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Immanuel Kant

Kant is of course one of the greatest philosophers in the whole history; but he can also be regarded as a great philosopher of science. In his Critique of Pure Reason, he treated several major problems of philosophy of science, such as the nature of space and time, causality, or the nature of logical and mathematical knowledge. His philosophizing had a close relationship with Newtonian mechanics, which was the up-to-date science of his day. Analytic vs. synthetic, a priori vs. a posteriori are typical examples of Kantian dichotomy.

Kantianism has another close relationship with philosophy of science. It is well known that some of the logical positivists in the 20th century were strongly influenced by Kantianism or neo-Kantianism in that they tried to distinguish the realm of reason and of experience in our knowledge. Thus, Schlick and Reichenbach, for instance, tried to maintain this Kantian dichotomy in their philosophy of space and time. However, they substituted conventional elements for a priori or rational elements; it seems in this way they tried to reconcile their Kantian legacy with Einstein's new physics, the relativity theory.

Incidentally, an interesting analogy, or rather reversed analogy from Kant's side, occurred in the realm of ethics before Kant: if you compare Hume's theory of justice with Kant's Rechtslehre, you are bound to find this analogy. According to Hume, justice (Kant's Recht) essentially depends on convention, i.e. convention determining private property. Kant's theory of property has a close affinity with Hume's, but Kant substitutes rational elements for Hume's convention (which has a somehow different sense from the preceding, though); thus property is established, according to Kant, by a relation in the realm of transcendental world, not by convention in this world.


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February 5, 1999; last modified March 30. (c) Soshichi Uchii
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