Quotes About Kant

What the recent physiology of the senses has shown by the way of experience is what Kant had tried to show for the representations of the human mind in general when he laid out the participation of the particular, built-in rules of the mind, the organization of the mind as it were, in our representations.

Intelligence, Kant reminds, is not so much a result of genius, rather it is a consequence of a determination to use it.

Kant's style is so heavy that after his pure reason, the reader longs for unreasonableness.

Immanuel Kant: "Human reason is by nature architectonic

in the same sense in which Kant held that the empirical sciences depend on some mental abilities – intuition and categories

Kant did not explain the origin of these judgments but assumed that they were attained by abstraction from the activity of the soul, which structures, according to eternal laws, its experiences (Kant, 1770/1968, § 8, § 15, corollary).

In the preface of his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant (1787/1933, B XVI) refers in the same way to the Copernican Revolution. He points out that for explaining the possibility of scientific knowledge about (physical) objects we have to reflect on central cognitive functions (intuition and categories). According to Piaget, however, the reversal of the attentional focus of the mind does not happen just once but several times – namely at every level transition.

This law of equilibrium, Piaget repeats, is not something external, imposed upon intellectual change from without; it is not a transcendent, Platonic principle. On the contrary, much like Kant's notion of the moral law, which is not internal to the individual, the law of equilibration is an immanent principle in experience (Piaget, 1977/1995, pp. 94, 154, 190, 216, 227, 243). Such a concept of the immanent versus the

Jackson, I. (1987). On situating Piaget's subject: A triangulation based on Kant, structuralism, and biology. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 17, 471–486.

Kant argued that our intuition (i.e., sensibility) and understanding use a priori (i.e., independent of all experience) forms and categories, which are the condition of the possibility for experiencing objectivity. Piaget subscribed to the ordering and organizing function of the mind, but he believed that the forms and categories are not a priori but undergo development as a result of the subject's interaction with the world (OI, pp. 376–395).

It is no coincidence that he referred to Kant as "the father of us all" (Piaget, 1965/1971, p. 220).

Kant argued that the mind has both receptive capacities and spontaneous capabilities, both operative in human knowledge. For Kant (1787/1933, B74, B93), knowledge has its origin in sensory capacities to receive representations and in intellectual capabilities for knowing objects through them.

Unlike Kant, for whom normative categories are a priori and fully formed in their use, for Piaget any framework has a formation in time through its serial use; that is, human development is the successive replacement of frameworks, from simple to complex (Smith, 2006, 2009).

Such is Kant's (1787/1933, B180) "schematism of understanding," though he candidly confessed that how this occurred was a mystery "in the depths of the human soul.

Piaget (1961/1966, pp. 152–153) made the same commitments as Kant: Normative properties are required for knowing reality, and so, following Kant, such properties are not learned (Piaget, 1964, p. 176) nor are they innate (Piaget, 1936/1953, pp. 1–2).

In the former, Kant pictured man as a being capable of following a rational moral law, but also liable to be swayed from it by the non-rational desires which have their origin in our physical nature. To act morally is thus always a struggle. Victory is to be won by the suppression of all desires except the feeling of reverence for the moral law, which leads us to do our duty for its own sake.

Such a concept of morality sounds noble and high-minded; the supreme importance of morality means that it must be based on the highest authority, and this is the authority of reason itself. However, as MacIntyre and other critics of Kant have noted, the grandeur of the structure of Kant's ethics is matched by the emptiness of its content

Here we see philosophy brought to what is, in fact, a precarious position, which should be made fast even though it is supported by nothing in either heaven or earth. Here philosophy must show its purity as the absolute sustainer of its laws, and not as a herald of laws which implanted sense or who knows what tutelary nature whispers to it. –IMMANUEL KANT, FOUNDATIONS

This part of Kant's view is, I believe, a profound truth. We can be morally responsible in several other ways, or senses, but no one could ever be responsible, I believe, in any way that could make them deserve to suffer. Nor, I believe, does anyone deserve to be less happy.

For peace to reign on Earth, humans must evolve into new beings who have learned to see the whole first.

Immanuel Kant, un uomo lontanissimo dall'irrazionalismo, osservò una volta che "dal legno storto dell'umanità non si è mai cavata una cosa diritta". È questo il motivo per cui nessuna soluzione perfetta è possibile nelle cose umane - non già soltanto in pratica, ma in linea di principio - e ogni serio tentativo di metterla in atto è destinato con ogni probabilità a produrre sofferenza, delusione e fallimento.

In fact the problem Leopardi is facing is speculative and metaphysical, a problem in the history of philosophy from Parmenides to Descartes and Kant: the relationship between the idea of infinity as absolute space and absolute time, and our empirical knowledge of space and time.

Freedom, the virtue of disinterested action ('good will'), and concern for the general welfare: these are the three key concepts which define the modern morality of duty, and which Kant was to express in the form of absolute commandments, known as categorical imperatives.

It is through good education that all the good in the world arises.