Kant and the Enlightenment: Philosophy, Science, and Reason
Kant and the Enlightenment
In the eighteenth century, some European monarchs embraced enlightened despotism. Prussia, Kant’s homeland, experienced great prosperity and annexed smaller states, contributing to the unification of Germany. Frederick II the Great, the most important king of Prussia, displayed intellectual gifts, engaged in governance, and maintained contact with French Enlightenment philosophers. Kant supported him.
Kant lived during the great revolutions of the eighteenth century. Britain recognized the independence of its North American colonies in 1783 after the American Revolution. The French Revolution involved the uprising of the common people against the absolute monarchy of Louis XVI. The mid-eighteenth century also saw the Industrial Revolution. These political and economic changes led to the Enlightenment, which Kant defended.
Kant’s Central Thesis
Kant’s central thesis is that reason must be independent. Man is the center and goal of science and politics. Science advances due to the independence of reason.
In the sixteenth century, Isaac Newton made significant scientific breakthroughs. The Newtonian method is based on the observation of nature and the creation of mathematical models. Kant sought to explain Newtonian knowledge as a synthesis of experience and reason.
The Purpose of Kantian Philosophy
Rationalists had defended the power of human reason and the possibility of metaphysics as a science. However, they incurred dogmatism because they argued that ideas about the self, world, and God are universal and necessary and refer to things that exist independently of all experience. Empiricists, on the other hand, rightly insisted that human knowledge must conform to experience. But their error, reflected in Hume’s skepticism, was that they reduced all knowledge to sense knowledge.
Kant developed a critical philosophy, submitting the ability to know to reason, both theoretical and practical. Through the critique of reason, Kant aimed to:
- Discover the foundation and scope of our theoretical knowledge: He found that science can only be done on the phenomena of experience.
- Search the foundations of practical reason: He concluded that, alongside a world of laws of nature under efficient causality, there exists another world of freedom.
Theoretical Knowledge and Science: Types of Judgments
Kant began his critique of knowledge and theoretical science by investigating the possible types of judgments. There are two classes:
- Analytic judgments: These are judgments in which the predicate is included in the concept of the subject. They are a priori, requiring no experience to know their truth, and are universal and necessary. However, they do not increase our knowledge.
- Synthetic judgments: These are judgments in which the predicate is not included in the subject. They increase knowledge and are ex post, requiring experience to know their truth. They are not universal or necessary.
For Kant, scientific judgments can only be synthetic a priori.