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Empiricism vs rationalism
Empiricism vs rationalism
Immanuel kant esssay
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Immanuel Kant
Shanta billingslea
Immanuel Kant wanted to bring together empiricist and rationalist. Empiricism is the theory the theory that all knowledge is derived from sense-experience. Rationalism is the theory that reason rather than experience is the foundation of certainty in knowledge. Empiricists tried to understand Kant’s epistemological theory through reason. In the field of epistemology no body surpasses philosopher Immanuel Kant, even in modern philosophy nobody has come close to further explaining his views. His viewpoint affects most every other kind of philosophy. The empiricists tried to begin understanding epistemology through knowing and understanding the external world, Kant believed that it was the human that creates or imposes itself on the external world when pertaining to certain things and knowledge. Where Descartes understood the relationship between the mind and the world and how we process information. Kant thought this interaction was impossible, he went on to expose the logical error Descartes was never able to fully appreciate, in particular that no matter where or what is happening to a person at any given time that same person cannot say that what is happening is really existing . The link between the person and the unknown was never really made substantial and therefore everything would have to be questioned.
The most important thing about to epistemology is the distinction between analytic judgments and synthetic judgments. Analytical judgments are based on the law of non-contradiction. This knowledge is a priori which knowledge that is independent upon experience is,. On the other hand, synthetic judgments provide us with new knowledge of...
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...ty that there is an actual causal relationship between the noumena and the phenomena? Maybe there is no connection but we might never get to the answer to this seeing as Kant is long gone.
What can we know for sure? for Kant, the only knowledge available to the subject is the phenomenon. Which can be divided into empiricism and rationalism? If the phenomena Is created by the mind I’m not sure we can be so reliant on it.
In conclusion Kant made some really bold observations if we all have a mind and use this mind to create thought ideas and real world application then is anything outside of my head real? Or have created it through my mind’s eye he further explains illusions or thing we have never seen happen as phenomena and just further makes his argument more valid we create dreams why can’t we create the life around us. One thing we know is we can never be sure
A first influence was John Locke’s idea of Empiricism, which was the idea that all knowledge was gained by experiences, exclusively through the senses. A second vital influence was Transcendentalism, which was a reaction to Empiricism. While John Locke believed that reality or truth was constituted by the material world and by the senses, Transcendentalists believed that reality and truth exist within the spiritual or ideal world (Kerry Vermillion & Quinn McCumber).
Accepting that we cannot establish the "objectivity" of our experiences' content, Kant nevertheless attempts to resist a slide into relativism by insisting that they are mediated by rationally delineated categories which supposedly insure the transcendental or universal nature of their form, thereby providing an absolute standard against which we might check the veridicality of our descriptions of, and communications concerning, them. However as a priori preconditions of the possibility of experience such categories are obviously inexperienceable in themselves, and consequently must also fall to the phenomenological reduction. (3) Nevertheless, a moments reflection will confirm that our experiences do indeed exhibit structure or form, and that we are able, even from within, or wholly upon the basis of, the (phenomenologically reduced) realm of, our experiences per se, to distinguish between the flux of constantly changing and interrupted subjective appearances, and the relatively unchanging and continuously existing objects constituted therein. Husserl confirms:
The transcending, or going beyond, empiricism, and ascertaining the fundamental principles of human knowledge. Kant (1724-1804) was born and educated in East Prussia. He founded critical philosophy and Transcendental Logic. “Kant made significant revisions to just about every branch of philosophy.” (www.philosophy.ucdavis.edu). In the Critique of Pure Reason (1781) Kant showed the great problems of metaphysics: the existence of God, freedom, and immortality and how they are insoluble by scientific thought. Kant’s writings had a major influence on Emerson and Thoreau during the time of Transcendentalism and “still have an influence on modern philosophy to the present day.” (www.ilt.columbia.edu).
Rationalism and empiricism have always been on opposite sides of the philosophic spectrum, Rene Descartes and David Hume are the best representative of each school of thought. Descartes’ rationalism posits that deduction, reason and thus innate ideas are the only way to get to true knowledge. Empiricism on the other hand, posits that by induction, and sense perception, we may find that there are in fact no innate ideas, but that truths must be carefully observed to be true.
Kant used understanding, the second faculty of the mind to explain causality. “As the understanding stands in need of categories for experience, reason contains in itself the source of ideas.”(76) The function of understanding is thinking, and thinking must use concepts to be an objective thought. The presence of this objective thought verifies its actuality. Therefore, causality, for Kant, was the way in which mind puts together experiences to understand them.
Kant's Critique of Pure Reason [2] is notoriously difficult to read and often unclear. Possibly, this is because Kant was in a hurry to complete the first edition. Schopenhauer comments on Kant's "want of adequate reflection with which he passes over such questions as: What is perception? What is concept? What is reason? What is understanding? What is object?" [1; p.434]. Kant failed to lay down a proper foundation for these fundamental notions, and this has led to ambiguities in his work.
...nd this is the result of the unity of synthesis of imagination and apperception. The unity of apperception which is found in all the knowledge is defined by Kant as affinity because it is the objective ground of knowledge. Furthermore, all things with affinity are associable and they would not be if it was not for imagination because imagination makes synthesis possible. It is only when I assign all perceptions to my apperception that I can be conscious of the knowledge of those perceptions. This understanding of the objects, also known as Faculty of Rules, relies on the sense of self and is thus, the source of the laws of nature.
The debate between rationalist and empiricist philosophers looks at the nature of knowledge, and specifically, how we gain this knowledge. Rationalists and empiricists take opposite, and sometimes mutually exclusive, views on how knowledge is obtained.
While Kant’s theory may seem “overly optimistic” (Johnson, 2008) now, it was ruled as acceptable and rational behavior then. Kant believed that any moral or ethical decision could be achieved with consistent behavior. While judgment was based on reason, morals were based on rational choices made by human beings (Freeman, 2000). A human’s brain is the most advanced in the animal kingdom. Not only do human beings work on instinct, but they have the ability to sort out situations in order to make a decision. This includes weighing the pros and cons of decisions that could be made and how they affect others either positively or negatively. This is called rational thought. Kant believed that any human being able to rationalize a decision before it was made had the ability to be a morally just person (Freeman, 2000). There were certain things that made the decision moral, and he called it the “Categorical Imperative” (Johnson, 2008). If someone was immoral they violated this CI and were considered irrational. The CI is said to be an automatic response which was part of Kant’s argument that all people were deserving of respect. This automatic response to rational thinking is where he is considered, now, to be “overly optimistic” (Johnson, 2008).
Unlike rationalists, empiricists believe that sense perception is the main source of knowledge. John Locke explained this by dividing ideas into 2 parts: 1) simple, and 2) complex. Simple ideas are based only on perception, like color, size, shape, etc. Complex ideas are formed when simple ideas are combined.
Finally, Kant saw the world as he wanted to see it, not the reality of it. In reality human beings are social animals that can be deceived, and can become irrational, this distinction is what makes us human, and it is that which makes us make mistakes. Kant states good arguments in his essay however his belief that people are enslaved and shackled by the “guardians” when he writes “shackles of a permanent immaturity” (Kant, 1) is sometimes absurd when the same guardians are the people that encourage our minds of thinking.
Probably few philosophers influenced so decisively the development of epistemology as Kant. Without him it is not possible to describe the last two hundred years of the history of philosophy as well as contemporary philosophy in general. On the other "end of the line" one of the most influential contemporary American philosophers Richard Rorty proposes that we should abandon epistemology and Kantian picture of representation. In this paper I pose the question, whether Rorty is thorougly succesful in his abandomnent. I try to investigate the differences and similarities of Kantian and Rortyan thinking with the help of the epistemological notion of representationalism and of the antiepistemological notion of antirepresentationalism. If it is possible to find crucial overlapping areas of both thinking, then there arises a dilemma: either Kant himself is a "Rortyan", postepistemological thinker, and this would be a surprizing new idea about Kantian philosophy or Rorty succeeds not completely to overcome the structures of Kantian-epistemological thinking.
To understand Kant’s account on causality, it is important to first understand that this account came into being as a response to Hume’s skepticism, and therefore important to also understand Hume’s account. While Hume thinks that causation comes from repeated experiences of events happening together or following one another, Kant believes that causation is just a function of our minds’ organization of experiences rather than from the actual experiences themselves.
I tend to agree with Kant, I don’t know that we can answer the questions we have on metaphysics. It is a matter of ones own opinion, thoughts, and interpretation.
Epistemology is the branch of philosophy concerned with the theory of knowledge. Epistemology studies the nature of knowledge, justification, and the rationality of belief. Much of the debate in epistemology centers on four areas: the philosophical analysis of the nature of knowledge and how it relates to such concepts as truth, belief, and justification, various problems of skepticism, the sources and scope of knowledge and justified belief, and the criteria for knowledge and justification. Epistemology addresses such questions as "What makes justified beliefs justified?", "What does it mean to say that we know something?" and fundamentally "How do we know that we know?"