Quotes About Kant

It must be freely admitted that there is a sort of circle here from which it seems impossible to escape. In the order of efficient causes we assume ourselves free, in order that in the order of ends we may conceive ourselves as subject to these laws because we have attributed to ourselves freedom of will; for freedom and self-legislation of will are both autonomy...

My object is to persuade all those who think metaphysics worth studying that it is absolutely necessary to pause a moment and, disregarding all that has been done, to propose first the preliminary question, "Whether such a thing as metaphysics be at all possible?

People who read mainly the Grounding and the Critique often criticize Kant for having his head in the clouds and for not being convincingly capable of dealing with concrete cases. A reading of the Metaphysics of Morals will show anyone how unfounded such criticisms are.

I]f I know that it is only by this process that the intended operation can be performed, then to say that if I fully will the operation, I also will the action required for it, is an analytical proposition...

We have no reason for assuming the form of such a thing to be still partly dependent on blind mechanism, for with such confusion of heterogeneous principles every reliable rule for estimating things would disappear.

Philosophy may be said to contain the principles of the rational cognition that concepts

Metaphysics is a dark ocean without shores or a lighthouse

Gustavo Solivellas dice: La felicidad no es un ideal de la razón, sino de la imaginación (Immanuel Kant)

I cannot, therefore, perceive external things, but can only infer their existence from my own inner perception, by taking the perception as the effect of which something external must be the proximate cause.

The Copernican revolution brought about by Kant was, I think, the most important single turning point in the history of philosophy.

I'm afraid we're stuck with Kant and his"crooked timber of humanity, from which no straight thing was ever made." If we're going to build another world, it will be from this crooked timber and no other, so we'd better start learning the necessary carpentry.

Immanuel Kant's "categorical imperative" says that individual actions are to be judged according to whether we would be pleased if everyone in society took the same action.

Albert [Einstein] was reading Kant and attending occasional lectures at the University of Pavia: for pleasure, without being registered there or having to think about exams. It is thus that serious scientists are made.

Qabalists assert that Reason is a weapon inadequate to the Search for Reality since its nature is essentially self-contradictory. Hume and Kant both saw this; but the one became a sceptic in the widest sense of the term, and with the other, the conclusion hid itself behind a verbose transcendentalism.

Jews refuse to apply Kant's categorical imperative and be limited by universal rules. We might attempt a definition of a Jew as someone unable to make an objective moral judgement. His arguments will forever vary according to whether the subject is good for Jews or bad for Jews. WMD are bad in gentile hands but good in Jewish ones. Gentile nationalism is bad, devotion to the Jewish cause is good. Equal rights for Jews and non-Jews is good in Europe but bad in Palestine.

The important point that Benjamin and Kant make is that revolutions, whether in art or in society, are about emotion. These moments engender not simply new ideas but new feelings about established power and human possibilities.

It is impossible to defy "radical evil"—a phrase originally coined by Immanuel Kant to describe those who surrender their freedom and morality to an extreme form of self-adulation and later adopted by Hannah Arendt to describe totalitarianism—without "sublime madness.

Morality, on the other hand, as Immanuel Kant insisted, is ultimately practical: though it matters morally what we think and feel, morality is, at its heart, about what we do.

Kant, the result of this universality is that the wild-man, the natural man, as well as the bourgeois, are circumscribed by the same definition and have the same basic qualities.

On Religion and Science: You cannot answer Berkeley, even if you have annihilated Kant, and yet, perforce, you assume that Berkeley is wrong when you affirm that science proves the non-existence of God, or, as much to the point, the existence of matter–You know I granted the reality of matter only in order to make myself intelligible to your understanding. Be positive scientists, if you please; but ontology has no place in positive science, so leave it alone....

I am a humanist because I think humanity can, with constant moral guidance, create reasonably decent societies. I think that young people who want to understand the world can profit from the works of Plato and Socrates, the behaviour of the three Thomases, Aquinas, More and Jefferson — the austere analyses of Immanuel Kant and the political leadership of Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. [The World Is My Home (1991)]

What finite beings say about transcendence is the semblance of transcendence; but as Kant well knew, it is a necessary semblance. Hence the incomparable metaphysical relevance of the rescue of semblance, the object of esthetics.

1754: Immanuel Kant hat eine Begegnung mit dem Ding an sich und sagt, er könne nicht darüber sprechen.

To suppose a reader thoroughly indifferent to Kant, is to suppose him thoroughly unintellectual; and, therefore, though in reality he should happen not to regard him with interest, it is one of the fictions of courtesy to presume that he does.