Kantianism

• Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary
  • n Kantianism The doctrine or theory of Kant; the Kantian philosophy.
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• • n kantianism The doctrine of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), one of the most influential of metaphysicians. His leading work, published in 1781 (second edition in 1787), is the “Kritik der reinen Vernunft,” or “Critic of the Pure Reason” (the word critic, borrowed from Locke, being the name of a science analogous to logic). His fundamental position is that just as blue and red are said to be “imputed” qualities, which do not exist in the outward things themselves, but are only the modes in which these things affect the eye, so every attribute is merely a mode in which the mind is affected, and has no application to a thing in itself. This is true even of such predicates as existence and possibility, and equally so of non-existence and impossibility. In short, a thing in itself is absolutely unthinkable. But just as it is quite true that one thing is blue and another red, in the sense of really so affecting the eye, so Kant does not attack the real externality of matters of fact, but only that of the forms under which alone they can be apprehended by us. The ideas which the mind thus imports into knowledge are of two kinds—those which are presented in sensation, and those which are introduced in the process of thinking. The first kind, that of the forms of intuition, consists of the ideas of space and time. Space is the form under which alone we can have external perceptions. Time is that in which all our inward experience must clothe itself, and thus our outward sensations, too, when they come to be reproduced in reflection. Thought, on the other hand, is obliged to assume the forms of propositions, and thus arise twelve general conceptions (categories). For as a proposition is either universal, particular, or singular, so the object of thought must have quantity; as propositions are either affirmative, negative, or infinitated, so the object of thought must have degree of reality, as propositions are either categorical, hypothetical, or disjunctive, so the object of thought must be either a substance with attributes inhering in it, or a cause with its effect, or mutually reacting elements; and, finally, as a proposition is either contingent, necessary, or problematical, so the object of thought must possess corresponding modes of being. In attributing an unchangeable character to these conceptions, Kant is profoundly hostile to the spirit of empiricism; but in limiting human knowledge strictly to objects of possible experience, he seemed to strike a severe blow to metaphysics. Religious ideas are, however, to be admitted as regulative principles. Kant is a severe moralist, his rule being “Act so that the maxim of thy will can likewise be valid as a principle of universal legislation.”
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• • ns Kantianism the doctrines or philosophy of Kant
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