Kant’s Critical Philosophy: Reason and Science

Posted on Feb 7, 2025 in Philosophy and ethics

Critique of Reason: Understanding its Limits

Abstract: The direction of a critique of reason itself is the task to prosecute the fundamental reason for the discrepancy and resolve the antagonism between their performances:

  1. Rationalist dogmatism, with its pretension that reason alone can interpret the structure and the sense of all that is real.
  2. Empiricist positivism, whose ultimate expression is skepticism, an attempt to reduce thought given by the senses, thus defeating reason.
  3. Irrationalism, understood as a hyper-valuation of sentiment, or mystical faith, subjective enthusiasm, and therefore, the negation of reason itself.

Critical reason is the need for clarification that is imposed on man, on what is, and their ultimate aims and interests.

Kant’s Philosophy of Science

Kant’s philosophy of science is the relationship of all knowledge to the essential purposes of human reason:

  1. Set limits to the principles that allow a scientific understanding of nature.
  2. Establishes and justifies the action of the principles and conditions of freedom.
  3. Projects the last destiny of man, the conditions, and possibilities of implementation.

Nature and Theoretical Reason

Kant distinguishes between:

  1. A posteriori knowledge: What comes through experience and sensation. It is empirical knowledge.
  2. A priori knowledge: What does not derive from existence, but somehow precedes and arises independently of existence.

Noumenon and Phenomenon

The categories are not applicable outside of existence, beyond what is given in space and time. But the idea that something appears implies, correlatively, the idea of something that does not appear. From this, the object of the phenomenon is called a referent object, considered outside its relation with sensitivity, it is called a noumenon. Kant distinguishes two directions of the noumenon concept:

  1. Negatively, noumenon means a thing insofar as it cannot be recognized by means of sensible intuition.
  2. Positively, it means an object that can be known by means of non-sensible intuition.

The distinction between phenomenon and noumenon is key to understanding Kant’s doctrine, called transcendental idealism, because space, time, and categories are conditions of possibility of the phenomena of experience, not properties of things in themselves.

Freedom and Practical Reason: Moral Formalism

Kant distinguishes theoretical reason, which is concerned with how things are, and practical reason, which is concerned with how human behavior should be.

Kantian Ethics

Kantian ethics is a real novelty in the history of philosophy. Before Kant, all ethics had been material; Kant’s is formal. In general, we can say that material ethics are those that fix a supreme good for human beings as a criterion of goodness or evil of behavior. In all material ethics, there are these two elements:

  1. There are real, good things for man.
  2. Once the supreme good is established, the ethics propose rules or requirements aimed at achieving it.

Empirical materials are ethical, a posteriori; their contents are extracted from experience.