Kants Philosophy

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Term Paper Title	Kants Philosophy
# of Words	1239
# of Pages (250 words per page double spaced)	4.96

Kant's Philosophy
The keystone of Kant's philosophy, sometimes called critical philosophy, is contained in his Critique of Pure Reason (1781), in which he examined the bases of human knowledge and created an individual epistemology.  Like earlier philosophers, Kant differentiated modes of thinking into analytic and synthetic propositions.  An analytic proposition is one in which the predicate is contained in the subject, as in the statement "Black houses are houses."  The truth of this type of proposition is evident, because to state the reverse would be to make the proposition self-contradictory.  Such propositions are called analytic because truth is discovered by the analysis of the concept itself.  Synthetic propositions, on the other hand, are those that cannot be arrived at by pure analysis, as in the statement "The house is black."  All the common propositions that result from experience of the world are synthetic.
Propositions, according to Kant, can also be divided into two other types: empirical and a priori.  Empirical propositions depend entirely on sense perception, but a priori propositions have a fundamental validity and are not based on such perception.  The difference between these two types of proposition may be illustrated by the empirical "The house is black" and the a priori "Two plus two makes four."  Kant's thesis in the Critique is that it is possible to make synthetic a priori judgments.  This philosophical position is usually known as transcendentalism.  In describing how this type of judgment is possible Kant regarded the objects of the material world as fundamentally unknowable; from the point of view of reason, they serve merely as the raw material from which sensations are formed.  Objects of themselves have no existence, and space and time exist only as part of the mind, as "intuitions" by which perceptions are measured and judged.
In addition to these intuitions, Kant stated that a number of a priori concepts, which he called categories, also exist.  He divided the categories into four groups: those concerning quantity, which are unity, plurality, and totality; those concerning quality, which are reality, negation, and limitation; those concerning relation, which are substance-and-accident, cause-and-effect, and reciprocity; and those concerning modality, which are possibility, existence, and necessity.  The intuitions and the categories can be applied to make judgments about experiences and perceptions, but cannot, accordi...

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