Empiricism and Kantian Ideas: Understanding Knowledge

Empiricism

What is Empiricism?

Empiricism, as a philosophical current, developed during the 17th and 18th centuries. The term "empiricism" signifies that experience is the essential source of knowledge.

British empiricism stands in contrast to continental rationalism. These are two opposing ways of understanding philosophical activity that persist to this day.

Both share certain characteristics, and empiricism is an heir to rationalist philosophy. Above all, they have in common that we do not know things directly, but rather our knowledge of these things is driven by ideas. The primacy of subjectivity or consciousness is a feature of all modern philosophy, whether rationalist or empiricist.

They differ with respect to the origin of those ideas. For the empiricist, all ideas are rooted in experience, while rationalists admit the existence of innate ideas and, therefore, rely on the power of reason. For rationalism, reason is not only responsible for receiving information but also creates or produces it itself.

The empiricist attitude is summed up in one sentence: "There is nothing in the understanding that does not come from experience," to which rationalists added, "except the understanding itself." The importance attached to experience and reason leads them to adopt different sciences as models for building their knowledge. Empiricists put physics as an example, while rationalists admire mathematics.

The most important figures of empiricism are Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. Notable background figures include Bacon and Hobbes. One could also mention the nominalist philosophy of Ockham. All these philosophies share a strong critical sense of large systems and structures of thought.

Kant's Ideas of Reason

The Ideas of Reason

Kant observed that our reason always aims to go beyond its actual, empirical knowledge and tends to form three major concepts:

• The Soul: We have no perception of the self, but we assume its existence as the ultimate basis of all our knowledge and feelings, as the subject of internal phenomena.
• The World: We have no perception of being as a whole, but we assume the existence of the world, of reality itself, as the ultimate substrate of external phenomena.
• God: Our perception can never grasp God, but we tend to think of this absolute, supreme concept that encapsulates everything that exists, both internal and external phenomena.

Because human reason tends toward these three concepts, one could argue that they are also transcendental. Kant calls these "ideas of reason." They are not valid knowledge but have an indicative value because they have always guided us toward where we should continue to investigate. Moreover, these ideas of reason are the noblest of human beings, their deepest longings. Hume believed that all books of metaphysics were worthless. Kant rectifies this: the metaphysics of Plato, Aristotle, or Descartes may have no validity for knowledge, but they taught us at least what our reason always aspires to.

While philosophy was once devoted to talking about the world, since Kant, it primarily deals with the subject and its way of knowing.

The whole Kantian doctrine is called transcendental idealism: idealism because it states that we do not know things directly, and transcendental because it concerns the conditions of the possibility of knowledge.