Kant's Critique of Reason: Knowledge, Metaphysics, and Moral Formalism

Transcendental Conditions

Transcendental conditions are universal, necessary, and not derived from experience. They are a priori structures, though they remain empty without experience.

Knowledge derived from experience is always a synthesis, established a priori. The subject acquires a key role in knowledge, imposing its conditions.

Analysis of the Authority of Knowledge

The Transcendental Aesthetic: Sensitivity

The Transcendental Aesthetic, part of the Critique of Pure Reason, studies sensitivity, which results in sensations. There is internal sensitivity and external sensitivity.

Sensitive knowledge involves two elements:

1. The Sensations: These are empirical elements, resulting from the influence of objects on the power of knowledge.
2. A Priori Forms of Sensibility: These are space and time. They are not caused by objects but by the subject, and they order the sensations.

Time and space are not independent realities of the knowing subject but are a priori forms of sensibility.

The Transcendental Analytic: Understanding

The Transcendental Analytic studies the understanding and makes it possible to conceptualize what occurs in perception. Kant states that understanding utilizes 12 categories to sort the objects shown in sensitivity; the most important of these is causality.

Sensibility and understanding are two distinct cognitive faculties.

The Transcendental Dialectic: Reason

The Transcendental Dialectic studies reason to understand its function and structure, allowing us to develop the faculty of reasoning. Reason is the faculty that concludes the human process of knowledge.

The ideal of reason is to find a universal principle that serves to explain all events in the world. The problem arises when reason seeks explanations for God, the soul, and the world—these are known as the Ideas of Reason.

The phenomena are the subject of our knowledge. There can be psychic phenomena and physical phenomena, just as in objects.

The Practical Use of Reason

Kantian Moral Formalism: The Categorical Imperative

In the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant addresses the practical use of reason to answer the fundamental question: What should I do? This work established the first formal ethics.

Material ethics, which Kant contrasts with his formal ethics, provides content by establishing a supreme good and a set of rules that must be fulfilled to achieve that good. Material ethics differs from Kantian formalism in several ways:

1. The ultimate end is established by experience (a posteriori).
2. The imperatives of material ethics are always conditional or hypothetical.