Immanuel Kant is the founder of German classical idealism. This philosopher was a professor at Koenigsberg University.
Kant's philosophy can be conditionally divided into two periods:
- subcritical period;
- critical period.
During the subcritical period, Kant's philosophy was aimed at the problems of nature, as well as natural science. During the period, critical Kant began to study the problems of the mind, mechanisms of behavior, mechanisms of cognition, its boundaries. He was also interested in questions of logic, ethics, social philosophy.
Kant's philosophy of the critical period is associated with three large works. We are talking about the “Critique of Pure Reason”, “The Critique of Practical Mind”, as well as the “Critique of the Power of Judgment”.
As mentioned above, in the subcritical period, Kant was interested in the problems of nature, natural science. Important for him were the problems of life. In fact, Kant's entire innovation lies in the fact that he was the first to consider all these problems with a great emphasis on the development problem.
Kant's philosophy held back the revolutionary conclusions of that time. He stated that our entire universe arose from a huge initial cloud, which consisted of rarefied particles. He argued that nature has its own history in time, and that it has its own beginning, as well as its end. With all this, nature is constantly evolving and changing. All living things are changing, and therefore the man himself. Man according to Kant is a natural result of evolution.
Kant's philosophy has a large imprint of the worldviews of that time, this is expressed in the fact that he claims that mechanical laws have their own root cause and are not embedded in matter. It is also worth saying here that he considered God to be the root cause.
Contemporaries considered Kant's discoveries by significance equivalent to the discoveries that Copernicus made at one time.
Kant's philosophy of the critical period is directly related to the problems of cognition.
In Critique of Pure Reason, the philosopher defends his ideas of agnosticism - he proves that it is impossible to know reality. He puts forward the idea that the world cannot be known in the first place, not because it is constantly changing, but precisely because the human mind is weak and simply not capable of it. The cognitive abilities of the human mind are weak. Kant's transcendental philosophy assures that, going beyond its limits, the human mind immediately encounters numerous contradictions. Kant indicated four such contradictions . He called them antinomies. The very first antinomy is directly related to the limited space, the second is called simple and complex, the third is freedom and causality, the fourth is the presence of God.
Reason makes it possible to prove simultaneously both antitomy opposites. For this reason, thinking is at an impasse. Kant argued that the existence of antimonies confirms the limited cognitive abilities of man.
In the same work, Kant classifies knowledge itself as a result of absolutely any cognitive activity, and also highlights the concepts that characterize knowledge. This is about:
- posterior knowledge;
- prior knowledge:
- "Things in themselves."
In the first case, we are talking about acquired knowledge, in the second - about the original. “The thing in itself” is one of the key concepts in Kant's entire philosophy. This refers to the inner essence that the human mind can never comprehend.
Of particular note is Kant's moral philosophy. The philosopher asks the following questions:
- what should be true morality;
- what should be the moral behavior of man.
After analyzing, he draws the following conclusions:
- pure morality is a virtuous public consciousness that is perceived by an individual as his own;
- pure morality and real life are in constant contradiction;
- morality should not depend on external circumstances.