Immanuel Kant’s Impact on Enlightenment Values For thousands of years, religion was used to help answer universal phenomenon’s. It wasn’t until Greek philosopher’s, such as Socrates and Aristotle, around 300 – 400 BC, started challenging religious ideals and looking at reason in the senses. These Greek philosophers, set the foundation and influenced many philosophers to come. Centuries later, a philosopher name Immanuel Kant, dedicated his life to find the parallels between the natural world and rational thinking. Yet, connections between Kant and other philosophers can be made with their collaborative ideas on acceptable political discussion and disobedience. Immanuel Kant derived a new way of thinking during the Enlightenment period, by contrasting and comparing the differences between other philosophers’ ideas, while examining his own presence and purpose for living in the natural world. The thinkers during the Enlightenment period sought out …show more content…
In his writings, Kant discusses the limits of one’s limits on acquiring knowledge and self-reason. He distinguished between the themes of appearance and reality, which during the Enlightenment period, were very common, yet controversial. One specific idea Kant had was that time and space are just merely appearances- they are independent of any object that any person can relate to. This concept of intangible theories, is referred to as “transcendental idealism.” In the Fourth Paralogism, Kant refutes idealism in his statement: “I understand by the transcendental idealism of all appearances [Erscheinungen] the doctrine that they are all together to be regarded as mere representations and not as things in themselves… and accordingly that space and time are only sensible forms of our intuition…” (qtd from the Guyer & Wood translation, Kant