Understanding
The faculty of concepts and rules: the understanding actively combines what is given in sense into judgments and thus into knowledge.
The understanding, in Kant, is the spontaneous, active faculty of cognition: it forms concepts and connects them into judgments, whereas sensibility merely receives. Its toolbox is the twelve categories, by which it brings what is intuited under rules.
On its own it can do nothing: an understanding without sensibility would have nothing to judge about — as little as a sovereign without a people can govern. Kant distinguishes the understanding from reason, which asks beyond all experience for the unconditioned.
Where it appears
- Aesthetics
- Enlightenment — The famous definition
- Knowledge — The Copernican revolution
- Peace & Politics — Peace out of self-interest
- Critique of Pure Reason — Structure & core ideas
- Critique of Judgment — Origins & context
- Answering the Question: What Is Enlightenment? — Core theses
- FAQ
- Hope — The guarantee of perpetual peace
- Being human — Why the three questions flow into the fourth
- Teaching — 1 · What is Enlightenment?
- Knowing
Source: Wikipedia: Understanding