Kant's Philosophical Worldview

Hi there.

My name is Sasha Gulab, and I'm a reader in philosophy at King's College, London.

Today we're going to have a series of six short presentations on Immanuel Kant.

So Can't is, without doubt the most important, influential

and in some ways problematic philosopher of the modern period.

He lived from 17 24 to 18 oh, four. Um, he wrote in German,

and he made

contributions that to this day have profound influence across metaphysics,

epistemology

and the philosophy of science, the philosophy of art.

There's scarcely an area in the subject that isn't still shaped by Kant's thought.

And it's This is not just an academic question is we're going to see many of

much of the basic Canty and worldview is the worldview of modern liberal societies.

Okay,

And as we're also going to see, some of the tensions in that world view

are connected. The tensions in those societies.

So

why might this Overbey overview be useful?

Well, can't is in many ways an unparalleled thinker.

There's an incredible combination of imagination, um,

rigour creativity in his work, But he's also a terrible, terrible writer.

Um,

and the real problem is that he knows He's a terrible writer.

He talks about this sometimes,

and the difficulty is that because he knows that he repeats

himself a lot and he thinks he's helping the reader.

He thinks, you know, I'll try it again.

You know, maybe it'll be clear at this time, but it

it doesn't really help,

because what it does is produce these enormously

long texts where you're often not clear.

Is this a new argument? Is that the same argument? You know, just being repeated.

It can be very hard to follow,

particularly when it's translated out of this

sort of elaborate German syntax into English.

So what we're gonna do is just give you a kind

of orientation to the kind of core points of his system,

Um,

to, I guess, make it a bit more accessible

The heart of his philosophical work are three texts called The Three Critiques.

So there's the critique of pure reason.

There's critique of practical reason, and there's the critique of judgement.

These, um, 17 eighties.

Now we don't need to worry too much about the details of the title for the moment,

as you probably picking up already, can't like all German thinkers in the period.

Loves terminology, loves, loves, inventing new words, love, strange jargon.

What we do need to worry about is this idea of critique.

Okay, so all his big books are critiques. What's the critique? Right,

So it doesn't mean primarily negative.

It's not that he's going around criticising people in the sense of, um,

judging them or being harsh on them or anything like that.

What he's talking about is critique as a culture of open discussion,

particularly challenging and questioning authority.

Okay, so the kind of authorities he has in mind,

our political or religious authorities,

you should believe this because the government tells

us to You should believe this because your

parents told you you should believe this because

it's in this special holy book we've got

for Can't those kind of claims are not good enough anymore?

Okay, he thinks of modernity is a place in which all

views have to be open to critique to Democratic justification. Argument?

Why should we believe this? Give me your reasons. Let's talk about it.

Okay, so that's his basic picture.

Now, within that,

he has, I guess,

a distinctive And I hope you're gonna find recognisable view of human beings.

So if you can't, we are fundamentally rational.

Okay, Um, we are distinct from other animals, as he sees it,

in terms of an ability to use logic to use reason.

And he's going to do this kind of

almost early cognitive science.

Okay, he comes up with all these sort of thought experiments, like, Imagine cases

he's trying to work out. How does the human mind function? What?

How does imagination function? How does speech function?

How does understanding function? What is it to understand something?

What is it to reason?

Okay, so he's got this picture of us as rational,

and he wants to tell us about the structure

of the mind that makes that rationality possible.

Second thing, he's got a picture of us as autonomous.

Okay, so every individual for can't is free

and free in a very strong sense.

Okay, so if you want to put this in a bit of philosophical jargon,

he has an incompatible list.

Conception of freedom.

He thinks that, um, to be free,

you can't be determined by your genetics or your upbringing.

Whatever your background for can't,

you must always have the ability to choose how to act.

Okay. You can't control what situations you're in,

but you can always choose for how you react to them, what you decide to do.

He thinks that's a universal human property. This autonomy. Okay,

third thing, ethics. He believes all human agents have what he calls dignity.

Now, this is you can think of it a bit like human rights.

He doesn't use that phrase in particular, but it's that kind of thing.

We've all got this property that can't be outweighed by anything.

Okay, So for example, you can't,

as he puts it, ever use people as a means.

You can't, um, for example, sacrifice deliberately one life to save 10 others.

Okay, You can't calculate over people's lives in this way for

human life is precious

and

unique worth.

And as

you can imagine, that's going to create some ethical issues possible.

An offence, possible problems that we'll talk about a couple of sessions time.

So you've got these various qualities, right? You've got rationality.

You've got autonomy, you've got dignity.

And finally,

universality these properties account a universal

across all human agents that unchanging.

Okay, so he's a very

non historical thinker. Okay?

He believes that me,

you people in fifth century China people in two centuries

to come all are defined by these basic structures.

Okay, you can see also, in a way, he's a very human focused thinker.

And again, this is something we'll come back to for him.

There's a really, really sharp boundary between human agents

and any kind of non human animal. Okay, so

if you're you know,

if you've got kind of Darwinian feelings that were on

a big spectrum and there's not a sharp divide,

can't think there is a very important

there's a very important part of him between all

human agents at any kind of animal capacity.

Now, I said, Can't shapes a lot of the modern world.

And I hope this kind of picture is sounding familiar,

at least as the sort of self image you'll find in lots of modern liberal democracies.

OK,

so it's a political culture based around the idea of

individuals with inalienable rights seen as making rational decisions.

Who should come together for Democratic discussion?

Okay, so I hope it's a familiar picture.

It's also obviously a very attractive picture in a lot of ways.

But one of the interesting things about counters,

that there are certain problems that are present from the

start in his work that you also see present in,

for example,

the creators of, uh, the American State,

which is despite all this talk about universality, equality,

everyone has dignity.

He also holds lots of deeply questionable racial views. Indeed,

in many ways, Counters is one of the founders of what became modern racial science.

He's very concerned, sitting in Europe,

to classify what he's hearing about groups in other countries

and to draw up racial hierarchies as he sees them.

And this is one of the deep tensions that you get in modern liberalism.

You see the same tension in

you know,

I mentioned the American Family fathers to give you the

example of Jefferson the same tension between this talk of equality

and then personal racism.

And this is going to be a deep,

deep fork in the road about how you think about modern liberalism.

One option.

The ideas are all good. It was just unfortunate.

Some of the people who came up with them had these kind of

nasty prejudices get rid of the nasty prejudices.

The ideas are still all great other option. There's some deeper connection.

There's some more problematic entanglement between

modern liberalism and this kind of racism

and one of the big debates of the last kind of 50 years.

And, uh, philosophy has been over that kind of fork in the road, and it's one.

If you see yourself as a liberal,

you're going to need to decide where you stand on that.