2 Answers

  1. It should be understood that “the philosophy of Immanuel Kant” is a lot of volumes of works on different subjects, written at different times. First of all, thanks to what Kant entered the history of thought, it is his ideas about the structure of human cognition, or “theoretical” philosophy. But there were also extremely influential works on ethics and aesthetics, not to mention the works of youth (although the latter are not so interesting).

    Leaving aside questions of style, terminology, and composition, and answering simply, his philosophy has the merit of pointing out the active role of the subject-whether it is the subject of knowledge in the process of learning, the subject who makes moral decisions or makes aesthetic judgments. In connection with cognition, of course, we are not talking about superposition in a physical experiment, but about ordinary cognition: vision or hearing. He pointed out that our perception of reality thereby actively forms this very reality, we see (hear, feel, etc.) only what our sense organs transmit to us, and we structure this data only by those cognitive mechanisms that are inherent in our consciousness itself. Kant called this the “Copernican revolution” in philosophy: just as the adoption of the heliocentric system put objects in their places in the universe, so too did his discovery in science (and philosophy): it is not man who walks around nature like a bundle, approaching it as something alien and unknown, but it revolves around man as its center-because it is thanks to man that it exists in the form in which we perceive it. From Kant's point of view, only in this way can we correctly understand its laws, because we ourselves, when structuring reality, put these laws into this reality (nature).

  2. Kant develops his epistemology in his Critique of Pure Reason. Before starting to solve the main problem, before describing our knowledge and defining the area to which it extends, Kant asks himself how knowledge itself is possible, what are its conditions and origins. All previous philosophy did not touch upon this question, and, since it was not sceptical, it was content with the simple and unfounded certainty that objects are knowable by us; this is why Kant calls it dogmatic, in contrast to his own, which he himself characterizes as the philosophy of criticism.

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