Immanuel Kant’s Theory of Knowledge (1724-1804) German Philosopher

Copernican Revolution Synthetic A Priori Knowledge

Kant on Hume “Hume awakened me from my dogmatic slumber”

Critique of Pure reason Kant took In his Critique of Pure reason Kant took the best from Hume and the Empiricists and the best from Descartes and the Rationalists

Transcendental Idealism The view that: The FORM of our knowledge of reality comes from REASON But the CONTENT of our knowledge of reality comes from OUR SENSES

Form of Knowledge Comes from Reason: Relations between things Causes of things Laws relating to things Organization of things

Content of Knowledge Comes from our Senses: Tastes Smells Sounds Shapes

Example: Every event has a cause

We assume that all events have a prior cause We cannot make sense of things simply happening for no reason at all

The mind must force events to fit into the mold of cause-effect if it is to know and understand them

“Although all knowledge begins with experience, it by no means follows that all knowledge arises out of experience”

Transcendental Structure of Mind Our minds have a structure that we impose upon all the information we receive thru experience

Space Time Causality

Synthetic A Priori Knowledge We know a priori that all our experiences will include Space Time Causality