Kant, Immanuel (1724-1804)

Prussian philosopher. Kant is considered to be the paradigmatic philosopher of the Modern era, removing the last traces of scholasticism from philosophy in the eighteen century. He agreed with the rationalists that one can have exact and certain knowledge, but he followed the empiricists in holding that such knowledge is more informative about the structure of thought than about the world outside of thought.

He distinguished three kinds of knowledge: analytical a priori, which is exact and certain but uninformative, because it makes clear only what is contained in definitions; synthetic a posteriori, which conveys information about the world learned from experience, but is subject to the errors of the senses; and synthetic a priori, which is discovered by pure intuition and is both exact and certain, for it expresses the necessary conditions that the mind imposes on all objects of experience. Mathematics and philosophy, according to Kant, provide this last type.

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Philosophy

Contributed by: Richard P Whaite