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.
While the understanding orders experience, theoretical reason seeks the unconditioned behind everything conditioned — forming the ideas of soul, world and God, to which no possible experience corresponds. It is exactly here that the illusions arise which Kant dissects in the “Critique of Pure Reason”.
Practical reason, by contrast, determines action: it gives the will the moral law — independently of inclination and experience. That the same reason is limited in knowing and legislative in acting belongs to the core of Kant's philosophy.
Where it appears
- Aesthetics
- Enlightenment — The famous definition
- Knowledge
- Ethics — The categorical imperative
- Life — Table talks
- Peace & Politics — The three definitive articles
- The End of All Things
- Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals
- Critique of Practical Reason
- Critique of Pure Reason
- Critique of Judgment — Origins & context
- Answering the Question: What Is Enlightenment? — Core theses
- FAQ
- Hoping
- Hope — Freedom, immortality, God: the three postulates
- Home — Test it yourself: the false promise
- Workshop — Your logbook
- Being human — Why the three questions flow into the fourth
- Doing
- Teaching — 1 · What is Enlightenment?
- Knowing
Source: Wikipedia: Reason