Abstract
Abstract Kant is often characterized as a system-builder. The conclusion shows the ways in which Kant is a philosopher in the classical sense, as someone driven by questions that challenge basic epistemological and moral beliefs – even his own.
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Notes
- 1.
G. W. Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics, in Philosophical Essays, trans. and ed. Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989), 51–52.
- 2.
“An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” (1784), “What Does It Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking?” (1786), and What Real Progress Has Metaphysics Made in Germany since the Time of Leibniz and Wolff? (1793/1804). The question posed in the title of Real Progress was actually formulated by the Berlin Royal Academy for a prize essay competition.
- 3.
Heinrich Heine, On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany and Other Writings, trans. Howard Pollack-Milgate, ed. Terry Pinkard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 79.
- 4.
Hegel derides Kant for such a claim: “This is like attributing right insight to someone, with the stipulation, however, that he is not fit to see what is true but only what is false. Absurd as this might be, no less absurd would be a cognition which is true but does not know its subject matter as it is in itself” (Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Science of Logic, trans. and ed. George di Giovanni [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010], 26). Heine compares Kant’s knower to the prisoners, who only see shadows, in Plato’s allegory of the cave (On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany, 82–83).
- 5.
Aristotle, Aristotle’s Metaphysics, trans. W. D. Ross, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1958), 982b11 (p. 120).
- 6.
Plato, Symposium, trans. Michael Joyce, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 204a–b (p. 556).
- 7.
With his references to freeing us from dogmatism, regaining a sense of uncertainty and wonder, and achieving a highest good in ultimate unity, Bertrand Russell echoes both Kant and Aristotle in his famous defense of philosophy:
Philosophy, though unable to tell us with certainty what is the true answer to the doubts which it raises, is able to suggest many possibilities which enlarge our thoughts and free them from the tyranny of custom. Thus, while diminishing our feeling of certainty as to what things are, it greatly increases our knowledge as to what they may be; it removes the somewhat arrogant dogmatism of those who have never travelled into the region of liberating doubt, and it keeps alive our sense of wonder by showing familiar things in an unfamiliar aspect…. Through the greatness of the universe which philosophy contemplates, the mind also is rendered great, and becomes capable of that union with the universe which constitutes its highest good. (The Problems of Philosophy [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959], 157, 161)
- 8.
C. D. Broad, Five Types of Ethical Theory (London: Routledge & Kegal Paul, 1930), 11.
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Altman, M.C. (2017). Conclusion: Kant the Philosopher. In: Altman, M. (eds) The Palgrave Kant Handbook. Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54656-2_35
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