Wednesday, December 6, 2006

In what way is Kant said to have wrought a Copernican revolution in knowledge?

Immanuel Kant brought together rationalism and empiricism, like Copernicus thought it out and decided the planets do not evolved around the earth. After Kant, nobody discussed the reality or knowledge without being aware of the role of the human mind in constructing reality and knowledge.

Kant found that rationalists do not trust their senses, although his way of thinking was that human must trust their senses. Rationalists also believed in reasoning to provide knowledge, which does not always work.

Kant found empiricists had no innate ideas. Empiricists tend to think general or complex ideas are derived by abstraction from simple ideas. We can think hard, but we will never escape the innate constraints of our minds.
Thus, according to Kant:
Both rationalism and empiricism claimed we can know things in themselves, and both were wrong.
Rationalists were wrong not to trust senses; in the phenomenal world, senses are all we have.
Rationalists were right about innate ideas, like Descartes’ in argument of the wax.
Hume was wrong when he claimed the concept of self is unsupported by senses.
Hume was wrong when he said that the future will resemble the past is due only to custom & habit”.
Hume was wrong when he says the source of our morality is our feelings. Morality links the noumenal (real) and phenomenal (apparent) worlds. Kant argues that if morality is real, then human freedom is real. So, humans are not merely creatures of the phenomenal world.

I’m still sticking to my females “guns!”

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