display all the ideas for this combination of texts
18 ideas
| 5540 | Cleverness is shown in knowing what can reasonably be asked [Kant] |
| Full Idea: It is already a great and necessary proof of cleverness or insight to know what one should reasonably ask. | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason [1781], B082/A58) | |
| A reaction: I admire the asking of unreasonable questions. They stretch the imagination, and the fixing of the limits of human thought requires some attempt to go beyond the limit. Kant sounds wise but conservative. |
| 5631 | Reason is only interested in knowledge, actions and hopes [Kant] |
| Full Idea: All interest of my reason (the speculative as well as the practical) is united in the following three questions: 1) What can I know?, 2) What should I do?, and 3) What may I hope? | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason [1781], B833/A805) | |
| A reaction: Maybe reason is also interested in itself. And presumably it doesn't lose interest in what is clearly unknowable, or unachievable, or beyond all hope? |
| 5635 | In ordinary life the highest philosophy is no better than common understanding [Kant] |
| Full Idea: In regard to the essential ends of human nature even the highest philosophy cannot advance further than the guidance that nature has also conferred on the most common understanding. | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason [1781], B859/A831) | |
| A reaction: This is a very anti-elitist remark which seems to me to reflect Kant's Christian background. It seems obvious to me that in politics our best leaders are not confined to 'common understanding'. Nor in morality. Moral saints are wiser. |
| 21954 | Metaphysics is a systematic account of everything that can be known a priori [Kant] |
| Full Idea: Metaphysics can be ...the investigation of everything that can ever be cognized a priori, as well as the presentation of that which constitutues a system of pure philosophical cognitions of this kind. | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason [1781], B869/A841) | |
| A reaction: [He excludes mathematics from this] Moore says this is Kant's most interesting definition of metaphysics (among several versions). |
| 7918 | Kant turned metaphysics into epistemology, ignoring Aristotle's 'being qua being' [Kant, by Macdonald,C] |
| Full Idea: Kant turned the question 'How is metaphysics possible?' into 'How is metaphysical knowledge possible?' He thus turned metaphysics into epistemology, obliterating Aristotle's distinction between being qua being and being qua known. | |
| From: report of Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason [1781]) by Cynthia Macdonald - Varieties of Things Ch.1 | |
| A reaction: This makes Kant the number one villain in my philosophical pantheon, although the confusion of ontology and epistemology is found in Berkeley and others. Human speculations are not pointless, though they are difficult to verify. |
| 21438 | Metaphysics might do better to match objects to our cognition (and not start with the objects) [Kant] |
| Full Idea: Up to now it has been assumed that all our cognition must conform to the objects; ...let us try whether we do not get farther with problems of metaphysics by assuming that the objects must conform to cognition. | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason [1781], B Pref xvi) | |
| A reaction: Kant compares this to rethinking our viewpoint on the solar system, and Gardner calls this idea Kant's 'Copernican Revolution'. We can only applaud the idea that we should be more self-conscious when we assess reality. Just don't give up on reality! |
| 16611 | You just can't stop metaphysical speculation, in any mature mind [Kant] |
| Full Idea: In all men, as soon as their reason has become ripe for speculation, there has always existed and will always continue to exist some kind of metaphysics. | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason [1781], B021) | |
| A reaction: I love the word 'speculation' in this, because it is the part of metaphysics which always resists logical positivist scepticism about metaphysics. So what if you can't 'verify' it? |
| 5586 | The voyage of reason may go only as far as the coastline of experience reaches [Kant] |
| Full Idea: The voyage of our reason may proceed only as far as the continuous coastline of experience reaches. | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason [1781], B406-/A395) | |
| A reaction: This is a strikingly empiricist remark, coming from Kant. It is certainly a firm rejection of what we might call 'speculative metaphysics', but allows what Peter Strawson calls 'descriptive metaphysics'. Cf. Idea 3722. |
| 21462 | It is still possible to largely accept Kant as a whole (where others must be dismantled) [Kant, by Gardner] |
| Full Idea: Unusually, Kant's system has continued to seem possible, to some degree, to endorse as a whole, as opposed to an edifice that has most to offer by being dismantled. | |
| From: report of Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason [1781]) by Sebastian Gardner - Kant and the Critique of Pure Reason 10 Intro | |
| A reaction: I think Aristotle passes this test, but Plato has to be dismantled. No one ever swallows Leibniz whole. I suppose Hume can be taken complete, but only because of his minimal commitments. |
| 5600 | Human reason considers all knowledge as belonging to a possible system [Kant] |
| Full Idea: Human reason is by nature architectonic, i.e. it considers all cognitions as belonging to a possible system, and hence it permits only such principles as do not render an intended cognition incapable of standing together with others in some system. | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason [1781], B502/A474) | |
| A reaction: Speak for yourself! However, there is no denying that the making connections seems basic to thought, and there is clearly an enticing magic in making lots of extended connections. Beautiful finished structures may, though, be coherent but false. |
| 21457 | Reason has two separate objects, morality and freedom, and nature, which ultimately unite [Kant] |
| Full Idea: The legislation of human reason (philosophy) has two objects, nature and freedom, and thus contains the natural law as well as the moral law, initially in two separate systems, but ultimately in a single philosophical system. | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason [1781], B868/A840) | |
| A reaction: Pure reason is for nature, and practical reason (which has priority) is for freedom and morality. There is a streak of religiosity in Kant which makes him give morality and normativity priority over truth and science. |
| 9752 | Kant showed that theoretical reason cannot give answers to speculative metaphysics [Kant, by Korsgaard] |
| Full Idea: In the 'Critique of Pure Reason' Kant shows that theoretical reason is unable to answer the questions of speculative metaphysics. | |
| From: report of Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason [1781]) by Christine M. Korsgaard - Intro to 'Creating the Kingdom of Ends' 'Intro' | |
| A reaction: I don't think I really agree with Kant. We can draw very extended inferences from experience, but the process rapidly becomes exceedingly difficult. The concepts we have built up are rather piecemeal, and not really designed for the job. |
| 6584 | A priori metaphysics is fond of basic unchanging entities like God, the soul, Forms, atoms… [Kant, by Fogelin] |
| Full Idea: Kant stresses that reason, when it turns dialectical, posits immutable basic entities; these are the standard inhabitants of traditional a priori metaphysics - God, souls, Platonic ideas, Democritean indestructible atoms, and the like. | |
| From: report of Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason [1781]) by Robert Fogelin - Walking the Tightrope of Reason Ch.3 | |
| A reaction: This sounds like a good warning, but it just invites the meta-question in a priori metaphysics 'Are we searching for something unchanging, or is this impossible?' Aristotle certainly addressed this question. The search strikes me as sensible. |
| 9349 | A dove cutting through the air, might think it could fly better in airless space (which Plato attempted) [Kant] |
| Full Idea: The light dove, in free flight cutting through the air the resistance of which it feels, could get the idea that it could do even better in airless space. ..Plato made no headway in the empty space of understanding; he had no resistance, no support. | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason [1781], B008/A5) | |
| A reaction: Who says Kant can't write? This is the classic image of the excesses of metaphysics which Kant wished to curtail. His attacks culminates in the contempt of logical positivism for such things, but no one would now disagree with Kant on this. |
| 12767 | Kant exposed the illusions of reason in the Transcendental Dialectic [Kant, by Fraassen] |
| Full Idea: The truly critical part of his First Critique was the Transcendental Dialectic; there Kant exposed the Illusions of Reason. | |
| From: report of Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason [1781]) by Bas C. van Fraassen - The Empirical Stance 1.1 |
| 18259 | Analysis is becoming self-conscious about our concepts [Kant] |
| Full Idea: To analyze a concept is to become self-conscious of the manifold that I always think in it. | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason [1781], B011/A7) |
| 9350 | Our reason mostly analyses concepts we already have of objects [Kant] |
| Full Idea: A great part, perhaps the greatest part, of the business of our reason consists in analyses of the concepts that we already have of objects. | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason [1781], B009/A5) | |
| A reaction: I am quite happy to think of this as the central and crucial aspect of philosophy, though I am much more sceptical about purely linguistic analysis, as developed by Frege and Russell. It describes much of what Aristotle did. |
| 5530 | Analysis of our concepts is merely a preparation for proper a priori metaphysics [Kant] |
| Full Idea: The mere analysis of the concepts that inhabit our reason a priori, is not the end at all, but only a preparation for metaphysics proper, namely extending its a priori cognition sythetically. | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason [1781], B023) | |
| A reaction: This seems to be evidence that Kant is not an 'analytical' philosopher, because he is willing to speculate, but that is a narrow twentieth century view of analysis. I take the aim to be an analysis of reality, not of human thought. |