Unit 4: Immanuel Kant

1. The Copernican Revolution

Before Kant, philosophers thought the mind was a passive mirror that had to conform to objects. Kant reversed this, claiming that objects must conform to the structure of our mind.

2. Types of Judgments

Kant began his critique by classifying how we make statements:

• Analytic Judgments: The predicate is already contained in the subject (e.g., "All bachelors are unmarried"). They are true by definition but add no new knowledge.
• Synthetic Judgments: The predicate adds something new (e.g., "The cat is on the mat"). Most of our knowledge is synthetic.

3. Synthetic A Priori Knowledge

This is the central question of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason: "How are synthetic a priori judgments possible?"

He argued that mathematics (7+5=12) and physics (every event has a cause) are A Priori (known independent of a specific experience) but also Synthetic (they provide universal and necessary new information).

4. Phenomena vs. Noumena

Because the mind "processes" reality, Kant made a famous distinction between two worlds:

• Phenomena: The world as it appears to us. This is the only world we can know through science and experience.
• Noumena (The Thing-in-Itself): Reality as it is independently of our perception. Kant argued we can never know the noumena; we only know how things appear to us through our mental "filters."

5. The Structure of Experience

Kant argued that the mind has two levels of filters:

1. Forms of Intuition: Space and Time. These are not "out there" in the world; they are the mental framework through which we perceive anything.
2. The Categories: Twelve innate concepts (like Causality and Substance) that the mind uses to "glue" sensory data together.