Philosophy Course: Introduction to Kant

Philosophy. Study the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality and existence.

“Two things awe me most, the starry sky above and the moral law within.”

– Immanuel Kant

Immanuel Kant is a towering figure in philosophical history, who has had a profound influence on developments in metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, political theory and aesthetics. Kant synthesised early modern rationalism and empiricism. During this ten-week course, we will review his three major works and explore their main arguments: Critique of Pure Reason (1781) (science and the categories of the human mind); Critique of Practical Reason (1788) (the basis of morality and law); and Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790) (the human relation to nature and the basis of aesthetics).

Outcomes

By the end of this course, you should be able to:

• comprehend the overall idea of the development of Kant’s life, works, and the history of the times
• comprehend Kant’s ideas on the human mind; the basis of empirical knowledge; the foundations of morality; and the fundamental issues concerning nature and art
• discuss Kant’s impact on the philosophical world that came after his time
• relate Kant’s ideas to contemporary debates in ethics, politics, and art theory
• apply Kant’s theory to the assessment of some current debates on the nature of consciousness and the human mind.

Content

Life and works

Kant enjoyed great success as a lecturer; his lecturing style, which differed markedly from that of his books, was humorous and vivid, enlivened by many examples from his reading in English and French literature, and in travel and geography.

Kant’s Copernican Revolution in philosophy

Just as the founder of modern astronomy, Nicolaus Copernicus, had explained the apparent movements of the stars by ascribing them partly to the movement of the observers, Kant argues that objects conform to the human mind: in knowing, “it is not the mind that conforms to things but instead things that conform to the mind.”

Transcendental Idealism

Kant’s theory is that human beings experience only appearances, not things in themselves; and that space and time are the a priori forms of human intuition which allow us to organise our sensory perceptions.

The Transcendental Deduction

The goal of the transcendental deduction is to show that we have a priori concepts or categories that are objectively valid, or that apply necessarily to all objects in the world that we experience. One way to think of the categories is that they are our ‘mental equipment’ for making judgements.

Morality and the categorical imperative

“Act that your principles of action might be safely made a law for the whole world.” (Immanuel Kant, 1724)

The purposiveness of nature

In the Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant discusses four main ways in which reflecting judgment leads us to regard nature as purposive: first, it leads us to regard nature as governed by a system of empirical laws; second, it enables us to make aesthetic judgments; third, it leads us to think of organisms as objectively purposive; and fourth, it ultimately leads us to think about the final end of nature as a whole.

Aesthetics

Kant’s concern is to try and work out how we make statements such as: ‘This is a beautiful object’ or ‘This is a sublime experience’. He asks whether these are matters of personal subjective taste, or can we make universal as claims about judgements of beauty.

Intended audience

Anyone with a general interest in philosophy

Prerequisites

None

Delivery style

Lecture/seminar

Materials

Course notes are distributed electronically

Reference list

Primary literature

P. Guyer and A. Wood (eds.), 1992, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (English edition of Kant’s work used). The individual volumes are:

• Gregor, M. (ed.), 1996, Practical Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Guyer, P., and Wood, A. (eds.), 1998, Critique of Pure Reason, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Guyer, P. (ed.), 2000, Critique of the Power of Judgment, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Rauscher, F. (ed.), 2016, Lectures and Drafts on Political Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Walford, D., and Meerbote, R. (eds.), 1992, Theoretical Philosophy, 1755–1770, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Watkins, E. (ed.), 2012, Natural Science, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Zöller, G., and Louden, R. (eds.), 2007, Anthropology, History, and Education, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Zweig, A. (ed.), 1999, Correspondence, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Secondary Literature

 Allais, L., 2015, Manifest Reality: Kant’s Idealism and his Realism, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Allison, H, 2004, Kant’s Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, Revised and Enlarged Edition.

–––, 2015, Kant’s Transcendental Deduction: An Analytical-Historical Commentary, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

–––, 2020, Kant’s Conception of Freedom: A Developmental and Critical Analysis, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Altman, M. (ed.), 2017, The Palgrave Kant Handbook, London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Friedman, M., 2013, Kant’s Construction of Nature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Gardner, S., 1999, Kant and the Critique of Pure Reason, London and New York: Routledge.

Ginsborg, H., 1990, The Role of Taste in Kant’s Theory of Cognition, New York: Garland.

–––, 1997, “Kant on Aesthetic and Biological Purposiveness,” in B. Herman, C.

Grier, M. 2001, Kant’s Doctrine of Transcendental Illusion, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Guyer, P., 1987, Kant and the Claims of Knowledge, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

––– (ed.), 1992, The Cambridge Companion to Kant, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

––– (ed.), 2006, The Cambridge Companion to Kant and Modern Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

––– (ed.), 2010, The Cambridge Companion to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kitcher, P. (ed) 2011, Kant’s Thinker, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Rawls, J., 2000, Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy, B. Herman (ed.), Cambridge and New York: Harvard University Press.

Zuckert, R., 2007, Kant on Beauty and Biology: An Interpretation of the Critique of Judgment, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.