---
date: '2023-12-04'
description: and [[thoughts/moral|moral]] philosophy
id: Philosophy and Kant
modified: 2026-10-23 11:12:47 GMT-04:00
seealso:
  - '[[thoughts/moral|moral]]'
  - '[[thoughts/ethics|ethics]]'
  - '[[thoughts/Metaphysics|Metaphysics]]'
tags:
  - philosophy
title: Immanuel Kant
created: '2023-12-04'
published: '2023-12-04'
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slug: thoughts/Philosophy-and-Kant
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---
He is the hard one, but I respect rigorous discipline. It was known that the people in Königsberg often formed a routine surrounding his mode of living.[^clock]

Kant is also known to be rather paradigmatic with his whole ethical framework of reasons. In a way, we are living in a Kantian world, where there is a _universal concept_ of reason that transcends all linguistic and cultural boundaries.

The framework works like this. A moral rule binds me because reason gives it, so it binds every rational agent in the same way, whatever they happen to want. The test is the categorical imperative: act only on a maxim that you could also will as a universal law.[^groundwork] Consequences and feelings do not settle the question. See [[thoughts/ethics|ethics]] for the three formulations and the standard objections.

In a way, Kant IS _emblematic of this certain notion of philosophy_.

### ontology framework.

see also: [[library/The Critique of Pure Reason|Critique of Pure Reason]]

The first _Critique_ (1781, revised 1787) starts from a question about knowledge. Some judgments add content and still hold necessarily, such as $7+5=12$ or “every event has a cause”. Experience alone cannot show necessity, so Kant asks how these _synthetic a priori_ judgments are possible.

His answer is transcendental idealism. Space and time are the forms in which anything appears to us, and the categories of the understanding, such as cause and substance, are the rules by which we combine appearances into objects. Those structures come from the knowing subject, which is why they hold for every possible experience. The price is a limit: we know things as they appear, and we cannot know things as they are in themselves. Readers still dispute whether “thing in itself” names a second set of objects or the same objects considered apart from how they appear to us.[^idealism]

[^clock]: The best-known version is Heinrich Heine’s story, in _On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany_ (1834), that neighbours knew it was half past three when Kant stepped out for his afternoon walk. Manfred Kuehn’s _Kant: A Biography_ (2001) dates the strict routine to Kant’s middle age and links it to his friendship with the merchant Joseph Green.

[^groundwork]: \[@kant1785groundwork\], Ak. 4:421.

[^idealism]: See the _Critique of Pure Reason_, B1–B19 for the synthetic a priori problem, and the Stanford Encyclopedia entry on [Kant’s transcendental idealism](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-transcendental-idealism/) for the one-world and two-world readings.

### critique.