1.

Kant background
a. Went to school in Konigsburg
b. Eventually went to teach there
2. The Three Critiques
a. Critique of pure reason (1781): epistemology or theory of
knowledge
i. Kant is overturning the common sense approach of
knowing what we know
ii. It is a way of saying Knowledge is imposed on us, but
Kant overturns this
iii. Objects conform to our way of knowing them
iv. We can know things only in the way prescribed by
the structure of human understanding (or the way we
ourselves perceive it)
v. What we know may very well be the actual world,
what is out there, but what theories are reliable once
the assumption of our ready made world is shaken?
b. Critique of Practical Reason (1788): moral philosophy
c. Critique of Judgment (1790): aesthetics
3. Letter to Markus Herz
a. on what ground rests the reference of what in us is called
representation (Vorstellung) to the object?
i. something that is placed before the mind
Vorstellung
ii. What is the relationship between objects in the world
and our mental representation of that object?
b. Empiricism our knowledge is based upon our sensory
experience of the world
c. John Lock
i. Essay Concerning Human Understanding
ii. Human mind as tabula rasa on which is written
experience derived from sense impressions
iii. Our knowledge of things is formed of ideas that are
in agreement or disagreement with one another
d. David Hume
i. Our ideas are derived from impressions
(sensations)
ii. Ideas are remembered or imagined impressions, faint
copies of our original sensations
iii. Beliefs cannot be established through reason, but are
the result of accumulated sense experience
e. Rationalism
i. Knowledge is intellectual and deducted
ii. In principle, all knowledge can be gained through
reasoning alone

iii. This is only possible in certain areas (i.e.

mathematics)
f. Rene Descartes
i. The rational pursuit of truth should doubt every belief
about reality: only that which can be recognized by
intellect by reason- can be classified as knowledge
ii. He could be certain of his own existence only if he
considered himself a thinking being- is the most
famous of the irrefutable principles regarding
knowledge developed by Descartes
1. This is a judgement that exists before any
sensort experience: a priori
g. Kant refutes both positions in a letter to Herz
4. Kants Typology of Judgements
a. The possible forms of judgments
b. Analytic judgments: predicate is contained within subject.
Triangles have three sides.
c. Synthetic judgments: based upon observation (predicate is
not contained in subject) Freds jacket is brown
i. Wont be a self-contradiction
ii. Possible to negate a synthetic judgement
d. Possible justifications for judgments
i. A posteriori: justified by appeal to experience
ii. A priori: justified by appeal to some principle
independent of experience
e. What is the possibility of synthetic a priori judgements? It
is: consider the example of 5 + 7 = 12; we a priori know 5,
7, +, but we apply + so that makes the judgment
synthetic
f. How is it possible to produce a priori cognition of
something like pure mathematics?
i. The manner in which we combine the
representations of concepts and intuitions both of
them faculties of the mind makes up the structure
of our experience
ii. We cant do geometry unless we have some
consciousness of space as a category; we cant do
arithmetic unless bring forth some concept of time