Immanuel Kant was a rational philosopher. He claimed that, after reading David Hume (who wrote about reason and cause) and realizing that science was growing, he had awakened from the ‘dogmatic slumbers’ of rationalism. He wanted to reconcile the apparent opposition between rationalism and empiricism. In his most prominent work, The Critique of Pure Reason, Kant’s argument was that there was something we could call ‘sense’, which enabled us to recognize things in space and time. But then, there were ‘things in themselves, including space, time, and matter, which were not perceived by sense but required a mind to conceive. These categories, he thought, were innate in us, and we could never perceive anything without using them. However, we did not need to know them before we experienced the world. We knew the world through our senses, but we already understood the structure of reality in our minds. When we learned about the world, we discovered things through observation.
Introduction
How do we really define Philosophy? The Greek word φιλοσοφία – Philosophia. Or as the term has been coined by modern Western language – Philosophy. The literal meaning of this word is relatively static. Derived from its Greek origin it comprises two separate words...
