Immanuel Kant
Philosophy

Like many of his contemporaries, Kant was greatly impressed with the scientific advances made by Newton and others. This new evidence of the power of human reason called into question for many the traditional authority of politics and religion. In particular, the modern mechanistic view of the world called into question the very possibility of morality; for, if there is no agency, there cannot be any responsibility.

The aim of Kant's critical project is to secure human autonomy, the basis of religion and morality, from this threat of mechanism—and to do so in a way that preserves the advances of modern science. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant summarizes his philosophical concerns in the following three questions:

The Critique of Pure Reason focuses upon the first question and opens a conceptual space for an answer to the second question. It argues that even though we cannot strictly know that we are free, we can—and for practical purposes, must— think of ourselves as free. In Kant's own words, "I had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith." Our rational faith in morality is further developed in The Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and The Critique of Practical Reason.

The Critique of the Power of Judgment argues we may rationally hope for the harmonious unity of the theoretical and practical domains treated in the first two Critiques on the basis, not only of its conceptual possibility, but also on the basis of our affective experience of natural beauty and, more generally, the organization of the natural world. In Religion within the Bounds of Mere Reason, Kant endeavors to complete his answer to this third question.

These works all place the active, rational human subject at the center of the cognitive and moral worlds. In brief, Kant argues that the mind itself necessarily makes a constitutive contribution to knowledge, that this contribution is transcendental rather than psychological, and that to act autonomously is to act according to rational moral principles.
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