2,101 Responses to “Did Immanuel Kant draw more upon idealist modern philosophers or empiricist philosophers?”

1. Theoden Says:
   April 18th, 2010 at 10:24 pm

   He is usually classified as a rationalist rather than an empiricist since empiricists give no role to a priori knowledge. But that is not quite the same issue you are asking. The truth is that much of the brilliance of Kant was his ability to synthesize the idealist and empirical philosophies. that”s why his metaphysics features both an empirical phenomenal world and an idealist noumenal world. But most of his attention is on the phenomenal world since that”s the one we can experience and actually know things about.

   Hope this helps!

2. Yaoi Shonen-ai Says:
   April 18th, 2010 at 10:44 pm

   This part, about “perceiving,” makes him a Rationalist:
   “…his argument amounted to a negation, not only of man”s consciousness, but of any consciousness, of consciousness as such. His argument, in essence, ran as follows: man is limited to a consciousness of a specific nature, which perceives by specific means and no others, therefore, his consciousness is not valid…
   “For the New Intellectual,” For the New Intellectual, 30.

   But his stated purpose was to try to bridge the gap between those Empiricism and Rationalism, not something called ”idealism.”

   “[Philosophers came to be divided] into two camps: those who claimed that man obtains his knowledge of the world by deducing it exclusively from concepts, which come from inside his head and are not derived from the perception of physical facts (the Rationalists)—and those who claimed that man obtains his knowledge from experience, which was held to mean: by direct perception of immediate facts, with no recourse to concepts (the Empiricists). To put it more simply: those who joined the [mystics] by abandoning reality—and those who clung to reality, by abandoning their mind.”
   “For the New Intellectual,” For the New Intellectual, 30.

   “The implicit, but unadmitted premise [ ] is the notion that only an ineffable consciousness can acquire a valid knowledge of reality, that “true” knowledge has to be causeless, i.e., acquired without any means of cognition.

   “The entire apparatus of Kant”s system, [rests] on a single point: that man”s knowledge is not valid because his consciousness possesses identity …”
   Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, 106

   How can a man be Empiricist, however, when his entire premise is that phenomena are not real? Noumena are real, he says. A Rationalist says we can learn little about the real world through sensory experience because our senses are limited, but at least they say our minds can make sense of the world through our limitations.

   Kant says we can”t even make “real” sense, we just have to hope that what we think we know turns out to be e"coDdk5L3r"logo-name">The Philosophers Chair … Our views on philosophy