Group Presentation Outline
IMMANUEL KANT AND THE
METAPHYSICS OF MORALS
1. BACKGROUND INFORMATION ON IMMANUEL KANT
A. General Information
i. He was a German philosopher who lived from 1721-1804.
ii. He is Considered to be the central figure of modern philosophy.
iii. Kant argued that the human mind creates the structures of human experience,
that reason is the source of morality, that aesthetics arises from a faculty of fair
judgment, that space and time are forms of our sensibility, and that the world as
it is “in-itself” is independent of our concepts of it.
iv. Kant took himself to have affected a Copernican revolution in philosophy, akin
to Copernicus’ reversal of the age-old belief that the sun revolved around the
earth. In Philosophy, a “Copernican Revolution” is a change in perspective as
significant to philosophy as Copernicus’ recognition that the earth is not the
center of the universe.
v. His views continue to have a significant influence on contemporary philosophy,
especially the fields of metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, political theory, and
aesthetics.
vi. His ideas influenced many thinkers in Germany during his lifetime, and he
moved philosophy beyond the debate between rationalists and empiricists.
B. Kant’s critical phase
i. He sought to ‘reverse’ the orientation of pre–critical philosophy by showing how
the traditional problems of metaphysics can be overcome by supposing that the
agreement between reality and the concepts we use to conceive it arises not
because our mental concepts have come to mirror reality passively, but because
reality must conform to the human mind’s active ideas to be conceivable and at
all possible for us to experience.
ii. Kant thus regarded the basic categories of the human mind as the
transcendental “condition of possibility” for any experience.
C. The Critique of Pure Reason
i. He attempted to explain the relationship between reason and human
experience and to move beyond the failures of traditional philosophy and
metaphysics.
ii. Kant wanted to put an end to an era of futile and speculative theories of human
experience while resisting the skepticism of thinkers such as David Hume.
iii. Kant regarded himself as ending and showing the way beyond the impasse
which modern philosophy had led to between rationalists and empiricists, and is
widely held to have synthesized these two early modern traditions in his
thought.
D. Kant’s arguments and aims
i. Kant argued that our experiences are structured by essential features of our
minds.
ii. Kant’s philosophical goal was to use logical analysis to understand reason itself.
Before we go about analyzing our world, Kant argued, we must understand the
mental tools we will be using.
iii. In his view, the mind shapes and structures experience so that, on an abstract
level, all human experience shares certain essential structural features. Kant
believed that the concepts of space and time are integral to all human
experience, as our concepts of cause and effect. One important consequence of
this view is that our experience of things is always of the phenomenal world as
conveyed by our senses: we do not have direct access to things themselves, the
