Quotes About Kant

Western philosophy has been worshipping reason and distrusting the passions for thousands of years.4 There's a direct line running from Plato through Immanuel Kant to Lawrence Kohlberg. I'll refer to this worshipful attitude throughout this book as the rationalist delusion.

Kant, like Plato, wanted to discover the timeless, changeless form of the Good. He believed that morality had to be the same for all rational creatures, regardless of their cultural or individual proclivities.

Kant provided an abstract rule from which (he claimed) all other valid moral rules could be derived. He called it the categorical (or unconditional) imperative: "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law."22

Kant had disproved the ontological argument. Hume had shown that for any supposed miracle, the evidence that it had not happened was always greater than the evidence that it had. Darwin had shown the error in the 'argument from design'.

Even the austere philosopher Immanuel Kant of Koenigsberg, it is said, whose habits were so regular that the citizens of that town set their watches by him, postponed the hour of his afternoon stroll when he received the news, thus convincing Koenigsberg that a world-shaking event had indeed happened.

Voltaire, Kant, Bentham—all assumed that reason could construct morality from scratch. But their moralities did not coincide. Practically speaking, their morality lifted elements, even if unconsciously, from the Judeo-Christian tradition and Greek telos they suggested they had exploded.

When Professor Orlando Patterson of Harvard University was interviewed on NewsHour with Jim Lehrer regarding President Bill Clinton's perjury, he said, "I think it's important to emphasize the fact that there are no absolutes in our moral precepts. Kant may have believed that, and some fascists do. . . . [P]erjury is not an absolute.

Hitler claimed ideological forebears in Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche;1 Stalin took his cues from Marx; the eugenicists took their ideas from Darwin and Comte.

Japan has more specialists of Immanuel Kant than Germany does [RIS 2016 Lecture on A Young Muslim's Guide to the Modern World]

Kant's expressly stated purpose was to save the morality of self-abnegation and self-sacrifice. He knew that it could not survive without a mystic base—and what it had to be saved from was reason.

Perpetual Peace," Kant laid out measures that would discourage leaders from dragging their countries into war.20 Together with international commerce, he recommended representative republics (what we would call democracies), mutual transparency, norms against conquest and internal interference, freedom of travel and immigration, and a federation of states that would adjudicate disputes between them.

The great thing was to form the idea that this one thing – mind or world – may well be capable of other forms of appearance that we cannot grasp and that do not imply the notions of space and time. This means an imposing liberation from our inveterate prejudice. There probably are other orders of appearance than the space-time-like. It was, so I believe, Schopenhauer who first read this from Kant.

An anecdote in which Kant captures himself in pithy fashion: [Kant's] Famulus, a theologian who was unable to connect philosophy to theology, once asked Kant for advice as to what he should read on the subject. Kant: Read travel literature. Famulus: In dogmatic philosophy, there are things I do not understand. Kant: Read travel literature. Walter Benjamin, 'Unknown Anecdotes about Kant', GS

Modern philosophy begins with Descartes, whose fundamental certainty is the existence of himself and his thoughts, from which the external world is to be inferred. This was only the first stage in a development, through Berkeley and Kant, to Fichte, for whom everything is only an emanation of the ego. This was insanity, and, from this extreme, philosophy has been attempting, ever since, to escape into the world of every-day common sense.

Kant holds that the mind orders the raw material of sensation, but never thinks it necessary to say why it orders it as it does and not otherwise.

Frege's work it followed that arithmetic, and pure mathematics generally, is nothing but a prolongation of deductive logic. This disproved Kant's theory that arithmetical propositions are 'synthetic' and involve a reference to time. The development of pure mathematics from logic was set forth in detail in Principia Mathematica, by Whitehead and myself.

We can be sure, he [Kant] says, that anything we shall ever experience must show the characteristics affirmed of it in our a priori knowledge, because these characteristics are due to our own nature, and therefore nothing can ever come into our experience without acquiring these characteristics.

With regard to the purpose, one should not immediately or should not merely think of the form in which it is in consciousness, as a determination on hand in the representation. Through the concept of inner purposiveness, Kant re-awakened the idea in general and that of life in particular. Aristotle's determination of life already contains the inner purposiveness and thus stands infinitely far beyond the concept of modern teleology which has only the finite, the external purposiveness in view.

Gregariousness is always the refuge of mediocrities, whether they swear by Soloviev or Kant or Marx. Only individuals seek the truth, and they shun those whose sole concern is not the truth.

Gregariousness is always the refuge of mediocrities, whether they swear by Soloviev or Kant or Marx. Only individuals seek the truth, and they shun those whose sole concern is not the truth.

Kant picked up on Rousseau's idea of perfectibility, and turned it into the core of his moral philosophy. At the beginning of the Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, he says that the only thing that is unconditionally good is a good will, and that the capacity to make moral choices is what makes us distinctively human. Human beings are ends in themselves and should never be treated as a means to other ends.

I know my Germany. This is a temporary illness, something like measles, which will pass as soon as the economic situation improves. Do you really believe the compatriots of Goethe and Schiller, Kant and Beethoven will fall for this rubbish?

In order to discredit faith and seduce believers, Kant does not hesitate to appeal to pride or vanity: whoever does not rely on reason alone is a "minor" who refuses to "grow up"; if men allow themselves to be led by "authorities" instead of "thinking for themselves," it is solely through laziness and cowardice, neither more nor less. A thinker who needs to make use of such means — which on the whole are demagogic — must indeed be short of serious arguments.

But when Herndon took off on some "deep volume," like the writings of Immanuel Kant, Lincoln would wave it away as indigestible.