Immanuel Kant Warning: You are not logged in. Your IP address will be publicly visible if you make any edits. If you log in or create an account, your edits will be attributed to your username, along with other benefits.Anti-spam check. Do not fill this in! ===Historical influence=== During his own life, much critical attention was paid to Kant's thought. He influenced [[Karl Leonhard Reinhold|Reinhold]], [[Johann Gottlieb Fichte|Fichte]], [[Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling|Schelling]], [[Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel|Hegel]], and [[Novalis]] during the 1780s and 90s. [[File:Kant Kaliningrad.jpg|thumb|upright=.8|Statue of Immanuel Kant in [[Kaliningrad]], Russia. Replica by {{Interlanguage link|Harald Haacke|de}} of the original by [[Christian Daniel Rauch]] lost in 1945.]] [[Samuel Taylor Coleridge]] was greatly influenced by Kant and helped to spread awareness of him, and of German Idealism generally, in the UK and the US. In his ''[[Biographia Literaria]]'' (1817), he credits Kant's ideas in coming to believe that the mind is not a passive, but an active agent in the apprehension of reality. Hegel was one of Kant's first major critics. In Hegel's view the entire project of setting a "transcendental subject" (i.e., human consciousness) apart from the living individual as well as from nature, history, and society was fundamentally flawed,<ref>{{Cite book|last=Hegel|first=Georg Wilhelm Friedrich|title=Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline|year=1827|location=Heidelberg|pages=14–15}}</ref> although parts of that very project could be put to good use in a new direction. Similar concerns motivated Hegel's criticisms of Kant's concept of moral autonomy, to which Hegel opposed an ethic focused on the "ethical life" of the community.{{efn|Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, ''Natural Law: The Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Law, Its Place in Moral Philosophy, and Its Relation to the Positive Sciences''. trans. T. M. Knox. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1975. Hegel's mature view and his concept of "ethical life" is elaborated in his ''Philosophy of Right''. Hegel, ''Philosophy of Right''. trans. T. M. Knox. Oxford University Press, 1967.}} In a sense, Hegel's notion of "ethical life" is meant to subsume, rather than replace, [[Kantian ethics]]. And Hegel can be seen as trying to defend Kant's idea of freedom as going beyond finite "desires", by means of reason. Thus, in contrast to later critics like Nietzsche or Russell, Hegel shares some of Kant's concerns.{{efn|Robert Pippin's ''Hegel's Idealism'' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) emphasizes the continuity of Hegel's concerns with Kant's. Robert Wallace, ''Hegel's Philosophy of Reality, Freedom, and God'' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) explains how Hegel's ''Science of Logic'' defends Kant's idea of freedom as going beyond finite "inclinations", contra skeptics such as David Hume.}} Kant's thinking on religion was used in Britain by philosophers such as [[Thomas Carlyle]]<ref>{{Cite web |last=Cody |first=David |date= |title=Carlyle: Sources and Influence |url=https://victorianweb.org/authors/carlyle/sources.html |access-date=28 July 2023 |website=The Victorian Web}}</ref> to challenge the nineteenth-century decline in religious faith. British Catholic writers, notably [[G. K. Chesterton]] and [[Hilaire Belloc]], followed this approach.{{Citation needed|date=July 2023}} Criticisms of Kant were common in the realist views of the new [[positivism]] at that time. [[Arthur Schopenhauer]] was strongly influenced by Kant's [[transcendental idealism]]. He, like [[Gottlob Ernst Schulze|G. E. Schulze]], [[Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi|Jacobi]], and Fichte before him, was critical of Kant's theory of the thing-in-itself. Things-in-themselves, they argued, are neither the cause of what we observe, nor are they completely beyond our access. Ever since the ''Critique of Pure Reason'', philosophers have been critical of Kant's theory of the thing-in-itself. Many have argued that, if such a thing exists beyond experience, then one cannot posit that it affects us causally, since that would entail stretching the category "causality" beyond the realm of experience.{{efn|For a review of this problem and the relevant literature see ''The Thing in Itself and the Problem of Affection'' in the revised edition of Henry Allison's ''Kant's Transcendental Idealism''.}} With the success and wide influence of Hegel's writings, Kant's own influence began to wane, but a re-examination of his ideas began in Germany in 1865 with the publication of ''Kant und die Epigonen'' by [[Otto Liebmann]], whose motto was "Back to Kant". There proceeded an important revival of Kant's theoretical philosophy, known as [[Neo-Kantianism]]. [[File:DR 1926 391 Immanuel Kant.jpg|thumb|upright|[[Weimar Republic]] stamp honoring Kant, 1926]] Kant's notion of "critique" has been more broadly influential. The early German Romantics, especially [[Friedrich Schlegel]] in his "Athenaeum Fragments", used Kant's reflexive conception of criticism in their Romantic theory of poetry.<ref>Schlegel, Friedrich. "Athenaeum Fragments", in ''Philosophical Fragments''. Trans. Peter Firchow. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1991. See especially fragments Nos. 1, 43, 44.</ref> Also in [[aesthetics]], [[Clement Greenberg]], in his classic essay "Modernist Painting", uses Kantian criticism, what Greenberg refers to as "immanent criticism", to justify the aims of [[Abstract art|abstract painting]], a movement Greenberg saw as aware of the key limitation—flatness—that makes up the medium of painting.<ref>Greenberg, Clement. "Modernist Painting", in ''The Philosophy of Art'', ed. Alex Neill and Aaron Ridley, McGraw-Hill, 1995.</ref> French philosopher [[Michel Foucault]] was also greatly influenced by Kant's notion of "critique" and wrote several pieces on Kant for a re-thinking of the Enlightenment as a form of "critical thought". He went so far as to classify his own philosophy as a "critical history of modernity, rooted in Kant".<ref>See "Essential Works of Foucault: 1954–1984 vol. 2: Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology". Ed. by James Faubion, Trans. Robert Hurley et al. New York City: The New Press, 1998 (2010 reprint). See "Foucault, Michel, 1926 –" entry by Maurice Florence.</ref> Kant believed that mathematical truths were forms of [[Synthetic a priori|synthetic ''a priori'']] knowledge, which means they are necessary and universal, yet known through the ''a priori'' intuition of space and time, as transcendental preconditions of experience.<ref>For a discussion and qualified defense of this position, see Stephen Palmquist, "A Priori Knowledge in Perspective: (I) Mathematics, Method and Pure Intuition", ''The Review of Metaphysics'' 41:1 (September 1987), pp. 3–22.</ref> Kant's often brief remarks about [[mathematics]] influenced the mathematical school known as [[intuitionism]], a movement in [[philosophy of mathematics]] opposed to [[David Hilbert|Hilbert]]'s [[Formalism (mathematics)|formalism]], and [[Gottlob Frege|Frege]] and [[Bertrand Russell]]'s [[logicism]].{{efn|[[Stephan Körner|Körner, Stephan]], ''The Philosophy of Mathematics'', Dover, 1986. For an analysis of Kant's writings on mathematics see, Friedman, Michael, ''Kant and the Exact Sciences'', Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1992.}} Summary: Please note that all contributions to Christianpedia may be edited, altered, or removed by other contributors. If you do not want your writing to be edited mercilessly, then do not submit it here. You are also promising us that you wrote this yourself, or copied it from a public domain or similar free resource (see Christianpedia:Copyrights for details). Do not submit copyrighted work without permission! Cancel Editing help (opens in new window) Discuss this page