Rationalism In Immanuel Kant's Epistemology

Immanuel Kant’s Epistemology

Eighteenth Century Europe was in turmoil, “characterized by dramatic revolutions in science, philosophy, society and politics” (Bristow, 2011, para. 1). Revolution was afoot in France, while earlier scientific discoveries from Copernicus to Newton drastically changed how humans understood the world. Empiricism and Skepticism rose with modern science to challenge the prevailing Rationalism (Murphy, 2010).

The grand and complex debate that emerged between Continental Rationalists, the likes of Renee Descartes and Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, and British Empiricists, such as John Locke and David Hume, epistemologically hinged on the notion of whether there is knowledge beyond experience. More specifically, the debate

With the idea of synthetic a priori knowledge as the springboard, Kant develops his critical philosophy, rejecting his own direct realism as well as Hume’s more radical Empiricist views (Seung, 2011). The Critique of Pure Reason (1778) is Kant’s seminal epistemological work, in which he outlines his “grand theory of perception,” which he termed transcendental (Seung, 2011, pp. 1). Kant’s transcendental philosophy provided a new way of understanding knowledge, and expanded our ideas of what we can know, how we know, and the limits to what we can

In Kant’s view, human cognition or intellect, is comprised of sensibility and understanding. For Kant, sense perception is either a priori or a posteriori, the former being innate and intuitive, framed by space and time not in the physical but perceptual sense, while the latter is direct sense perception and empirical in nature (Seung, 2011). Understanding, in Kant’s philosophy, utilizes categories to structure and order thought in knowledge-making. According to Heidemann (2011) “categories are simply logical functions of judgements, but determinations of [a priori] intuitions” (pp.