Immanuel Kant: Germany (1724-1804)The Giants of Philosophy

Immanuel Kant's "transcendental" philosophy transcends the question of "what" we know to ask "how" we know it. Before Kant, philosophers had debated for centuries whether knowledge is derived from experience or reason. Kant says that both views are partly right and partly wrong, that they share the same error; both believe that the mind and the world, reason and nature, are separated from one another. Kant says that our reason organizes our sense perception to produce knowledge. The mind is a creative force for understanding the manifold of new, un-conceptualized sense impressions with which the world bombards us. Kant says we cannot know the "thing-in-itself"—the object apart from our conceptualization of it. His influence on subsequent thought has been monumental; all of nineteenth and twentieth century philosophy stands in his debt.