Republic of the Philippines

CENTRAL BICOL STATE UNIVERSITY OF AGRICULTURE

Impig, Sipocot, Camarines Sur 4408
Website: www.cbsua.edu.ph
Email Address: cbsua.sipocot@cbsua.edu.ph
Trunkline: (054) 881-6681

INTRODUCTION

Enlightenment thinkers in Britain, in France and throughout Europe

questioned traditional authority and embraced the notion that humanity could be
improved through rational change. According to a common Enlightenment
assumption, as humankind clarifies the laws of nature through the advance of natural
science and philosophy, the true moral and political order will be revealed with it.
Emmanuel Kant was a German philosopher and one of the central
Enlightenment thinkers. Kant was born in 1724 in the Prussian city of Königsberg
(now Kaliningrad in Russia). His parents – Johann Georg and Anna Regina – were
pietists. Although they raised Kant in this tradition (an austere offshoot of
Lutheranism that emphasized humility and divine grace), he does not appear ever to
have been very sympathetic to this kind of religious devotion. His mother had died in
1737, and after his father’s death in 1746 Kant left the University to work as a private
tutor for several families in the countryside around the city. Kant never married and
there are many stories that paint him as a quirky but dour eccentric. These stories do
not do him justice. He was beloved by his friends and colleagues. He was
consistently generous to all those around him, including his servants. He was
universally considered a lively and engaging dinner guest and (later in life) host. And
he was a devoted and popular teacher throughout the five decades he spent in the
classroom. Although he had hoped for a small, private ceremony, when he died in
1804, age 79, his funeral was attended by the thousands who wished to pay their
respects to “the sage of Königsberg.”
As a youth, he attended the Collegium Fridericianum in Königsberg, after
which he attended the University of Königsberg. Although he initially focused his
studies on the classics, philosophy soon caught and held his attention. He returned
to the University in 1754 to teach as a Privatdozent, which meant that he was paid
directly by individual students, rather than by the University. He supported himself in
this way until 1770. Kant published many essays and other short works during this
period. He made minor scientific contributions in astronomy, physics, and earth
science, and wrote philosophical treatises engaging with the Leibnizian-Wolffian
traditions of the day (many of these are discussed below). Kant’s primary
professional goal during this period was to eventually attain the position of Professor
of Logic and Metaphysics at Königsberg. He finally succeeded in 1770 (at the age of
46) when he completed his second dissertation (the first had been published in
1755), which is now referred to as the Inaugural Dissertation. Commentators divide
Kant’s career into the “pre-critical” period before 1770 and the “critical” period after.
After the publication of the Inaugural Dissertation, Kant published hardly anything for
more than a decade (this period is referred to as his “silent decade”). However, this
was anything but a fallow period for Kant. After discovering and being shaken by the
radical skepticism of Hume’s empiricism in the early 1770s, Kant undertook a
massive project to respond to Hume. He realized that this response would require a
complete reorientation of the most fundamental approaches to metaphysics and
epistemology. Although it took much longer than initially planned, his project came to
fruition in 1781 with the publication of the first edition of Critique of Pure Reason. The
1780s would be the most productive years of Kant’s career. In addition to writing the
Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (1783) as a sort of introduction to the
Critique, Kant wrote important works in ethics (Groundwork for the Metaphysics of
Morals, 1785, and Critique of Practical Reason, 1788), he applied his theoretical
philosophy to Newtonian physical theory (Metaphysical Foundations of Natural
Science, 1786), and he substantially revised the Critique of Pure Reason in 1787.
Kant capped the decade with the publication of the third and final critique, Critique of
the Power of Judgment (1790). Kant’s comprehensive and systematic works in
epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics have made him one of the most
influential figures in modern Western philosophy.
The ethical theory of Immanuel Kant (b. 1724–d. 1804) exerted a powerful
influence on the subsequent history of philosophy and continues to be a dominant
approach to ethics, rivaling consequentialism and virtue ethics. Kant’s ethical thought
continues to be studied in itself, as a part of his critical system of philosophy, in its
historical context, and in relation to particular practical questions. Kant’s writings and
lectures display the influence of the Stoics, Rousseau, Crusius, Wolff, Hutcheson,
Hume, and others; Fichte, Hegel, Nietzsche, Bradley, Greene, Habermas, and Rawls
are among the many philosophers whose moral philosophies can be read (in part) as
responses to Kant. Many of Kant’s own discussions of particular duties, virtues, and
vices are controversial. For example, Kant appears to condemn all lies as violations
of a duty to oneself. This entry focuses on Kant’s ethics rather than Kantian ethics
more broadly. Immanuel Kant’s moral theory is grounded in a theory of intrinsic
value. But where the utilitarian take happiness, conceived of as pleasure and the
absence of pain to be what has intrinsic value, Kant takes the only think to have
moral worth for its own sake to be the good will. Persons, conceived of as
autonomous rational moral agents, are beings that have intrinsic moral worth. This
value of persons makes them deserving of moral respect. Kant’s moral theory is
often referred to as the “respect for persons” theory of morality. Whatever produces
the most happiness in the most people is the moral course of action. Kant has an
insightful objection to moral evaluations of this sort. The essence of the objection is
that utilitarian theories actually devalue the individuals it is supposed to benefit. Kant
calls his fundamental moral principle the Categorical Imperative. An imperative is
just a command. The notion of a categorical imperative can be understood in
contrast to that of a hypothetical imperative. A hypothetical imperative tells you what
to do in order to achieve some goal. Categorical imperative can be understood the
term formulation the univesalizability principle and the formula of humanity. Coming
now to the comparison of Kant's doctrines with modern physics, it looks in the first
moment as though his central concept of the 'synthetic judgments a priori' had been
completely annihilated by the discoveries of our century.