Immanuel Kant's View Of Humanism During The Renaissance

Between the years 1450 and 1600 the Renaissance brought what we now call “humanism”. This was a philosophy that celebrated the self. Individualism, personal religious beliefs, and Platonic philosophy gained huge interest as Aristotelean thought was questioned for being a dogmatic philosophy. We see remnants of this in modern psychology with an actual subfield being called Humanistic psychology. Around 1630 Descartes theorized the idea of “dualism”, where the mind and body are separate, but work together simultaneously. He held a mechanistic view of humans, and he was the first to theorize the “reflex”. His ideas can be seen to be proved in our current research which shows the interconnectivity of our brain to our entire biological physiology. In 1651 Thomas Hobbes led the way of the British empiricism movement. Like Descartes, this school of thought took a turn towards complete mechanistic empiricism. They viewed humans as machines inside a big universal machine. Hobbes believed that all phenomena are explained by, and caused by, a separate physical process, essentially eliminating the idea of free will. His philosophy not only affected politics greatly, but was the beginning of one of the pillars of modern psychology and science in general, materialism.

He brought rationalism back into the mix with his complex analyses of thought processes. His idea was that nothing could be known for a fact because everything is measured and analyzed using our subjective experience. He acknowledged the necessity of utilizing the senses, but believed in “a priori”, or innate, thought categories through which we are able to build a foundation. The interaction of these innate concepts with our senses is what defines our subjective reality. Modern psychologists acknowledge the idea of subjectivity, and likewise all other scientific fields must acknowledge it as