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a priori / a posteriori
A priori knowledge is independent of all experience (e.g. mathematics); a posteriori knowledge derives from experience.
XGlossary
Image: © Foto H.-P.Haack · CC BY-SA 3.0 · Wikimedia Commons
Image: © Foto H.-P.Haack · CC BY-SA 3.0 · Wikimedia Commons
Image: Immanuel Kant · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
Image: Immanuel Kant · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
Image: © Foto H.-P.Haack · CC BY-SA 3.0 · Wikimedia Commons
Image: Kant · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
Image: © Foto H.-P.Haack · CC BY-SA 3.0 · Wikimedia Commons
Image: unbekannt / unknown · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
Image: Immanuel Kant · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
Image: Immanuel Kant · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
Image: Immanuel Kant · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
Image: Immanuel Kant · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
Image: Immanuel Kant · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
Image: unbekannt / unknown · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
Image: Immanuel Kant · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
Image: Immanuel Kant · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
Image: © Foto H.-P.Haack · CC BY-SA 3.0 · Wikimedia Commons
Image: Immanuel Kant · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
Image: Caspar David Friedrich · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
Image: © Foto H.-P.Haack · CC BY-SA 3.0 · Wikimedia Commons
Glossary
Image: © Foto H.-P.Haack · CC BY-SA 3.0 · Wikimedia Commons
Image: © Foto H.-P.Haack · CC BY-SA 3.0 · Wikimedia Commons
Antinomy
A conflict of reason with itself: thesis and antithesis can — on Kant's showing — be proved equally well: for him the alarm signal of a metaphysics that oversteps its bounds.
Appearance
The object as it is given to us through space, time and the categories — the only thing we can know.
Image: Immanuel Kant · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
Autonomy
Self-legislation of the will: free is whoever gives the moral law to themselves — instead of being determined by inclinations or authorities.
Image: Immanuel Kant · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
Categorical imperative
The supreme principle of Kantian ethics: “act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law.”
Categories
The twelve pure concepts of the understanding (e.g. cause, substance, unity) by which the understanding structures all experience — prior to any experience.
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Copernican revolution (in philosophy)
Kant's reversal of perspective: our cognition does not conform to objects — the objects of experience conform to our cognition.
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Cosmopolitan right
The third definitive article of “Perpetual Peace”: “Cosmopolitan right shall be limited to conditions of universal hospitality.”
Image: © Foto H.-P.Haack · CC BY-SA 3.0 · Wikimedia Commons
Critique
In Kant, critique does not mean fault-finding but examination: the inquiry into what a faculty can achieve and where its limits lie.
Dignity
The absolute worth of the person: what has a price can be replaced — what has dignity admits of no equivalent.
Duty
“Duty is the necessity of an action done out of respect for the law” — the core concept of Kantian ethics.
Empiricism
The position that all knowledge ultimately derives from sense experience — held by Locke, Berkeley and Hume, among others.
End in itself
Persons exist as ends in themselves: they have absolute worth and may never be used merely as means.
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Enlightenment
“Man's emergence from his self-incurred immaturity” — Kant's famous definition of 1784.
Image: Immanuel Kant · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
Genius
The inborn talent through which “nature gives the rule to art” — for Kant the origin of all fine art.
Image: Immanuel Kant · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
Good will
The only thing that can be “regarded as good without limitation” — the famous opening claim of the first section of Kant's “Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals”.
Heteronomy
Determination of the will from outside — the opposite of autonomy: the will is guided by inclinations, utility or external authorities.
Image: Immanuel Kant · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
Highest good
The union of virtue and happiness: happiness in exact proportion to worthiness of it — for Kant the goal of pure practical reason.
Hypothetical imperative
A conditional command: “If you want X, do Y.” It binds only as long as you will the end — unlike the categorical imperative.
Intuition (Anschauung)
The immediate, sensible representation of a single object — for Kant the indispensable material source of all knowledge.
Judgment
The basic operation of thought: the combination of representations in which a predicate is affirmed or denied of a subject.
Image: Immanuel Kant · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
Judgment of taste
The aesthetic judgment “this is beautiful”: its determining ground is subjective — a feeling — and yet it claims everyone's assent.
Image: Immanuel Kant · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
Kingdom of ends
Kant's thought-picture of a community of rational beings systematically united under common laws — each at once legislator and subject.
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Maturity
The ability to use one's own understanding without another's guidance — the goal of enlightenment.
Maxim
The subjective principle of action — the personal rule on which someone actually acts.
Metaphysics
The fundamental philosophical discipline of ultimate questions — God, freedom, the soul, the world as a whole. Kant examines whether it can ever become a science.
Image: Immanuel Kant · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
Moral law
The fundamental law of pure practical reason: it commands acting only on maxims fit to serve as universal legislation.
Noumenon
A mere object of thought: the concept of an object that would be not sensed but only thought — in Kant a boundary concept of cognition.
Image: Immanuel Kant · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
Postulates of practical reason
Freedom, the immortality of the soul and God: assumptions that practical reason demands, although theoretical knowledge of them is impossible.
Rationalism
The position that secure knowledge stems primarily from pure thought — classically in Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz.
Reason
The highest faculty of cognition: it draws inferences, forms ideas of the unconditioned (soul, world, God) and, as practical reason, gives the will its law.
Regulative idea
Ideas of reason such as soul, world and God yield no knowledge of objects — but as guiding threads they direct our inquiry and action.
Sensibility
The receptive faculty of cognition: the capacity to be affected by objects and to receive intuitions — shaped by space and time.
Space and time
For Kant neither things nor properties of things in themselves, but the pure forms of our sensible intuition: everything that appears to us appears in space and time.
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Synthetic / analytic
Analytic judgments merely unfold what is already contained in the concept; synthetic ones extend knowledge. Kant's guiding question: how are synthetic judgments a priori possible?
Image: Immanuel Kant · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
The beautiful
According to the “Critique of Judgment”, the beautiful is what pleases universally, without interest and without a concept.
Image: Caspar David Friedrich · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
The sublime
The sublime is “what is absolutely great”: nature's overwhelming size and might, in which we experience at once our powerlessness and our vocation as rational beings.
Image: © Foto H.-P.Haack · CC BY-SA 3.0 · Wikimedia Commons
Thing in itself
Reality as it is independently of our cognition — for Kant fundamentally unknowable; we only ever know appearances.
Transcendental
Kant's method: inquiry into the conditions of the possibility of knowledge — not to be confused with “transcendent” (otherworldly).
Understanding
The faculty of concepts and rules: the understanding actively combines what is given in sense into judgments and thus into knowledge.
The concept map
How Kant's concepts hang together: a line joins two terms when one appears in the explanation of the other. The larger the dot, the more connections. Point at a term to highlight its neighbours — click to open its explanation.
40 terms · 111 connections