The Philosophy Book: From the Vedas to the New Atheists, 250 Milestones in the History of Philosophy by Gregory Bassham

Author:Gregory Bassham
Language: eng
Format: epub

Hume wondered how strong the analogy is between human-made machines, such as this steam engine invented by British engineer Thomas Newcomen in 1712, and a God-made world-machine.

SEE ALSO Mind Organizes Nature (c. 460 BCE), The Five Ways (c. 1265), Deism (1730), Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859)

1781

Critique of Pure Reason

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804)

Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason was a huge watershed in philosophy. The book’s central idea—that the world as we experience it is mostly a construct of the human mind—dominated nineteenth-century thought and is still accepted by many philosophers today.

Kant’s life will never be made into a movie; it was rich in ideas but not in adventures. He was born in Königsberg (then part of East Prussia but now Kaliningrad, in a noncontiguous part of Russia). Aside from a few short trips, Kant lived his entire life in his native city, where he taught at the University of Königsberg for many decades. A late bloomer, Kant published all of his major philosophical works after the age of fifty-six. His most important books are the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), Critique of Practical Reason (1788), and Critique of Judgment (1790). Like many great philosophers, he never married.

Kant was troubled by both Hume’s corrosive skepticism and the failure of traditional metaphysics to provide a secure foundation for belief in God, objective morality, free will, and life after death. Unlike Hume, Kant believed that we know necessary truths about empirical and moral reality (for example, we know that every event must have a cause). As Hume had argued, it is impossible for us to acquire such knowledge through experience. Kant’s solution was to say that the human mind has certain innate, built-in structures that automatically process all possible experiences into certain predetermined forms. The mind, as it were, has certain hardwired cookie-cutter patterns that it imposes on all possible experiences. The upshot is that we can never know reality as it is itself (what Kant calls “noumenal reality”); we can only know “phenomenal reality,” reality as it appears to us. Ultimately, Kant argues, reason cannot prove that God exists or that we have free will or that there will be an afterlife. However, our moral experience makes no sense without these underpinning beliefs, so they can be supported by a kind of rational faith.

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