Immanuel Kant · Philosophy Atlas

Contributions to threads

What authorizes a rational agent to regard itself as free?

1785–1788 · approximate

Kant connects morality with autonomy: rational agents must regard themselves as giving a universal law rather than merely following inclination. Natural causation governs appearances, while practical deliberation takes a standpoint of freedom. This does not provide theoretical knowledge of an uncaused event. The difficult task is explaining why that practical standpoint has authority.

Works or evidence:Groundwork III (Ak. 4:446–463); Critique of Practical Reason (Ak. 5:29–31).

Sources: 3

Intellectual setting

Kant synthesized and challenged rationalist, empiricist, scientific, and religious inheritances in the Prussian Enlightenment while also reproducing racial hierarchies that require critical examination.

Key ideas

Transcendental idealism

Human knowledge concerns appearances structured by our forms of intuition and understanding, not things as they are independently.

Autonomy

Moral agents bind themselves through principles they can will as universal, rather than merely following appetite or external command.

Legacy

His critical philosophy reorganized debates in metaphysics, knowledge, ethics, aesthetics, politics, and history, becoming a central point of departure for later European thought and its critics.

Connections

Influenced by David Hume (documented influence): Kant explicitly credited Hume with interrupting his dogmatic slumber, and his critical philosophy responds to Humean problems about causation and metaphysics.

Influenced Arthur Schopenhauer (documented influence): Schopenhauer grounds his theory of knowledge on the subject-object distinction he takes from the Critique of Pure Reason and accepts Kant's limit on what reason can settle, then argues that the thing in itself is will; the entry treats his critique of Kant as a whole section of his system.

Influenced G. W. F. Hegel (documented influence): Hegel's interests turned to the questions raised by Kant's critical philosophy, and he presents his system as completing the transcendental idealism Kant began; whether that reading makes Hegel a metaphysician or a post-Kantian is the central dispute in the literature.

Influenced Johann Gottlieb Fichte (documented influence): Fichte began giving lessons on the Critical philosophy in 1790 and wrote the Attempt at a Critique of All Revelation to prove his mastery of it; Kant was impressed enough to arrange its publication with his own publisher, and the book first appeared without Fichte's name.

Sources

Immanuel Kant , Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

A New History of Western Philosophy: Philosophy in the Modern World , Historical orientation for Immanuel Kant, Oxford University Press

Kant’s Moral Philosophy , Autonomy and freedom; bibliography for Groundwork, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy