The Kant Dictionary by Thorpe Lucas

Author:Thorpe, Lucas.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

ideal

Kant rejects the Platonic theory of ideas. According to Plato’s theory, the world as we experience it is a pale copy or shadow of a world of ideal forms, which serve as archetypes of the material objects that we experience, and the goal of philosophy is to acquire knowledge of these ideal forms. According to this Platonic theory the material world is dependent for its existence on this world of ideals. However, although Kant rejects this theoretical role of ideals, rejecting their theoretical power, he does think that they have practical power, serving as regulative principles which can ground the possibility of the perfection of both knowledge and action. Thus, the ideal of systematicity plays an important role in Kant’s account of the development of our knowledge and the formation of empirical concepts. And ideals play an extremely important role in his ethics. There are good reasons to think that what Kant calls a good will in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785) is at least partially to be thought of as a practical ideal. In the section called the Ideal of Pure Reason of the Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787) Kant explains the distinction between an idea of pure reason and an ideal, explaining that with an ideal we understand an idea not merely concretely but as an individual thing that is determined through the idea alone. And he suggests that whereas we can think of ideas as providing rules for our thinking we can think of an ideal as serving as something like an original picture which we can use to judge how accurate a copy is. As such, Kant suggests, although ideals can never be realized as objects of experience, they can play an indispensable role as standards of reason and of judgement. See: beauty, ideal of; Ideal of Pure Reason.

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