Kant and Metaphysics (Summary)


Kant and the rejection of the dogmatic metaphysics

Kant’s project in the metaphysics branch holds in one sentence: breaking with dogmatism.

To achieve this goal, Kant questions the human reason, its status and limitations. In a word, the metaphysical question is: what am I able to know? How can we really know? To answer this question, we must give a methodology of metaphysics.

Before Kant, in fact, metaphysics refers to the knowledge of intelligible objects (see Plato’s form theory), without any questioning of their possibility of knowledge. Within the couple subject / object, Kant rejects both hypotheses, realistic and idealistic:

– Realism think that is the object that affects the subject

– Defends the idealism that is the subject that produces the object.

Kant seeks to find a middle way between these two approaches, a gift that is not a posting on one side and the other, a way to put the object outside of sujet.Il has to reconcile the activity of the intellect and the gift experience and a priori in the same gesture.

According to Kant, it is clear that our concepts may not agree with experiment. There is no pre-established harmony, guaranteed by God or a higher power, between my classes and the real.

Kant and the Copernican revolution:

The Copernican revolution is no longer from the object but the subject and its representations, to check what is objective in its representations. The object exists, but it is to be formed only when the subject faces it is time and such. Thus, what we see in things is what we put into it. The Copernican revolution refocused the metaphysics of subjectivity.

Criticism of Kant breaks with the in-itself outside, the existence of objects in themselves. With the foundation of transcendental logic, metaphysics is the science of pure understanding and rational cognition of objects a priori. These are the principles of the understanding that makes possible the experience.

These principles, Kant limited reason: human knowledge is limited to objects given in experience sensible.En outside of sensory experience, man can only think of the objects, do not know. Knowing the area is unsurpassable experience. Exit the ontology that thought it could know everything, up to phenomenology.

Kant realized a triple action:

– Foundation of the truth of knowledge

– Termination of dogmatic metaphysics and its mistakes

– Overhaul of metaphysics as a thought that gives an objective value of its concepts by practical reason.

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