Kant
Our knowledge of the world of our experience is inevitably a knowledge that is constructed through our own frameworks and categories - this gives rise to questions about whether our "knowledge" is anything to do with the "world as it is." Kant's epistemology stands as a critique of both empiricism and rationalism. The empiricist view is wrong, since the mind is not a mere tabula rasa, which passively receives knowledge of the world through the senses. The rationalist model of knowledge is just as mistaken, as reason alone can never give rise to knowledge, since knowledge demands both concepts and the raw data supplied by the senses. Thus speculative metaphysics - the attempt to achieve theoretical knowledge of non-empirical subjects such as the existence of God, freedom and immortality - inevitably falls into illusion. It aims to gain knowledge of the world as it is in itself, but theoretical knowledge can only be of the world as it appears.
Kant held that we have no......
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Approximate Word Count: 321
Approximate Pages: 2 (260 words per double-spaced page) |