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Immanuel Kant's View Of The Mind

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Immanuel Kant (1724 - 1804) was a Prussian philosopher who spent his entire adult life both in academia and in the town of Königsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia) (Rohlf, 2016). He was raised in Pietism – an evangelical branch of Lutheranism emphasising personal faith and enlightenment, and pursuing social and educational agendas (Encyclopaedia Britannica, n.d.a). However, he rebelled against its teachings, perhaps influencing his subsequent predilection for reason rather than faith. His parents were both artisans, and he was also immersed in artisan values such as honesty and hard work. As an adult, he displayed strict self-discipline and a rigid daily schedule (Great Thinkers, n.d.). During Kant’s life, Prussia was a powerful state under the …show more content…

Rather, it is symptomatic of the mind’s representations – the way the mind works (McCormick, n.d.). While this might seem obvious today, it was a radical concept then. The prevailing view was than the mind was “greenfield” – built from the assimilation of experiences of objects with inviolate properties, rather than our own interpretations of them. This had implications for modern science as well as for metaphysics – are empirical observations independent or interpreted. Our methodologies for inquiry today place substantial emphasis on this …show more content…

He argues that our motivations should be to act so as to move from one to the other – to convert the world as we experience it into the world we think it should be. This provides Kant with an entry point into the domain of ethics – “good” is associated with intent (I intend to make the world a better place) rather than consequence (the ends justify the means). The ying and yang of Kant Kant’s transcendental idealism (objects exist only as represented by our minds, not as independent and inviolate) and his empirical realism (theorised, but unobserved objects (e.g. dark matter) may be real and should not be discounted just because we have not experienced them) seem to me a form of ying and yang. Both are part of the reality, and they are interconnected: “even if we cannot cognize these same objects as things in themselves, we are at least able to think of them as things in themselves” (Stang, 2016, section 4.1).

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