Immanuel Kant Research Paper

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Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was one of the most influential Western philosophers that contributed to many aspects of metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. The 18th-century German philosopher, Immanuel Kant felt as if though philosophy has reached its pivotal point, thus he fashioned a new view of knowledge that claims that both reason and the senses contribute to our knowledge of the world (Velasquez, 2017). His theory emerged from rationalist who claimed that the mind is a source of knowledge of universal laws, combined with the theory of the empiricist who argued that the senses are the only credible source of knowledge. Kant’s theory suggested a new view of knowledge, that suggested that our knowledge of reality comes from reason but its content derives from a person’s senses. Kant named his new view: Transcendental Idealism, also referred to as formalistic idealism. Kant proposed that our mind constructed the world that appears to be around us, we construct the world by arranging the sensations, into structures or patterns, that derive from your senses. In other terms, our mind arranges our sensations – the colours, smells, sounds – into the world we experience, the pattern those sensations are arranged, in other words, their structure, come from the mind. In addition, the mind knows the laws that govern all that we perceive because …show more content…

Hume, a skeptic, argued that experience was the only valid basis for knowledge. However, Kant disagreed and proved that the mind or reason is also a real source of knowledge. Hume said that our senses revealed the taste, sounds, smells, and shapes of objects, Kant agreed but pointed out our senses don’t disclose relationships with another object, therefore our mind must be the source of how the objects relate to one another, in addition, through an awareness of these relationships we discover

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