Kant's Philosophy: Categories, Metaphysics, and Moral Principles

Kant's Philosophy

Between these two categories, there are two wrecks: Hume's substance and the cause. Categories are given legitimate application to phenomena based on perceptions and lose that legitimacy when we endeavor to apply them to non-empirical or supersensible realities.

Kant again emphasizes the difference between phenomenon and thing in itself.

Kant goes on to show that metaphysics cannot be a science because it lacks the empirical conditions. This is because it looks at God, spirit, and matter (the universe).

The Moral Principles of the Law

Reason is the faculty of reasoning. An argument is a chain of trials. To link the early trials, they are needed. The only way to relate judgments is by linking all trials, each in turn belonging to a principle. The principle upon which all is based is a principle that does not depend on any condition, so it is unconditioned.

Reason a priori contains three unconditional principles whose function is to guide all our trials to complete the synthesis points. Thanks to these vertices (early), the business meets its natural tendency: the development of a universal system of knowledge.

The first is the idea of the unconditioned soul. It enables reason to unify or synthesize all trials relating to the internal experience. The second is the idea of the unconditioned world (matter), which allows the complete synthesis of all the judgments of inner experience. The third is God, which unifies the two previous experiences.

Kant called these three pillars of metaphysics transcendental illusion, which consists of believing that because reason needs these three ideas, the three objects represented in it are objectively real. But the truth is that as non-empirical objects, these three supersensible ideas are given a priori in reason and do not apply to any experience, thus remaining empty of content. Because the content has to come from experience, but there is no experience of the soul, the world, or God, metaphysics cannot be a science.

The Three Postulates of Practical Reason - Kant

The postulates are requests or requirements that lead reason to affirm the reality of something that cannot be proved but which is a condition without which there could have been an event that occurs. The three postulates are conditions of the possibility of moral fact, and that fact is the need to act out of duty. The need is felt by every rational subject.