Kantian Philosophy: Freedom, Knowledge, and Transcendence

Knowledge

Knowledge

Kantian philosophy is aimed at the recovery of human freedom through a universal right. If the ideas that arose in the Age of Enlightenment have not been developed, the age cannot be considered enlightened. The human being has not achieved their freedom and remains in a state of minority because of four reasons (theoretical, practical, historical, and social). We must begin by making a Critique of Pure Reason to respond to three questions: What can we know? What can we do? and What may we expect? What is summarized in humans? Reason has two applications that respond to the three questions above:

• Theoretical use: It responds to What can we know? and to questions of expectation in the Critique of Pure Reason (CPR).
• Practical use: It responds to What can we do? and What may we expect? in the Critique of Practical Reason, the Metaphysical Foundations of Morality, and Perpetual Peace.

Theoretical Use

In the CPR, assuming the existence of knowledge, Kant deals with the universal conditions that are necessary and enabling for knowledge. Science provides answers expressed in proofs, which are available to classify judgments.

• Analytic judgments: the predicate is contained in the subject. These are a priori judgments.
• Synthetic judgments: they provide new information in the predicate about the subject and link two different items. These judgments are a posteriori.

Scientific judgments are synthetic a priori, since subject and predicate are related in a way that holds universally and is not dependent on the sensory experience of each individual. Kant developed the conditions that make these judgments possible in mathematics, physics, and philosophy in two parts:

Transcendental Aesthetic

Transcendental aesthetic: Determines the transcendental conditions of sensibility: a priori forms of intuition, pure and without empirical content, by which mathematics can make scientific judgments. These are internal faculties of the subject:

• Space (geometry)
• Time (arithmetic)

Transcendental Logic

Transcendental logic: is analytically divided into the Transcendental Analytic and the Transcendental Dialectic.

Transcendental Analytic

1. Transcendental analytic: It determines the conditions that make understanding possible and allow the sciences to form scientific judgments. These are pure concepts. These concepts are categories that can synthesize the subject and predicate of judgments. There are twelve categories, which follow from metaphysical principles.

Kant argues that the coincidence limit is a pure concept.

The categories summarize experience: their core is an image or schema that links sensibility and part of the understanding as conceptual categories. Therefore, they allow the synthesis between sensibility and understanding, i.e., knowledge.