Name: Malingin, Ronibe B.

Subject: Understanding the Self

Course: BTLED-ICT 1-1A Instructor: Mr. Edgar Adam Escolano

Immanuel Kant: Life and Philosophy

Immanuel Kant is the central figure in modern philosophy and the most important
philosopher of the Enlightenment in the past 2,000 years. He was born, lived, and died
in the provincial Prussian university town of Konigsberg (now Kaliningrad in Russia).
Kant’s childhood is quite poor and religious, his family were Pietist of Lutheran Church
which emphasizes the importance of moral goodness, hard work, duty, and consistency.
He synthesized early modern rationalism and empiricism in the nineteenth and
twentieth-century philosophy which continues to exercise a significant influence today in
metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, political philosophy, aesthetics, and other fields.
Aside from this, he has 3 most famous works, these are the Critique of Pure Reason,
which was published in 1781 and revised in 1787, the Critique of Practical Reasons
(1788), and the Critique of Judgement (1790). This is the fundamental idea of Kant’s
“critical philosophy” and he argues that the human understanding is the source of the
general laws of nature that structure all our experience, and that human reason gives
itself the moral law which is our basis for belief in God, freedom, and immortality.

Furthermore, Kant’s moral philosophy is about our moral values it determines

on what we care about and what we don’t care about. Our values determine our
decisions, actions, and beliefs. This moral philosophy applies to everything in our lives.
Kant called these universalized ethical principles the “categorical imperatives”.
Categorical imperatives are the supreme principle of morality on what is right is right
and what is wrong is wrong. It has formulations in categorical imperatives, the first
states that “act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will
that it should become a universal law”, and it means that you should only act , so
everyone in the world to act in the same way and by that basis, you should refrain doing
things that you would not want everyone else to do. An example of this, the person
walked to the park to look at the beautiful flowers, one day they may want to pick some
flowers to take home, if they ask themselves what if everyone who came to the park
picked some flowers then there would be no more flowers left in the park and there will
no beautiful view and so picking flowers cannot be morally permissible. The second
formulation is “so act as to treat humanity, both in your own person, and in the
person of every other, always at the same time as an end, never simply as a
means”, you should never be used by someone else to fulfill another end, rather they
should consider ends themselves they should be treated as people. An example of this,
the slave owner forcing many people to build a giant building, the building is the end,
and people are being used as a means to build it. It forces them against their will to
build this would violate the moral law. Human beings must follow this imperative
unconditionally if they are to claim to be moral and this would create a state of peace
and harmony. Therefore, Kant continued to write his philosophy until shortly before his
death. In his last year, he became embittered due to his loss of memory, and later, he
died in 1804 at the age of 80.

References

Biography.com Editors. (2015, April 30). Immanuel Kant. Biography.

https://www.biography.com/scholar/immanuel-kant
Goodreads. (2020). Immanuel Kant quotes (Author of critique of pure reason).
Goodreads | Meet your next favorite book.
https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/11038.Immanuel_Kant
Michael Rohlf. (2020). Immanuel Kant (Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy). Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant/?
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PHILO-notes. (2020, February 17). Immanuel Kant’s Categorical Imperative [Video].
YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?
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The School of Life. (2015, November 13). PHILOSOPHY: Immanuel Kant [Video].
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SparkNotes LLC. (2020). Immanuel Kant (1724–1804): Themes, ideas, and arguments |
SparkNotes. SparkNotes: Today's Most Popular Study Guides.
https://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/kant/themes/?
fbclid=IwAR0fJdPuZ3oyVvMnO3hiHBA5XAa2gJIq6OZf0MK31YLmddpTyJGsqg
41RRE