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Immanuel kant philosophy pdf

He lived a highly disciplined life, keeping such a strict and consistent routine that locals would supposedly set their clocks by his daily walks. Immanuel Kant published his major works later on in life, notably beginning with the Critique of Pure Reason at age His ideas in epistemology and ethics, developed during an era of heated debate between rationalism and empiricism , have established him as one of the key figures in Western thought.

Kant distinguishes between:. According to Kant, the mind has structures and categories that filter and organise everything we perceive. Ideas such as space and time are not features of the external world itself but are instead ways that the mind organises and interprets experience. Space and time, he argued, are forms of intuition that shape how we perceive things, rather than actual properties of objects in the world.

In Critique of Pure Reason , Kant argued for synthetic a priori knowledge — that is, knowledge of propositions that are not merely true by definition synthetic propositions that can be arrived at independently of any experience a priori. This is in contrast to empiricists — in particular David Hume — who argued that synthetic propositions can only be known after experience a posteriori.

Kant saw this as proof that the mind has built-in structures for understanding, allowing us to have reliable knowledge that still relates to experience. Thoughts without content are void; intuitions without conceptions, blind.