School of thought

Kantian Critical Philosophy

Intellectual current

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Classification

Period
c. 1781-1804 CE
Regions
Europe (origin)
Domains
Aesthetics, Epistemology, Ethics, Metaphysics, Philosophy of Mind

Overview

Kant's critical philosophy asks what the mind itself contributes to knowledge. He argued that we perceive everything in space and time, which are forms of our own way of perceiving, and understand it through concepts such as substance and cause, which the understanding supplies rather than learns from experience. We can therefore know things only as they appear to us, never as they are in themselves, although we can still think about the latter. In ethics, Kant grounds morality in the categorical imperative: act only on principles that you could will everyone to follow as universal laws.

Key ideas

  • Transcendental Idealism: Space and time are the a priori forms of human sensible intuition, while the categories are a priori concepts through which the understanding organizes experience. Neither gives theoretical cognition of things as they are in themselves.
  • Categorical Imperative: 'Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.' Morality is grounded in rational duty, not consequences or desires.
  • Synthetic A Priori: Kant argues that some knowledge is both informative about the world (synthetic) and knowable independent of experience (a priori) — mathematics and the principles of natural science.

Key figures

Immanuel Kant

Methods used

Positions held

Influenced by

  • British Empiricism

    Kant took up Hume's problem about cause and effect: reason cannot show a priori why, if one thing is given, another must necessarily follow, so Hume traced the felt necessity to a habit formed by repeated experience. Kant widened the problem from causation to every concept by which the understanding connects things a priori.

  • Continental Rationalism

Later connections

  • German Idealism Influenced by this tradition

    Took Kant's transcendental idealism as its starting point and tried to complete it as a system derived from a single first principle, beginning with Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre of 1794; Kant's own critical philosophy is the separate entry it presupposes.

  • New Confucianism Influenced by this tradition

    Mou Zongsan translated Kant's three Critiques and built his moral metaphysics as a reconstruction of Kant: where Kant left freedom a postulate that cannot be known, Mou argued that the Confucian heart-mind knows it practically, through intellectual intuition.

  • Phenomenology Influenced by this tradition
  • Philosophies of the Will Influenced by this tradition

    Schopenhauer builds directly on Kant's distinction between appearance and thing-in-itself, keeping the distinction and identifying the thing-in-itself as Will. He set out the debt and the disagreement together in the Appendix to the first volume.

  • Pragmatism Influenced by this tradition

    Peirce took the very word 'pragmatic' from Kant, and his system of categories and architectonic method are deeply indebted to the critical philosophy.

  • Romanticism Influenced by this tradition
  • Transcendentalism Influenced by this tradition

    Emerson took three of Kant's claims, learned at second hand through Coleridge, Hedge and de Staël: the mind itself forms experience, that fact answers Locke's skepticism, and 'transcendental' names what makes experience possible rather than what lies beyond it. He blended them with Neoplatonism and post-Kantian idealism, and for many in the movement the word meant confidence in the mind's powers more than an inquiry into the conditions of experience.

  • Bergsonism Reacted to this tradition

    Time and Free Will is built as an attack on Kant's treatment of time as a homogeneous medium like space, and Bergson offers intuition as the metaphysical knowledge Kant had declared impossible.

  • Speculative Realism Reacted to this tradition

    Rejects correlationism — the post-Kantian thesis that we can only think the correlation of thought and being, never the world in itself — seeking access to a mind-independent reality.

  • Virtue Ethics Revival Reacted to this tradition
  • Neo-Kantianism Renewed this tradition after a break

    The rallying cry came from Otto Liebmann's Kant und die Epigonen (1865), which ends each chapter with the demand to go back to Kant — a renewal aimed at the idealist successors who claimed to have completed the critical philosophy.

References