge came from experience, an ideal society would include a multitude of experiences as to provide a wealth of sources for knowledge production. Through peaceful negotiations of other nations, citizens of one nation would be able to reform their worldviews and become more exposed to different versions of “truth”. In these countries, laws would exist, and be followed, but the public would have the right to be critical of them; after all, their

His parents were devout Lutherans, which shaped his attempt to reconcile religious doctrines with an individual’s knowledge production. He attended the University of Konigsberg, where he studied philosophy, and his exposure to the ideas of early Enlightenment thinkers, such as John Locke, Isaac Newton, and Christian Wolff. The influence of his ideas is apparent in his first book, Thoughts on the True Estimation of Living Forces (1747); having been exposed to conflicting ideas of force by Leibniz and Newton, his first published work is an attempt to examine this dispute. He was an unsalaried lecturer at the University of Konigsberg, so he had to teach and garner a living solely through the contributions of his students, teaching philosophy and metaphysics. In 1770, Kant was appointed to the chair of logic and metaphysics at the university. At the same time, he wrote a Latin dissertation known as the Inaugural Dissertation, which contained his key ideas of sensibility and understanding as two separate fundamental powers of human instinct, as opposed to the previous rationalist idea of understanding or intellect as the only power. The implications of these ideas lead to the formation of two different worlds; a world of sensibility and one of understanding, governed by different urges to paradigm of perfection--in the most fundamental sense, God. One of these worlds, the intelligible, exists independent of

At the same time, he also urges the examining of natural phenomena using reason, but never being satisfied with only a surface level understanding, which he says is indicative of our own biases through what we have experienced. Again, we see that Kant criticizes, or at least questions, the idea of indifference towards biases because of our own experience, urging scientists to consider the effect of their experiences on what they believe to be true about the world. Certainly he calls into question the knowledge production that society has accepted as facts, while still maintaining fundamental laws of nature that have been “discovered.” However, the paragraph cannot be taken as a rejection of reason; on the contrary, reason is necessary because it is futile, even though it can never reach an end independent of our human experience; that is, our analysis of this reason stays in the world of sensibility. It is the futility of the task which makes it necessary, when we realize that it is futile, we see the roots of our humanity and begin to uncover our perceptions of the world around us. Another idea that Kant begins to develop in this paragraph is that of individual human knowledge; we begin to see his urging of each person to develop and critically examine the roots of the ideas. Only then can a collective understanding of