Immanuel Kant

1. Immanuel Kant

2. Epistemology • Assumes that there are things out there because we have experienced things out there • Let's stop worrying about the stuff out there and start worrying about stuff in here • Agrees that a person both learns things a posteriori and a priori (before birth) • We have instincts and learn through experiences • Combines both Rationalism & Empiricism • Born with innate structures

3. Epistemology • A Priori • Universal and necessary • Things we just know; instinctive • Space • We do not have innate knowledge; but neither are we a blank slate • We are not unformatted hard drives

4. Epistemology • We all start with something • Innate structures of space and time (spacio-temperality) • Reasoning and logic • Everyone reasons the same way since they were born

5. Representational Realism • Reality is simply a representation to an individual • What is real to you is how you perceive it • Also your idea of it; reality is objective and subjective • Two realities for every object • There is what the object is and what we perceive the object as

6. Phenomena & Noumena • What we know exists; what we perceive • There is reality that is noumenato us and reality that is phenomena to us • However both things exist, whether we perceive it or not • We can't conceive what a thing actually is, we can only know what we see of it

7. Free Will • The key to knowledge and understanding is the world of experiences • Every material object exists between space and time • Principles of science: that the material world exists in our experiences

8. Free Will • Using these two pieces, one can know all the things that can be known • Problem: our bodies our material objects that move within time and space • If we are subjects to the movement of time and space, there's no free will • We are simply stuck to the actions of the universe. • Cannot go against the laws of nature

9. Free Will • Solution: what we choose to do is not apart of the phenomenal world • Free will is a part of the nominal world where science cannot control • Will is something we cannot know, it is nominal (uses negative)

10. Morality • Wants to find moral base and moral laws that apply to all of history and time • Wants these laws to be common ideas of morality that are true to any rational being • Didn't want to create a practical rule: something that has exceptions but is generally true • A moral law can have no exception and is consistently and universally true.

11. Morality • First rule: to have moral worth, an action that is from duty • A action must have moral value. • One is acting in accord with duty with someone is doing something "fair" • Self-interest • When we do something from duty is when you put personal benefit to the side

12. Categorical Imperative • There is an innate structures in what we determine what is good. • Fair is an innate structure • Everyone knows what it is • Theres debate on what interpreting fair but everyone knows what fair is