Quotes About Kant

that sense of relief which one has in reading Kant when, after the most rigorous demonstration of determinism, one finds that above the world of necessity there is the world of freedom.

This line of reasoning leads Kant to the second formulation of the categorical imperative: "Act in such a way that you always treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end."23 This is the formula of humanity as an end.

Still more striking is the fact that Kant unites epistemology and ethics specifically through the concept of law.

Perhaps most dangerously, Cohen claimed that Spinoza created certain negative stereotypes about Judaism and biblical religion that were later to influence Kant, who depended upon Spinoza's research. Spinoza thus stands accused of being the chief "prosecutor" of Judaism before a hostile Gentile world.25

An idea, as Kant uses the term, is a representation of a "totality of conditions to a given conditioned thing," made possible by an unconditioned condition or absolute.

Consequently, no idea – no complete series of answers to why-questions – can ever be an object of human knowledge. Yet, Kant argues, without ideas morality would be impossible:

Instead, knowledge gets its essential unity from the goal that uniquely orients the pursuit of knowledge. And this goal, Kant argues, can be nothing other than knowledge of the system of ideas. This system consists of an infinitely intelligible reality – the thing in itself or the absolute world – which is constituted by God – the ens realissimum or the absolute ground of all reality – who is at the same time the infinite intellect or the absolute soul.

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

In other words, we can ground human values and morals not just in philosophical principles such as Aristotle's virtue ethics, Kant's categorical imperative, Mill's utilitarianism, or Rawls's fairness ethics, but in science as well.

The theocracy, like other autocratic political systems, is the most conservative form of social structure. Modern democracies, for all their flaws, have evolved as mature political systems that protect against the religious and secular excesses of totalitarian regimes. Democracies do not declare war against each other, as Kant claimed in his essay, Perpetual Peace (1795), because he thought that a majority of the people would never vote to go to war unless in self defense.

On one hand, Kant thought science led to the conclusion that humans are elements in a vast machine operating by the laws of physics. On the other hand, he said, to salvage morality, we must act as if we were free. And to ratify our moral standards, we must act as if God existed. And because morality makes no sense unless justice prevails in the end, we must act as if there were an afterlife.

Ever since Kant, the phrase as if has come to signal truths that people are compelled to hold, even though they cannot account for those truths within their own worldview. They live as if Christianity were true, even though their worldview denies it. Instead of giving up their worldview in the face of contrary facts, they endure a severe mental schizophrenia.

Go ahead; take Kant's PROLEGOMENA TO ANY FUTURE METAPHYSIC and get it to show what he is telling. We would all be a lot happier.

Kant's great discovery—but one that he never admitted to—was that apodictic reason is incompatible with knowledge. Such reason must be 'transcendental'. This is a word that has been propagated with enthusiasm, but only because Kant simultaneously provided a method of misreading it. To be transcendental is to be 'free' of reality. This is surely the most elegant euphemism in the history of Western philosophy.

The more narrow-minded a system is the more it will please worldly-wise people. Thus the system of the materialists, the doctrine of Helvetius and also Locke has recieved the most acclaim amongst his class. Thus Kant even now will find more followers than Fichte.