Research Paper On Immanuel Kant

597 Words3 Pages

Immanuel Kant born in April 22, 1724, was a German philosopher who is recognized as being a central figure in philosophy. Kant makes several distinctions among the different types of sciences. The first division Kant makes is material sciences and formal science. The second division that Kant makes is empirical concepts and purely rational concepts. Ethics refers to purely rational concepts of one’s free will, which is good by itself and not determined by any consequences, limitations, or laws. Kant calls his ethical treatise a work on “the metaphysics of morals” because it deals with the concepts of a free will apart from anything we might actually experience. Kant calls concepts that refer to something we cannot experience, metaphysics, because they concern things, which are conceived absolutely apart from our experiences. Kant mentions material sciences, which are concepts that have content in the sense that they consider a specific type of thing. Physics, ethics, and mathematics all fall under the material sciences category. Physics considers the body mass moving in three dimensions. Ethics refers to the criteria by which we reasonably determine whether and action is bad or good. Mathematics is the properties and relations of abstract quantities and different sizes. He also mentions formal sciences, which means …show more content…

Empirical concepts are those that match our intuition. For example, the sky is blue, we can go look and see if the sky is actually blue. For Kant, statement that includes an empirical concept either matches or does not match one’s experiences. All concepts that draw back to one’s experiences are known as empirical concepts. Purely rational concepts are purely formal because they refer to relations between any types of concept without the regard of the content. Purely rational concepts apply universally although they have no content; they only express a