Region	Western Philosophy
Era	18th-century philosophy
Color	#B0C4DE
Name	Immanuel Kant
Birth date	22 April 1724
Birth place	Königsberg, Prussia (Now Kaliningrad, Russia)
Death date	February 12, 1804
Death place	Königsberg, Prussia
School tradition	Kantianism, enlightenment philosophy
Main interests	Epistemology, Metaphysics, Ethics, Logic
Influences	Wolff, Baumgarten, Tetens, Thales , Plato , Aristotle , Epicurus , Hutcheson, Empiricus, Montaigne, Hume, Pythagoras , Descartes, Malebranche, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Rousseau, Newton, Emanuel Swedenborg, Shaftesbury
Influenced	Virtually all later Western Philosophy including: Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Peirce, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Cassirer, Habermas, Rawls, Chomsky, Nozick, Popper, Kierkegaard, Jung, Searle, Mises, Foucault, Arendt, Gentile, Jaspers, Bergson, Ørsted, Ayer, Emerson, Weininger, Strawson, Strauss, Putnam, McDowell, Durkheim
Notable ideas	Categorical imperative, Transcendental Idealism, Synthetic a priori, Noumenon, Sapere aude, Nebular hypothesis
Signature	Autograph-ImmanuelKant.png }}

Immanuel Kant (; 22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804) was a German philosopher from Königsberg (today Kaliningrad of Russia), researching, lecturing and writing on philosophy and anthropology at the end of the 18th century Enlightenment.

At the time, there were major successes and advances in the sciences (for example, Isaac Newton, Carl Friedrich Gauss, and Robert Boyle) using reason and logic. This stood in sharp contrast to the skepticism and lack of agreement or progress in empiricist philosophy.

Kant’s magnum opus, the ''Critique of Pure Reason'' (''Kritik der reinen Vernunft'', 1781), aimed to unite reason with experience to move beyond what he took to be failures of traditional philosophy and metaphysics. He hoped to end an age of speculation where objects outside experience were used to support what he saw as futile theories, while opposing the skepticism of thinkers such as Descartes, Berkeley and Hume.

He stated:

}} Kant proposed a ‘Copernican Revolution’ in reverse, saying that:

Kant published other important works on ethics, religion, law, aesthetics, astronomy, and history. These included the ''Critique of Practical Reason'' (''Kritik der praktischen Vernunft'', 1788) and the ''Metaphysics of Morals'' (''Die Metaphysik der Sitten'', 1797), which dealt with ethics. And the ''Critique of Judgment'' (''Kritik der Urteilskraft'', 1790), which looks at aesthetics and teleology. He aimed to resolve disputes between empirical and rationalist approaches. The former asserted that all knowledge comes through experience; the latter maintained that reason and innate ideas were prior. Kant argued that experience is purely subjective without first being processed by pure reason. He also said that using reason without applying it to experience will only lead to theoretical illusions. The free and proper exercise of reason by the individual was both a theme of the Enlightenment, and of Kant's approaches to the various problems of philosophy.

His ideas influenced many thinkers in Germany during his lifetime. He settled and moved philosophy beyond the debate between the rationalists and empiricists. The philosophers Fichte, Schelling, Hegel and Schopenhauer amended and developed the Kantian system, thus bringing about various forms of German idealism. He is seen as a major figure in the history and development of philosophy. German and European thinking progressed after his time, and his influence still inspires philosophical work today.

Biography

Immanuel Kant was born in 1724 in Königsberg, the capital of Prussia at that time, today the city of Kaliningrad in the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad Oblast. He was the fourth of nine children (four of them reached adulthood). Baptized 'Emanuel', he changed his name to 'Immanuel' after learning Hebrew. In his entire life, he never traveled more than ten miles from Königsberg. His father, Johann Georg Kant (1682–1746), was a German harnessmaker from Memel, at the time Prussia's most northeastern city (now Klaipėda, Lithuania). His mother, Regina Dorothea Reuter (1697–1737), was born in Nuremberg. Kant's paternal grandfather had emigrated from Scotland to East Prussia, and his father still spelled their family name "Cant". In his youth, Kant was a solid, albeit unspectacular, student. He was brought up in a Pietist household that stressed intense religious devotion, personal humility, and a literal interpretation of the Bible. Consequently, Kant received a stern educationstrict, punitive, and disciplinarythat preferred Latin and religious instruction over mathematics and science. The common myths concerning Kant's personal mannerisms are enumerated, explained, and refuted in Goldthwait's introduction to his translation of ''Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime''. It is often held that Kant lived a very strict and predictable life, leading to the oft-repeated story that neighbors would set their clocks by his daily walks. He never married, but did not seem to lack a rewarding social life - he was a popular teacher and a modestly successful author even before starting on his major philosophical works.

The young scholar

Kant showed a great aptitude to study at an early age. He was first sent to Collegium Fredericianum and then enrolled at the University of Königsberg (where he would spend his entire career) in 1740, at the age of 16. He studied the philosophy of Leibniz and Wolff under Martin Knutzen, a rationalist who was also familiar with developments in British philosophy and science and who introduced Kant to the new mathematical physics of Newton. Knutzen dissuaded Kant from the theory of pre-established harmony, which he regarded as "the pillow for the lazy mind". He also dissuaded the young scholar from idealism, which was negatively regarded by most philosophers in the 18th century. (The theory of transcendental idealism that Kant developed in the Critique of Pure Reason is not traditional idealism, i.e. the idea that reality is purely mental. In fact, Kant produced arguments against traditional idealism in the second part of the ''Critique of Pure Reason''.) His father's stroke and subsequent death in 1746 interrupted his studies. Kant became a private tutor in the smaller towns surrounding Königsberg, but continued his scholarly research. 1747 saw the publication of his first philosophical work, ''Thoughts on the True Estimation of Living Forces''.

Early work

Kant is best known for his transcendental idealist philosophy that time and space are not materially real but merely the ideal a priori condition of our internal intuition. But he worked in other areas as well. He made an important astronomical discovery, namely a discovery about the nature of the Earth's rotation, for which he won the Berlin Academy Prize in 1754. Even more importantly, from this Kant concluded that time is not a thing in itself determined from experience, objects, motion, and change, but rather an unavoidable framework of the human mind that preconditions possible experience.

According to Lord Kelvin:

According to Thomas Huxley:

In the ''General History of Nature and Theory of the Heavens (Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels)'' (1755), Kant laid out the Nebular hypothesis, in which he deduced that the Solar System formed from a large cloud of gas, a nebula. He thus attempted to explain the order of the solar system, seen previously by Newton as being imposed from the beginning by God. Kant also correctly deduced that the Milky Way was a large disk of stars, which he theorized also formed from a (much larger) spinning cloud of gas. He further suggested the possibility that other nebulae might also be similarly large and distant disks of stars. These postulations opened new horizons for astronomy: for the first time extending astronomy beyond the solar system to galactic and extragalactic realms.

From this point on, Kant turned increasingly to philosophical issues, although he continued to write on the sciences throughout his life. In the early 1760s, Kant produced a series of important works in philosophy. ''The False Subtlety of the Four Syllogistic Figures'', a work in logic, was published in 1762. Two more works appeared the following year: ''Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy'' and ''The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God''. In 1764, Kant wrote ''Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime'' and then was second to Moses Mendelssohn in a Berlin Academy prize competition with his ''Inquiry Concerning the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morality'' (often referred to as "The Prize Essay"). In 1770, at the age of 45, Kant was finally appointed Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at the University of Königsberg. Kant wrote his ''inaugural dissertation'' in defence of this appointment. This work saw the emergence of several central themes of his mature work, including the distinction between the faculties of intellectual thought and sensible receptivity. Not to observe this distinction would mean to commit the error of subreption, and, as he says in the last chapter of the dissertation, only in avoidance of this error will metaphysics flourish.

The issue that vexed Kant was central to what twentieth century scholars termed "the philosophy of mind." The flowering of the natural sciences had led to an understanding of how data reaches the brain. Sunlight may fall upon a distant object, whereupon light is reflected from various parts of the object in a way that maps the surface features (color, texture, etc.) of the object. The light reaches the eye of a human observer, passes through the cornea, is focused by the lens upon the retina where it forms an image similar to that formed by light passing through a pinhole into a camera obscura. The retinal cells next send impulses through the optic nerve and thereafter they form a mapping in the brain of the visual features of the distant object. The interior mapping is not the exterior thing being mapped, and our belief that there is a meaningful relationship between the exterior object and the mapping in the brain depends on a chain of reasoning that is not fully grounded. But the uncertainty aroused by these considerations, the uncertainties raised by optical illusions, misperceptions, delusions, etc., are not the end of the problems.

Kant saw that the mind could not function as an empty container that simply receives data from the outside. Something had to be giving order to the incoming data. Images of external objects have to be kept in the same sequence in which they were received. This ordering occurs through the mind's intuition of time. The same considerations apply to the mind's function of constituting space for ordering mappings of visual and tactile signals arriving via the already described chains of physical causation.

It is often held that Kant was a late developer, that he only became an important philosopher in his mid-50s after rejecting his earlier views. While it is true that Kant wrote his greatest works relatively late in life, there is a tendency to underestimate the value of his earlier works. Recent Kant scholarship has devoted more attention to these "pre-critical" writings and has recognized a degree of continuity with his mature work.

The silent decade

At the age of 46, Kant was an established scholar and an increasingly influential philosopher. Much was expected of him. In correspondence with his ex-student and friend Markus Herz, Kant admitted that, in the ''Inaugural Dissertation'', he had failed to account for the relation and connection between our sensible and intellectual faculties—he needed to explain how we combine sensory knowledge with reasoned knowledge, these being related but very different processes. He also credited David Hume with awakening him from "dogmatic slumber" (circa 1771). Hume had stated that experience consists only of sequences of feelings, images or sounds. Ideas such as 'cause', goodness, or objects were not evident in experience, so why do we believe in the reality of these? Kant felt that reason could remove this skepticism, and he set himself to solving these problems. He did not publish any work in philosophy for the next eleven years. Although fond of company and conversation with others, Kant isolated himself. He resisted friends' attempts to bring him out of his isolation. In 1778, in response to one of these offers by a former pupil, Kant wrote:

"Any change makes me apprehensive, even if it offers the greatest promise of improving my condition, and I am persuaded by this natural instinct of mine that I must take heed if I wish that the threads which the Fates spin so thin and weak in my case to be spun to any length. My great thanks, to my well-wishers and friends, who think so kindly of me as to undertake my welfare, but at the same time a most humble request to protect me in my current condition from any disturbance."

When Kant emerged from his silence in 1781, the result was the ''Critique of Pure Reason''. Although now uniformly recognized as one of the greatest works in the history of philosophy, this ''Critique'' was largely ignored upon its initial publication. The book was long, over 800 pages in the original German edition, and written in what some considered a convoluted style. It received few reviews, and these granted no significance to the work. Its density made it, as Johann Gottfried Herder put it in a letter to Johann Georg Hamann, a "tough nut to crack," obscured by "all this heavy gossamer". Its reception stood in stark contrast to the praise Kant had received for earlier works such as his "Prize Essay" and other shorter works that precede the first Critique. These well-received and readable tracts include one on the earthquake in Lisbon which was so popular that it was sold by the page. Prior to the change in course documented in the first Critique, his books sold well, and by the time he published ''Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime'' in 1764 he had become a popular author of some note. Kant was disappointed with the first Critique's reception. Recognizing the need to clarify the original treatise, Kant wrote the ''Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics'' in 1783 as a summary of its main views. He also encouraged his friend, Johann Schultz, to publish a brief commentary on the ''Critique of Pure Reason''.

Kant's reputation gradually rose through the 1780s, sparked by a series of important works: the 1784 essay, "Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?"; 1785's ''Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals'' (his first work on moral philosophy); and, from 1786, ''Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science.'' But Kant's fame ultimately arrived from an unexpected source. In 1786, Karl Reinhold began to publish a series of public letters on the Kantian philosophy. In these letters, Reinhold framed Kant's philosophy as a response to the central intellectual controversy of the era: the Pantheism Dispute. Friedrich Jacobi had accused the recently deceased G. E. Lessing (a distinguished dramatist and philosophical essayist) of Spinozism. Such a charge, tantamount to atheism, was vigorously denied by Lessing's friend Moses Mendelssohn, and a bitter public dispute arose among partisans. The controversy gradually escalated into a general debate over the values of the Enlightenment and the value of reason itself. Reinhold maintained in his letters that Kant's ''Critique of Pure Reason'' could settle this dispute by defending the authority and bounds of reason. Reinhold's letters were widely read and made Kant the most famous philosopher of his era.

Mature work

Kant published a second edition of the ''Critique of Pure Reason'' (''Kritik der reinen Vernunft'') in 1787, heavily revising the first parts of the book. Most of his subsequent work focused on other areas of philosophy. He continued to develop his moral philosophy, notably in 1788's ''Critique of Practical Reason'' (known as the second ''Critique'') and 1797’s ''Metaphysics of Morals''. The 1790 ''Critique of Judgment'' (the third ''Critique'') applied the Kantian system to aesthetics and teleology.

In 1792, Kant's attempt to publish the Second of the four Pieces of ''Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason'', in the journal ''Berlinische Monatsschrift'', met with opposition from the King's censorship commission, which had been established that same year in the context of 1789 French Revolution. Kant then arranged to have all four pieces published as a book, routing it through the philosophy department at the University of Jena to avoid the need for theological censorship. Kant got a now famous reprimand from the King, for this action of insubordination. When he nevertheless published a second edition in 1794, the censor was so irate that he arranged for a royal order that required Kant never to publish or even speak publicly about religion. Kant then published his response to the King's reprimand and explained himself, in the preface of ''The Conflict of the Faculties''.

He also wrote a number of semi-popular essays on history, religion, politics and other topics. These works were well received by Kant's contemporaries and confirmed his preeminent status in eighteenth century philosophy. There were several journals devoted solely to defending and criticizing the Kantian philosophy. But despite his success, philosophical trends were moving in another direction. Many of Kant's most important disciples (including Reinhold, Beck and Fichte) transformed the Kantian position into increasingly radical forms of idealism. The progressive stages of revision of Kant's teachings marked the emergence of German Idealism. Kant opposed these developments and publicly denounced Fichte in an open letter in 1799. It was one of his final acts expounding a stance on philosophical questions. In 1800 a student of Kant, Gottlob Benjamin Jäsche, published a manual of logic for teachers called ''Logik'', which he had prepared at Kant's request. Jäsche prepared the ''Logik'' using a copy of a textbook in logic by Georg Freidrich Meier entitled ''Auszug aus der Vernunftlehre'', in which Kant had written copious notes and annotations. The ''Logik'' has been considered to be of fundamental importance to Kant's philosophy, and the understanding of it. The great nineteenth century logician Charles Sanders Peirce remarked, in an incomplete review of Thomas Kingsmill Abbott's English translation of the introduction to the ''Logik'', that "Kant's whole philosophy turns upon his logic." Also, Robert Schirokauer Hartman and Wolfgang Schwarz, wrote in the translators' introduction to their English translation of the ''Logik'', "Its importance lies not only in its significance for the ''Critique of Pure Reason'', the second part of which is a restatement of fundamental tenets of the ''Logic'', but in its position within the whole of Kant's work." Kant's health, long poor, took a turn for the worse and he died at Königsberg on 12 February 1804, uttering "''Genug''" ("Enough") before expiring. His unfinished final work, the fragmentary ''Opus Postumum'', was, as its title suggests, published posthumously.

Philosophy

In Kant's essay "Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment?", Kant defined the Enlightenment as an age shaped by the Latin motto ''Sapere aude'' ("Dare to Know"). Kant maintained that one ought to think autonomously, free of the dictates of external authority. His work reconciled many of the differences between the rationalist and empiricist traditions of the 18th century. He had a decisive impact on the Romantic and German Idealist philosophies of the 19th century. His work has also been a starting point for many 20th century philosophers.

Kant asserted that, because of the limitations of argumentation in the absence of irrefutable evidence, no one could really know whether there is a God and an afterlife or not. For the sake of morality and as a ground for reason, Kant asserted, people are justified in believing in God, even though they could never know God's presence empirically. He explained:

The sense of an enlightened approach and the critical method required that "If one cannot prove that a thing ''is,'' he may try to prove that it is ''not.'' And if he succeeds in doing neither (as often occurs), he may still ask whether it is in his ''interest'' to ''accept'' one or the other of the alternatives hypothetically, from the theoretical or the practical point of view. Hence the question no longer is as to whether perpetual peace is a real thing or not a real thing, or as to whether we may not be deceiving ourselves when we adopt the former alternative, but we must ''act'' on the supposition of its being real." The presupposition of God, soul, and freedom was then a practical concern, for "Morality, by itself, constitutes a system, but happiness does not, unless it is distributed in exact proportion to morality. This, however, is possible in an intelligible world only under a wise author and ruler. Reason compels us to admit such a ruler, together with life in such a world, which we must consider as future life, or else all moral laws are to be considered as idle dreams... ."

Kant claimed to have created a "Copernican revolution" in philosophy. This involved two interconnected foundations of his "critical philosophy":

the epistemology of Transcendental Idealism and

the moral philosophy of the autonomy of practical reason.

These teachings placed the active, rational human subject at the center of the cognitive and moral worlds. Kant argued that the rational order of the world as known by science was not just the fortuitous accumulation of sense perceptions.

Conceptual unification and integration is carried out by the mind through concepts or the "categories of the understanding" operating on the perceptual manifold within space and time. The latter are not concepts, but are forms of sensibility that are a priori necessary conditions for any possible experience. Thus the objective order of nature and the causal necessity that operates within it are dependent upon the mind's processes, the product of the rule-based activity which Kant called "synthesis". There is much discussion among Kant scholars on the correct interpretation of this train of thought.

The 'two-world' interpretation regards Kant's position as a statement of epistemological limitation, that we are not able to transcend the bounds of our own mind, meaning that we cannot access the "thing-in-itself". Kant, however, also speaks of the thing in itself or ''transcendental object'' as a product of the (human) understanding as it attempts to conceive of objects in abstraction from the conditions of sensibility. Following this line of thought, some interpreters have argued that the thing in itself does not represent a separate ontological domain but simply a way of considering objects by means of the understanding alonethis is known as the two-aspect view.

The notion of the "thing in itself" was much discussed by those who came after Kant. It was argued that since the "thing in itself" was unknowable its existence could not simply be assumed. Rather than arbitrarily switching to an account that was ungrounded in anything supposed to be the "real," as did the German Idealists, another group arose to ask how our (presumably reliable) accounts of a coherent and rule-abiding universe were actually grounded. This new kind of philosophy became known as Phenomenology, and its founder was Edmund Husserl.

With regard to morality, Kant argued that the source of the good lies not in anything outside the human subject, either in nature or given by God, but rather is only the good will itself. A good will is one that acts from duty in accordance with the universal moral law that the autonomous human being freely gives itself. This law obliges one to treat humanityunderstood as rational agency, and represented through oneself as well as othersas an end in itself rather than (merely) as means to other ends the individual might hold. This necessitates practical self-reflection in which we universalize our reasons.

These ideas have largely framed or influenced all subsequent philosophical discussion and analysis. The specifics of Kant's account generated immediate and lasting controversy. Nevertheless, his thesesthat the mind itself necessarily makes a constitutive contribution to its knowledge, that this contribution is transcendental rather than psychological, that philosophy involves self-critical activity, that morality is rooted in human freedom, and that to act autonomously is to act according to rational moral principleshave all had a lasting effect on subsequent philosophy.

Theory of perception

Kant defines his theory of perception in his influential 1781 work ''The Critique of Pure Reason'', which has often been cited as the most significant volume of metaphysics and epistemology in modern philosophy. Kant maintains that our understanding of the external world had its foundations not merely in experience, but in both experience and a priori concepts, thus offering a non-empiricist critique of rationalist philosophy, which is what he and others referred to as his "Copernican revolution".

Firstly, Kant's distinction between analytic and synthetic propositions:

#Analytic proposition: a proposition whose predicate concept is contained in its subject concept; ''e.g., "All bachelors are unmarried," or, "All bodies take up space."'' #Synthetic proposition: a proposition whose predicate concept is not contained in its subject concept ; ''e.g., "All bachelors are happy," or, "All bodies have weight."

Analytic propositions are true by nature of the meaning of the words involved in the sentence—we require no further knowledge than a grasp of the language to understand this proposition. On the other hand, synthetic statements are those that tell us something about the world. The truth or falsehood of synthetic statements derives from something outside of their linguistic content. In this instance, weight is not a necessary predicate of the body; until we are told the heaviness of the body we do not know that it has weight. In this case, experience of the body is required before its heaviness becomes clear. Before Kant's first Critique, empiricists (cf. Hume) and rationalists (cf. Leibniz) assumed that all synthetic statements required experience in order to be known.

Kant, however, contests this: he claims that elementary mathematics, like arithmetic, is synthetic ''a priori'', in that its statements provide new knowledge, but knowledge that is not derived from experience. This becomes part of his over-all argument for transcendental idealism. That is, he argues that the possibility of experience depends on certain necessary conditions—which he calls ''a priori'' forms—and that these conditions structure and hold true of the world of experience. In so doing, his main claims in the "Transcendental Aesthetic" are that mathematic judgments are synthetic ''a priori'' and in addition, that Space and Time are not derived from experience but rather are its preconditions.

Once we have grasped the concepts of addition, subtraction or the functions of basic arithmetic, we do not need any empirical experience to know that 100 + 100 = 200, and in this way it would appear that arithmetic is in fact analytic. However, that it is analytic can be disproved thus: if the numbers five and seven in the calculation 5 + 7 = 12 are examined, there is nothing to be found in them by which the number 12 can be inferred. Such it is that "5 + 7" and "the cube root of 1,728" or "12" are not analytic because their reference is the same but their sense is not—that the mathematic judgment "5 + 7 = 12" tells us something new about the world. It is self-evident, and undeniably a priori, but at the same time it is synthetic. And so Kant proves a proposition can be synthetic and known a priori.

Kant asserts that experience is based both upon the perception of external objects and a priori knowledge. The external world, he writes, provides those things which we sense. It is our mind, though, that processes this information about the world and gives it order, allowing us to comprehend it. Our mind supplies the conditions of space and time to experience objects. According to the "transcendental unity of apperception", the concepts of the mind (Understanding) and the perceptions or intuitions that garner information from phenomena (Sensibility) are synthesized by comprehension. Without the concepts, intuitions are nondescript; without the intuitions, concepts are meaningless—thus the famous statement, "Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind."

Categories of the Faculty of Understanding

In studying the work of Kant one must realize that there is a distinction between "understanding" as the general concept (in German, ''das Verstehen'') and the "understanding" as a faculty of the human mind (in German, ''der Verstand'', "the intellect"). In much English language scholarship, the word "understanding" is used in both senses.

Kant deemed it obvious that we have some objective knowledge of the world, such as, say, Newtonian physics. But this knowledge relies on synthetic, ''a priori'' laws of nature, like causality and substance. The problem, then, is how this is possible. Kant’s solution was to reason that the subject must supply laws that make experience of objects possible, and that these laws are the synthetic, ''a priori'' laws of nature which we can know all objects are subject to prior to experiencing them. So to deduce all these laws, Kant examined experience in general, dissecting in it what is supplied by the mind from what is supplied by the given intuitions. This which has just been explicated is commonly called a transcendental reduction.

To begin with, Kant’s distinction between the ''a posteriori'' being contingent and particular knowledge, and the ''a priori'' being universal and necessary knowledge, must be kept in mind. For if we merely connect two intuitions together in a perceiving subject, the knowledge will always be subjective because it is derived ''a posteriori,'' when what is desired is for the knowledge to be objective, that is, for the two intuitions to refer to the object and hold good of it necessarily universally for anyone at anytime, not just the perceiving subject in its current condition. What else is equivalent to objective knowledge besides the ''a priori,'' that is to say, universal and necessary knowledge? Nothing else, and hence before knowledge can be objective, it must be incorporated under an ''a priori'' category of ''the understanding''.

For example, say a subject says, “The sun shines on the stone; the stone grows warm”, which is all he perceives in perception. His judgment is contingent and holds no necessity. But if he says, “The sunshine causes the stone to warm”, he subsumes the perception under the category of causality, which is not found in the perception, and necessarily synthesizes the concept sunshine with the concept heat, producing a necessarily universally true judgment.

To explain the categories in more detail, they are the preconditions of the construction of objects in the mind. Indeed, to even think of the sun and stone presupposes the category of subsistence, that is, substance. For the categories synthesize the random data of the sensory manifold into intelligible objects. This means that the categories are also the most abstract things one can say of any object whatsoever, and hence one can have an ''a priori'' cognition of the totality of all objects of experience if one can list all of them. To do so, Kant formulates another transcendental deduction.

Judgments are, for Kant, the preconditions of any thought. Man thinks via judgments, so all possible judgments must be listed and the perceptions connected within them put aside, so as to make it possible to examine the moments when ''the understanding'' is engaged in constructing judgments. For the categories are equivalent to these moments, in that they are concepts of intuitions in general, so far as they are determined by these moments universally and necessarily. Thus by listing all the moments, one can deduce from them all of the categories.

One may now ask: How many possible judgments are there? Kant believed that all the possible propositions within Aristotle’s syllogistic logic are equivalent to all possible judgments, and that all the logical operators within the propositions are equivalent to the moments of the understanding within judgments. Thus he listed Aristotle’s system in four groups of three: quantity (universal, particular, singular), quality (affirmative, negative, infinite), relation (categorical, hypothetical, disjunctive) and modality (problematic, assertoric, apodeictic). The parallelism with Kant’s categories is obvious: quantity (unity, plurality, totality), quality (reality, negation, limitation), relation (substance, cause, community) and modality (possibility, existence, necessity).

The fundamental building blocks of experience, i.e. objective knowledge, are now in place. First there is the sensibility, which supplies the mind with intuitions, and then there is the understanding, which produces judgments of these intuitions and can subsume them under categories. These categories lift the intuitions up out of the subject’s current state of consciousness and place them within consciousness in general, producing universally necessary knowledge. For the categories are innate in any rational being, so any intuition thought within a category in one mind will necessarily be subsumed and understood identically in any mind. In other words we filter what we see and hear.

Schema

Kant ran into a problem with his theory that the mind plays a part in producing objective knowledge. Intuitions and categories are entirely disparate, so how can they interact? Kant’s solution is the schema: a priori principles by which the transcendental imagination connects concepts with intuitions through time. All the principles are temporally bound, for if a concept is purely a priori, as the categories are, then they must apply for all times. Hence there are principles such as ''substance is that which endures through time'', and ''the cause must always be prior to the effect''.

Moral philosophy

Kant developed his moral philosophy in three works: ''Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals'' (1785), ''Critique of Practical Reason'' (1788), and ''Metaphysics of Morals'' (1797) .

In the ''Groundwork'', Kant's method involves trying to convert our everyday, obvious, rational knowledge of morality into philosophical knowledge. The latter two works followed a method of using "practical reason", which is based only upon things about which reason can tell us, and not deriving any principles from experience, to reach conclusions which are able to be applied to the world of experience (in the second part of ''The Metaphysic of Morals'').

Kant is known for his theory that there is a single moral obligation, which he called the "Categorical Imperative", and is derived from the concept of duty. Kant defines the demands of the moral law as "categorical imperatives". Categorical imperatives are principles that are intrinsically valid; they are good in and of themselves; they must be obeyed in all, and by all, situations and circumstances if our behavior is to observe the moral law. It is from the Categorical Imperative that all other moral obligations are generated, and by which all moral obligations can be tested. Kant also stated that the moral means and ends can be applied to the categorical imperative, that rational beings can pursue certain "ends" using the appropriate "means". Ends that are based on physical needs or wants will always give merely hypothetical imperatives. The categorical imperative, however, may be based only on something that is an "end in itself". That is, an end that is a means only to itself and not to some other need, desire, or purpose. He believed that the moral law is a principle of reason itself, and is not based on contingent facts about the world, such as what would make us happy, but to act upon the moral law which has no other motive than "worthiness of being happy". Accordingly, he believed that moral obligation applies only to rational agents.

A categorical imperative is an unconditional obligation; that is, it has the force of an obligation regardless of our will or desires (Contrast this with hypothetical imperative) In ''Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals'' (1785) Kant enumerated three formulations of the categorical imperative which he believed to be roughly equivalent.

Kant believed that if an action is not done with the motive of duty, then it is without moral value. He thought that every action should have pure intention behind it; otherwise it was meaningless. He did not necessarily believe that the final result was the most important aspect of an action, but that how the person felt while carrying out the action was the time at which value was set to the result.

In ''Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals'', Kant also posited the "counter-utilitarian idea that there is a difference between preferences and values and that considerations of individual rights temper calculations of aggregate utility", a concept that is an axiom in economics:

Everything has either a ''price'' or a ''dignity''. Whatever has a price can be replaced by something else as its equivalent; on the other hand, whatever is above all price, and therefore admits of no equivalent, has a dignity. But that which constitutes the condition under which alone something can be an end in itself does not have mere relative worth, i.e., price, but an intrinsic worth, i.e., a dignity. (p. 53, italics in original).

A phrase quoted by Kant, which is used to summarize the counter-utilitarian nature of his moral philosophy, is ''Fiat justitia, pereat mundus,'' ("Let justice be done, though the world perish"), which he translates loosely as "Let justice reign even if all the rascals in the world should perish from it". This appears in his 1795 ''Perpetual Peace'' (Zum ewigen Frieden. Ein philosophischer Entwurf.), Appendix 1.

The first formulation

The first formulation (Formula of Universal Law) of the moral imperative "requires that the maxims be chosen as though they should hold as universal laws of nature" . This formulation in principle has as its supreme law the creed "Always act according to that maxim whose universality as a law you can at the same time will" and is the "only condition under which a will can never come into conflict with itself [....]"

One interpretation of the first formulation is called the "universalizability test". An agent's maxim, according to Kant, is his "subjective principle of human actions": that is, what the agent believes is his reason to act. The universalisability test has five steps:

# Find the agent's maxim (i.e., an action paired with its motivation). Take for example the declaration "I will lie for personal benefit". Lying is the action; the motivation is to fulfill some sort of desire. Paired together, they form the maxim. # Imagine a possible world in which everyone in a similar position to the real-world agent followed that maxim. With no exception of one's self. This is in order for you to hold people to the same principle, that is required of yourself. # Decide whether any contradictions or irrationalities arise in the possible world as a result of following the maxim. # If a contradiction or irrationality arises, acting on that maxim is not allowed in the real world. # If there is no contradiction, then acting on that maxim is permissible, and is sometimes required.

(For a modern parallel, see John Rawls' hypothetical situation, the original position.)

The second formulation

The second formulation (or Formula of the End in Itself) holds that "the rational being, as by its nature an end and thus as an end in itself, must serve in every maxim as the condition restricting all merely relative and arbitrary ends". The principle dictates that you "[a]ct with reference to every rational being (whether yourself or another) so that it is an end in itself in your maxim", meaning that the rational being is "the basis of all maxims of action" and "must be treated never as a mere means but as the supreme limiting condition in the use of all means, i.e., as an end at the same time".

The third formulation

The third formulation (Formula of Autonomy) is a synthesis of the first two and is the basis for the "complete determination of all maxims". It says "that all maxims which stem from autonomous legislation ought to harmonize with a possible realm of ends as with a realm of nature". In principle, "So act as if your maxims should serve at the same time as the universal law (of all rational beings)", meaning that we should so act that we may think of ourselves as "a member in the universal realm of ends", legislating universal laws through our maxims (that is, a code of conduct), in a "possible realm of ends". None may elevate themselves above the universal law, therefore it is one's duty to follow the maxim(s).

Idea of God

Kant stated the practical necessity for a belief in God in his ''Critique of Practical Reason''. As an idea of pure reason, "we do not have the slightest ground to assume in an absolute manner ... the object of this idea", but adds that the idea of God cannot be separated from the relation of happiness with morality as the "ideal of the supreme good". The foundation of this connection is an intelligible moral world, and "is necessary from the practical point of view"; compare Voltaire: "If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him." In the ''Jäsche Logic'' (1800) he wrote "One cannot provide objective reality for any theoretical idea, or prove it, except for the idea of freedom, because this is the condition of the moral law, whose reality is an axiom. The reality of the idea of God can only be proved by means of this idea, and hence only with a practical purpose, i.e., to act as though (''als ob'') there is a God, and hence only for this purpose" (9:93, trans. J. Michael Young, ''Lectures on Logic,'' p. 590-91).

Along with this idea over reason and God, Kant places thought over religion and nature, i.e. the idea of religion being natural or naturalistic. Kant saw reason as natural, and as some part of Christianity is based on reason and morality, as Kant points out this is major in the scriptures, it is inevitable that Christianity is 'natural'. However, it is not 'naturalistic' in the sense that the religion does include supernatural or transcendent belief. Aside from this, a key point is that Kant saw that the Bible should be seen as a source of natural morality no matter whether there is/was any truth behind the supernatural factor, meaning that it is not necessary to know whether the supernatural part of Christianity has any truth to abide by and use the core Christian moral code.

Kant articulates in Book Four some of his strongest criticisms of the organization and practices of Christianity that encourage what he sees as a religion of counterfeit service to God. Among the major targets of his criticism are external ritual, superstition and a hierarchical church order. He sees all of these as efforts to make oneself pleasing to God in ways other than conscientious adherence to the principle of moral rightness in the choice of one's actions. The severity of Kant's criticisms on these matters, along with his rejection of the possibility of theoretical proofs for the existence of God and his philosophical re-interpretation of some basic Christian doctrines, have provided the basis for interpretations that see Kant as thoroughly hostile to religion in general and Christianity in particular (e.g., Walsh 1967).

Kant had exposure to Islam as well and reflected about the role of reason therein.

Idea of freedom

In the ''Critique of Pure Reason'', Kant distinguishes between the transcendental idea of freedom, which as a psychological concept is "mainly empirical" and refers to "the question whether we must admit a power of spontaneously beginning a series of successive things or states" as a real ground of necessity in regard to causality, and the practical concept of freedom as the independence of our will from the "coercion" or "necessitation through sensuous impulses". Kant finds it a source of difficulty that the practical concept of freedom is founded on the transcendental idea of freedom, but for the sake of practical interests uses the practical meaning, taking "no account of... its transcendental meaning", which he feels was properly "disposed of" in the Third Antinomy, and as an element in the question of the freedom of the will is for philosophy "a real stumbling-block" that has "embarrassed speculative reason".

Kant calls practical "everything that is possible through freedom", and the pure practical laws that are never given through sensuous conditions but are held analogously with the universal law of causality are moral laws. Reason can give us only the "pragmatic laws of free action through the senses", but pure practical laws given by reason ''a priori'' dictate "''what ought to be done''".

Aesthetic philosophy

Kant discusses the subjective nature of aesthetic qualities and experiences in ''Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime'', (1764). Kant's contribution to aesthetic theory is developed in the ''Critique of Judgment'' (1790) where he investigates the possibility and logical status of "judgments of taste." In the "Critique of Aesthetic Judgment," the first major division of the ''Critique of Judgment'', Kant used the term "aesthetic" in a manner that is, according to Kant scholar W.H. Walsh, its modern sense. Prior to this, in the ''Critique of Pure Reason'', Kant had, in order to note the essential differences between judgments of taste, moral judgments, and scientific judgments, abandoned the use of the term "aesthetic" as "designating the critique of taste," noting that judgments of taste could never be "directed" by "laws ''a priori''". After A. G. Baumgarten, who wrote ''Aesthetica'' (1750–58), Kant was one of the first philosophers to develop and integrate aesthetic theory into a unified and comprehensive philosophical system, utilizing ideas that played an integral role throughout his philosophy.

In the chapter "Analytic of the Beautiful" of the ''Critique of Judgment'', Kant states that beauty is not a property of an artwork or natural phenomenon, but is instead a consciousness of the pleasure which attends the 'free play' of the imagination and the understanding. Even though it appears that we are using reason to decide that which is beautiful, the judgment is not a cognitive judgment, "and is consequently not logical, but aesthetical" (§ 1). A pure judgement of taste is in fact subjective insofar as it refers to the emotional response of the subject and is based upon nothing but esteem for an object itself: it is a ''disinterested'' pleasure, and we feel that pure judgements of taste, i.e. judgements of beauty, lay claim to universal validity (§§20–22). It is important to note that this universal validity is not derived from a determinate concept of beauty but from ''common sense'' [source?]. Kant also believed that a judgement of taste shares characteristics engaged in a moral judgement: both are disinterested, and we hold them to be universal. In the chapter "Analytic of the Sublime" Kant identifies the sublime as an aesthetic quality which, like beauty, is subjective, but unlike beauty refers to an indeterminate relationship between the faculties of the imagination and of reason, and shares the character of moral judgments in the use of reason. The feeling of the sublime, itself officially divided into two distinct modes (the mathematical and the dynamical sublime), describes two subjective moments, both of which concern the relationship of the faculty of the imagination to reason. Some commentators, however, argue that Kant's critical philosophy contains a third kind of the sublime, the moral sublime, which is the aesthetic response to the moral law or a representation thereof, and a development of the "noble" sublime in Kant's theory of 1764. The mathematical sublime is situated in the failure of the imagination to comprehend natural objects which appear boundless and formless, or which appear "absolutely great" (§ 23–25). This imaginative failure is then recuperated through the pleasure taken in reason's assertion of the concept of infinity. In this move the faculty of reason proves itself superior to our fallible sensible self (§§ 25–26). In the dynamical sublime there is the sense of annihilation of the sensible self as the imagination tries to comprehend a vast might. This power of nature threatens us but through the resistance of reason to such sensible annihilation, the subject feels a pleasure and a sense of the human moral vocation. This appreciation of moral feeling through exposure to the sublime helps to develop moral character.

Kant had developed the distinction between an object of art as a material value subject to the conventions of society and the transcendental condition of the judgment of taste as a "refined" value in the propositions of his ''Idea of A Universal History'' (1784). In the Fourth and Fifth Theses of that work he identified all art as the "fruits of unsociableness" due to men's "antagonism in society", and in the Seventh Thesis asserted that while such material property is indicative of a civilized state, only the ideal of morality and the universalization of refined value through the improvement of the mind of man "belongs to culture".

Political philosophy

In ''Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch'' Kant listed several conditions that he thought necessary for ending wars and creating a lasting peace. They included a world of constitutional republics. His classical republican theory was extended in the ''Science of Right', the first part of the Metaphysics of Morals (1797).

"Kant's political teaching may be summarized in a phrase: republican government and international organization. In more characteristically Kantian terms, it is doctrine of the state based upon the law (Rechtsstaat) and of eternal peace. Indeed, in each of these formulations, both terms express the same idea: that of legal constitution or of "peace through law." ... Taken simply by itself, Kant's political philosophy, being essentially a legal doctrine, rejects by definition the opposition between moral education and the play of passions as alternate foundations for social life. The state is defined as the union of men under law. The state rightly so called is constituted by laws which are necessary a priory because they flow from very concept of law. A regime can be judged by no other criteria nor be assigned any other functions, than those proper to the lawful order as such."

He opposed "democracy," which at his time meant direct democracy, believing that majority rule posed a threat to individual liberty. He stated, "...democracy is, properly speaking, necessarily a despotism, because it establishes an executive power in which 'all' decide for or even against one who does not agree; that is, 'all,' who are not quite all, decide, and this is a contradiction of the general will with itself and with freedom." As most writers at the time he distinguished three forms of government i.e. democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy with mixed government as the most ideal form of it.

Anthropology

Kant lectured on anthropology for over 25 years. His Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View was published in 1798. (This was the subject of Michel Foucault's doctoral dissertation.) Kant's Lectures on Anthropology were published for the first time in 1997 in German. The former was translated into English and published by the Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy series in 2006.

Influence

Kant's influence on Western thought has been profound. Over and above his influence on specific thinkers, Kant changed the framework within which philosophical inquiry has been carried out. He accomplished a paradigm shift: very little philosophy is now carried out as an extension, or in the style of pre-Kantian philosophy. This shift consists in several closely related innovations that have become axiomatic, in philosophy itself and in the social sciences and humanities generally:

Kant's "Copernican revolution", that placed the role of the human subject or knower at the center of inquiry into our knowledge, such that it is impossible to philosophize about things as they are independently of us or of how they are for us;

his invention of critical philosophy, that is of the notion of being able to discover and systematically explore possible inherent limits to our ability to know through philosophical reasoning;

his creation of the concept of "conditions of possibility", as in his notion of "the conditions of possible experience"that is that things, knowledge, and forms of consciousness rest on prior conditions that make them possible, so that to understand or know them we have to first understand these conditions;

his theory that objective experience is actively constituted or constructed by the functioning of the human mind;

his notion of moral autonomy as central to humanity;

his assertion of the principle that human beings should be treated as ends rather than as means.

Some or all of these Kantian ideas can be seen in schools of thought as different from one another as German Idealism, Marxism, positivism, phenomenology, existentialism, critical theory, linguistic philosophy, structuralism, post-structuralism, and deconstructionism.

Historical influence

During his own life, there was much critical attention paid to his thought . He did have a positive influence on Reinhold, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and Novalis during the 1780s and 1790s. The school of thinking known as German Idealism developed from his writings. The German Idealists Fichte and Schelling, for example, tried to bring traditional "metaphysically" laden notions like "the Absolute," "God," or "Being" into the scope of Kant's critical thought. In so doing, the German Idealists tried to reverse Kant's view that we cannot know that which we cannot observe.

Hegel was one of his first major critics. In response to what he saw as Kant's abstract and formal account, Hegel brought about an ethic focused on the "ethical life" of the community. But Hegel's notion of "ethical life" is meant to subsume, rather than replace, Kantian ethics. And Hegel can be seen as trying to defend Kant's idea of freedom as going beyond finite "desires," by means of reason. Thus, in contrast to later critics like Nietzsche or Russell, Hegel shares some of Kant's most basic concerns.

Kant's thinking on religion was used in Britain to challenge the decline in religious faith in the nineteenth century. British Catholic writers, notably G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, followed this approach. Ronald Englefield debated this movement, and Kant's use of language.See Ronald Englefield's article, reprinted in Englefield Criticisms of Kant were common in the realist views of the new positivism at that time.

Arthur Schopenhauer was strongly influenced by Kant's transcendental idealism. He, like G. E. Schulze, Jacobi and Fichte before him, was critical of Kant's theory of the thing in itself. Things in themselves, they argued, are neither the cause of what we observe nor are they completely beyond our access. Ever since the first ''Critique of Pure Reason'' philosophers have been critical of Kant's theory of the thing in itself. Many have argued, if such a thing exists beyond experience then one cannot posit that it affects us causally, since that would entail stretching the category 'causality' beyond the realm of experience. For a review of this problem and the relevant literature see ''The Thing in Itself and the Problem of Affection'' in the revised edition of Henry Allison's ''Kant's Transcendental Idealism''. For Schopenhauer things in themselves do not exist outside the non-rational will. The world, as Schopenhauer would have it, is the striving and largely unconscious will.

With the success and wide influence of Hegel's writings, Kant's influence began to wane, though there was in Germany a movement that hailed a return to Kant in the 1860s, beginning with the publication of ''Kant und die Epigonen'' in 1865 by Otto Liebmann. His motto was "Back to Kant", and a re-examination of his ideas began (See Neo-Kantianism). During the turn of the 20th century there was an important revival of Kant's theoretical philosophy, known as the Marburg School, represented in the work of Hermann Cohen, Paul Natorp, Ernst Cassirer, and anti-Neo-Kantian Nicolai Hartmann.

Kant's notion of "Critique" or criticism has been quite influential. The Early German Romantics, especially Friedrich Schlegel in his "Athenaeum Fragments", used Kant's self-reflexive conception of criticism in their Romantic theory of poetry. Also in Aesthetics, Clement Greenberg, in his classic essay "Modernist Painting", uses Kantian criticism, what Greenberg refers to as "immanent criticism", to justify the aims of Abstract painting, a movement Greenberg saw as aware of the key limitiaton—flatness—that makes up the medium of painting. French philosopher Michel Foucault was also greatly influenced by Kant's notion of "Critique" and wrote several pieces on Kant for a re-thinking of the Enlightenment as a form of "critical thought". He went so far as to classify his own philosophy as a "critical history of modernity, rooted in Kant".

Kant believed that mathematical truths were forms of synthetic a priori knowledge, which means they are necessary and universal, yet known through intuition. Kant’s often brief remarks about mathematics influenced the mathematical school known as intuitionism, a movement in philosophy of mathematics opposed to Hilbert’s formalism, and the logicism of Frege and Bertrand Russell.

Influence on modern thinkers

With his ''Perpetual Peace'', Kant is considered to have foreshadowed many of the ideas that have come to form the democratic peace theory, one of the main controversies in political science.

The Kantian paradigm shift in philosophy and metaphysics has been sustained. Some British and American philosophers trace their intellectual origins to Hume: however, Kant acknowledged Hume as awakening him from his 'dogmatic slumbers', and his work articulated and clarified the issues looked at by Hume. (See The silent decade section, above).

Prominent recent Kantians include the British philosopher P. F. Strawson, the American philosophers Wilfrid Sellars and Christine Korsgaard.

Due to the influence of Strawson and Sellars, among others, there has been a renewed interest in Kant's view of the mind. Central to many debates in philosophy of psychology and cognitive science is Kant's conception of the unity of consciousness.

Kant's work on mathematics and synthetic a priori knowledge is also cited by theoretical physicist Albert Einstein as an early influence on his intellectual development.

Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls are two significant political and moral philosophers whose work is strongly influenced by Kant's moral philosophy. They have each argued against relativism, supporting the Kantian view that universality is essential to any viable moral philosophy.

Kant's influence also has extended to the social and behavioral sciences, as in the sociology of Max Weber, the psychology of Jean Piaget, and the linguistics of Noam Chomsky. Because of the thoroughness of the Kantian paradigm shift, his influence extends to thinkers who neither specifically refer to his work nor use his terminology.

Tomb and statue

Kant's tomb is today in a mausoleum adjoining the northeast corner of Königsberg Cathedral in what is now known as Kaliningrad, Russia. The mausoleum was constructed by the architect Friedrich Lahrs and was finished in 1924 in time for the bicentenary of Kant's birth. Originally, Kant was buried inside the cathedral, but in 1880 his remains were moved outside and placed in a neo-Gothic chapel adjoining the northeast corner of the cathedral. Over the years, the chapel became dilapidated before it was demolished to make way for the mausoleum, which was built on the same spot, where it is today.

The tomb and its mausoleum are some of the few artifacts of German times preserved by the Soviets after they conquered and annexed the city. Today, many newlyweds bring flowers to the mausoleum.

A replica of the statue of Kant that stood in German times in front of the main University of Königsberg building was donated by a German entity in the early 1990s and placed in the same grounds.

After the expulsion of Königsberg's German population at the end of World War II, the historical University of Königsberg where Kant taught was replaced by the Russian-speaking "Kaliningrad State University", which took up the campus and surviving buildings of the historic German university. In 2005, that Russian-speaking university was renamed Immanuel Kant State University of Russia in honour of Kant. The change of name was announced at a ceremony attended by President Vladimir Putin of Russia and Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of Germany, and the university further formed a Kant Society, dedicated to the study of Kantianism.

List of works

(1746) ''Thoughts on the True Estimation of Vital Forces'' (''Gedanken von der wahren Schätzung der lebendigen Kräfte'')

(1755) ''A New Explanation of the First Principles of Metaphysical Knowledge'' (''Neue Erhellung der ersten Grundsätze metaphysischer Erkenntnisse''; Doctoral Thesis: ''Principiorum primorum cognitionis metaphysicae nova dilucidatio'')

(1755) ''Universal Natural History and Theory of Heaven'' (''Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels'')

(1756) ''Monadologia Physica''

(1762) ''The False Subtlety of the Four Syllogistic Figures'' (''Die falsche Spitzfindigkeit der vier syllogistischen Figuren'')

(1763) ''The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God'' (''Der einzig mögliche Beweisgrund zu einer Demonstration des Daseins Gottes'')

(1763) ''Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy'' (''Versuch den Begriff der negativen Größen in die Weltweisheit einzuführen'')

(1764) ''Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime'' (''Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen'')

(1764) ''Essay on the Illness of the Head'' (''Über die Krankheit des Kopfes'')

(1764) ''Inquiry Concerning the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morality'' (the ''Prize Essay'') (''Untersuchungen über die Deutlichkeit der Grundsätze der natürlichen Theologie und der Moral'')

(1766) ''Dreams of a Spirit Seer'' (''On Emmanuel Swedenborg'') (''Träume eines Geistersehers'')

(1770) ''Inaugural Dissertation'' (''De mundi sensibilis atque intelligibilis forma et principiis'')

(1775) ''On the Different Races of Man'' (''Über die verschiedenen Rassen der Menschen'')

(1781) First edition of the ''Critique of Pure Reason'' (''Kritik der reinen Vernunft'') (1783) "''Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics''" (''Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik'') (1784) "An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?" (''Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?'')

(1784) "Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose" (''Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht'')

(1785) ''Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals'' (''Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten'')

(1786) ''Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science'' (''Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft'')

(1786) ''Conjectural Beginning of Human History''

(1787) Second edition of the ''Critique of Pure Reason'' (''Kritik der reinen Vernunft'') (1788) ''Critique of Practical Reason'' (''Kritik der praktischen Vernunft'') (1790) ''Critique of Judgement'' (''Kritik der Urteilskraft'') (1790) ''The Science of Right'' (1793) ''Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone'' (''Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft'')

(1793) ''On the Old Saw: That may be right in theory, but it won't work in practice'' ''(Über den Gemeinspruch: Das mag in der Theorie richtig sein, taugt aber nicht für die Praxis)''

(1795) ''Perpetual Peace'' (''Zum ewigen Frieden'')

(1797) ''Metaphysics of Morals'' (''Metaphysik der Sitten'')

(1798) ''Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View'' (''Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht'')

(1798) ''The Contest of Faculties'' (''Der Streit der Fakultäten'')

(1800) ''Logic'' (''Logik'')

(1803) ''On Pedagogy'' (''Über Pädagogik'')

(1804) ''Opus Postumum''

(1817) ''Lectures on Philosophical Theology'' (''Immanuel Kants Vorlesungen über die philosophische Religionslehre'' edited by K. H. L. Pölitz). [The English edition of A. W. Wood & G. M. Clark (Cornell, 1978) is based on Pölitz' second edition, 1830, of these lectures.]

See also

''Aenesidemus (book)''

Kant Russian State University

List of liberal theorists

On Vision and Colors

Political philosophy of Immanuel Kant

Rechtsstaat

Rule according to higher law

Criticism

Schopenhauer's criticism of the Kantian philosophy

Schopenhauer's criticism of Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals

Schopenhauer's criticism of Kant's schemata

Footnotes

References and further reading

Any suggestion of further reading on Kant has to take cognizance of the fact that his work has dominated philosophy like no other figure after him. Nevertheless, several guideposts can be made out. In Germany, the most important contemporary interpreter of Kant and the movement of German Idealism which he began is Dieter Henrich, who has some work available in English. P.F. Strawson's "The Bounds of Sense" (1969) played a significant role in determining the contemporary reception of Kant in England and America. More recent interpreters of note in the English-speaking world include Lewis White Beck, Jonathan Bennett, Henry Allison, Paul Guyer, Christine Korsgaard, Stephen Palmquist, Robert B. Pippin, Roger Scruton, Rudolf Makkreel, and Béatrice Longuenesse.

General introductions to his thought

Scruton, Roger. ''Kant: a Very Short Introduction''. Oxford University Press, 2001. ISBN 0192801996 (provides a brief account of his life, and a lucid introduction to the three major critiques)

Broad, C. D. ''Kant: an Introduction''. Cambridge University Press, 1978. ISBN 0-521-21755-5, ISBN 0-521-29265-4

Gardner, Sebastian. ''Kant and the Critique of Pure Reason''. Routledge, 1999. ISBN 0-415-11909-X

Martin, Gottfried. ''Kant's Metaphysics and Theory of Science''. Greenwood Press, 1955 ISBN 978-0-8371-7154-8 (elucidates Kant's most fundamental concepts in their historical context)

Perez, Daniel Omar. ''Kant e o problema da significação''. Curitiba: Editora Champagnat, 2008. ISBN 9788572921879 (Portuguese)

Palmquist, Stephen. ''Kant's System of Perspectives'''': an architectonic interpretation of the Critical philosophy''. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1993. ISBN 0-8191-8927-8 (for availability see link)

Seung, T. K. 2007. ''Kant: a Guide for the Perplexed''. London: Continuum. ISBN 0-8264-8580-4

Uleman, Jennifer. ''An Introduction to Kant's Moral Philosophy''. Cambridge University Press, 2010. ISBN 978-0-521-13644-0

Satyananda Giri. ''Kant''. Durham, CT: Strategic Publishing Group, 2010. ISBN 978-1-60911-686-6

Biography and historical context

Beck, Lewis White. ''Early German Philosophy: Kant and his Predecessors.'' Harvard University Press, 1969. (a survey of Kant's intellectual background)

Beiser, Frederick C. ''The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte.'' Harvard University Press, 1987.

Beiser, Frederick C. ''German Idealism: the Struggle against Subjectivism, 1781-1801.'' Harvard University Press, 2002

Cassirer, Ernst. ''Kant's Life and Thought.'' Translation of ''Kants Leben und Lehre''. Trans., Jame S. Haden, intr. Stephan Körner. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981.

Chamberlain, Houston Stewart. ''Immanuel Kanta study and a comparison with Goethe, Leonardo da Vinci, Bruno, Plato and Descartes'', the authorised translation from the German by Lord Redesdale, with his 'Introduction', The Bodley Head, London, 1914, (2 volumes).

Gulyga, Arsenij. ''Immanuel Kant: His Life and Thought''. Trans., Marijan Despaltović. Boston: Birkhäuser, 1987.

Johnson, G.R. (ed.). ''Kant on Swedenborg. Dreams of a Spirit-Seer and Other Writings''. Swedenborg Foundation, 2002. (new translation and analysis, many supplementary texts)

Kuehn, Manfred. ''Kant: a Biography.'' Cambridge University Press, 2001. ISBN 0-521-49704-3. (now the standard biography of Kant in English)

Lehner, Ulrich L., Kants Vorsehungskonzept auf dem Hintergrund der deutschen Schulphilosophie und -theologie (Leiden: 2007) (Kant's concept of Providence and its background in German school philosophy and theology)

Pinkard, Terry. ''German Philosophy, 1760-1860: the Legacy of Idealism.'' Cambridge, 2002.

Sassen, Brigitte (ed.). ''Kant's Early Critics: the Empiricist Critique of the Theoretical Philosophy'', Cambridge, 2000.

Collections of essays

Guyer, Paul. ed. ''The Cambridge Companion to Kant.'' Cambridge University Press, 1992. ISBN 0-521-36587-2, ISBN 0-521-36768-9. ''Excellent collection of papers that covers most areas of Kant's thought''

Förster, Eckart ed. "Kant's Transcendental Deductions: The Three 'Critiques' and the 'Opus Postumum.'" Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989. ''Includes an important essay by Dieter Henrich'

Cohen, Ted and Paul Guyer eds. ''Essays in Kant's Aesthetics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. ''Essays on Kant's Critique of Judgment''

Firestone, Chris L. and Stephen Palmquist (eds.). ''Kant and the New Philosophy of Religion''. Indiana University Press, 2006. ISBN 0-253-21800-4

Mohanty, J.N. and Robert W. Shahan. eds. ''Essays on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.'' Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1982. ISBN 0-8061-1782-6

Phillips, Dewi et al. ''Kant and Kierkegaard on Religion.'' Palgrave Macmillian, 2000, ISBN 0-312-23234-9 ''Collection of essays about Kantian religion and its influence on Kierkegaardian and contemporary philosophy of religion.''

''Proceedings of the International Kant Congresses.'' Several Congresses (numbered) edited by various publishers.

Theoretical philosophy

Allison, Henry. ''Kant’s Transcendental Idealism.'' New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983, 2004. ISBN 0-300-03629-9, ISBN 0-300-03002-9. (a very influential defense of Kant's idealism, recently revised)

Ameriks, Karl. ''Kant's Theory of Mind: An Analysis of the Paralogisms of Pure Reason.'' Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982. (one of the first detailed studies of the Dialectic in English)

Banham, Gary. ''Kant's Transcendental Imagination'' London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

Deleuze, Gilles. ''Kant's Critical Philosophy''. Trans., Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. University of Minnesota Press, 1984. ISBN 0-8166-1341-9, ISBN 0-8166-1436-9

Dottarelli, Luciano. ''Kant e la metafisica come scienza'', Roma: Erre Emme, 1995. ISBN 88-85378-75-7 (Italian)

Farias, Vanderlei de Oliveira. ''Kants Realismus und der Aussenweltskeptizismus''. OLMS. Hildesheim, Zürich, New York. 2006. (German)

Gram, Moltke S. ''The Transcendental Turn: The Foundation of Kant's Idealism.'' Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1984. ISBN 0-8130-0787-9

Greenberg, Robert. ''Kant's Theory of A Priori Knowledge''. Penn State Press, 2001 ISBN 0-271-02083-0

Guyer, Paul. ''Kant and the Claims of Knowledge''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. (modern defense of the view that Kant's theoretical philosophy is a "patchwork" of ill-fitting arguments)

Heidegger, Martin. ''Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics''. Trans., Richard Taft. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. ISBN 0-253-21067-4

Henrich, Dieter. ''The Unity of Reason: Essays on Kant’s Philosophy.'' Ed. with introduction by Richard L. Velkley; trans. Jeffrey Edwards ''et al''. Harvard University Press, 1994. ISBN 0-674-92905-5

Kemp Smith, Norman. ''A Commentary to Kant's ‘Critique of Pure Reason''. London: Macmillan, 1930. (somewhat dated, but influential commentary on the first Critique, recently reprinted)

Kitcher, Patricia. ''Kant's Transcendental Psychology.'' New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.

Longuenesse, Béatrice. ''Kant and the Capacity to Judge.'' Princeton University Press, 1998. ISBN 0-691-04348-5. (argues that the notion of judgment provides the key to understanding the overall argument of the first Critique)

Melnick, Arthur. ''Kant's Analogies of Experience.'' Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973. (important study of Kant's Analogies, including his defense of the principle of causality)

Paton, H. J. ''Kant’s Metaphysic of Experience: a Commentary on the First Half of the Kritik der reinen Vernunft''. Two volumes. London: Macmillan, 1936. (eExtensive study of Kant's theoretical philosophy)

Pippin, Robert B.. ''Kant's Theory of Form: an Essay on the Critique of Pure Reason.'' New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982. (influential examination of the formal character of Kant's work)

Sala, Giovanni. Kant, Lonergan und der christliche Glaube (Nordhausen: Bautz, 2005), ed. by Ulrich L. Lehner and Ronald K. Tacelli

Schopenhauer, Arthur. ''Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. Erster Band. Anhang. Kritik der Kantischen Philosophie''. F. A. Brockhaus, Leipzig 1859 (In English: Arthur Schopenhauer, New York: Dover Press, Volume I, Appendix, "Criticism of the Kantian Philosophy", ISBN 0-486-21761-2)

Seung, T. K. ''Kant's Transcendental Logic''. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969.

Sgarbi, Marco. La Kritik der reinen Vernunft nel contesto della tradizione logica aristotelica, Hildesheim, Olms 2010

Strawson, P.F. ''The Bounds of Sense: an essay on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.'' Routledge, 1989. (work that revitalized the interest of contemporary analytic philosophers in Kant)

Wolff, Robert Paul. ''Kant's Theory of Mental Activity: a Commentary on the Transcendental Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason.'' Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963. (detailed and influential commentary on the first part of the Critique of Pure Reason)

Yovel, Yirmiahu. ''Kant and the Philosophy of History''. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. (review)

Practical philosophy

Allison, Henry, ''Kant's theory of freedom'' Cambridge University Press 1990.

Banham, Gary. ''Kant's Practical Philosophy: From Critique to Doctrine'' Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

Koorsgaard, Christine M. ''The Sources of Normativity'' Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Michalson, Gordon E. ''Fallen Freedom: Kant on Radical Evil and Moral Regeneration.'' Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Michalson, Gordon E. ''Kant and the Problem of God.'' Blackwell Publishers, 1999.

Paton, H. J. ''The Categorical Imperative; a study in Kant's moral philosophy'' University of Pennsylvania Press 1971.

Rawls, John. ''Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy. '' Cambridge, 2000.

Seung, T.K. ''Kant's Platonic Revolution in Moral and Political Philosophy''. Johns Hopkins, 1994.

Wolff, Robert Paul. ''The Autonomy of Reason: A Commentary on Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals.'' New York: HarperCollins, 1974. ISBN 0-06-131792-6.

Wood, Allen. ''Kant's Ethical Thought'' New York: Cambridge University Press: 1999.

Aesthetics

Allison, Henry. ''Kant's Theory of Taste: A Reading of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment''. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Banham, Gary. ''Kant and the Ends of Aesthetics''. London and New York: Macmillan Press, 2000.

Clewis, Robert. ''The Kantian Sublime and the Revelation of Freedom''. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Crawford, Donald. ''Kant's Aesthetic Theory''. Wisconsin, 1974.

Guyer, Paul. ''Kant and the Claims of Taste''. Cambridge, MA and London, 1979.

Hammermeister, Kai. ''The German Aesthetic Tradition''. Cambridge University Press, 2002.

''Immanuel Kant'' entry in Kelly, Michael (Editor in Chief) (1998) ''Encyclopedia of Aesthetics''. New York, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Makkreel, Rudolf, ''Imagination and Interpretation in Kant''. Chicago, 1990.

McCloskey, Mary. ''Kant's Aesthetic''. SUNY, 1987.

Schaper, Eva. ''Studies in Kant's Aesthetics''. Edinburgh, 1979.

Zammito, John H. ''The Genesis of Kant's Critique of Judgment''. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1992.

Zupancic, Alenka. ''Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan''. Verso, 2000.

Philosophy of religion

Palmquist, Stephen. Kant's Critical Religion: Volume Two of ''Kant's System of Perspectives''. Ashgate, 2000. ISBN 0-7546-1333-X

Perez, Daniel Omar. "Religión, Política y Medicina en Kant: El Conflicto de las Proposiciones". Cinta de Moebio. ''Revista de Epistemologia de Ciencias Sociales'', v. 28, p. 91-103, 2007. Uchile.cl (Spanish)

Other work

White, Mark D. ''Kantian Ethics and Economics: Autonomy, Dignity, and Character''. Stanford University Press, 2011. ISBN 978-0-8047-6894-8. (Reviewed in The Montreal Review)

Braver, Lee. ''A Thing of This World: a History of Continental Anti-Realism''. Northwestern University Press: 2007. ISBN 978-0-8101-2380-9 (This study covers Kant and his contribution to the history of Continental Anti-Realism)

Caygill, Howard. ''A Kant Dictionary''. Oxford, UK; Cambridge, Mass., US: Blackwell Reference, 1995. ISBN 0-631-17534-2, ISBN 0-631-17535-0

Derrida, Jacques. ''Mochlos; or, The Conflict of the Faculties''. Columbia University, 1980.

Mosser, Kurt. ''Necessity and Possibility; The Logical Strategy of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason''. Catholic University of America Press, 2008. ISBN 978-0-8132-1532-7

Perez, D. O. . Os significados dos conceitos de hospitalidade em Kant e a problemática do estrangeiro. Revista Philosophica (Chile), v. 31, p. 43-53, 2007. Também em Konvergencias, 2007, nro. 15. UCV.cl, Konvergencias.net

Perez, D. O. A loucura como questão semântica:uma interpretação kantiana. Trans/Form/Ação, São Paulo, 32(1): 95-117, 2009. Scielo.br

Contemporary philosophy with a Kantian influence

Herman, Barbara. ''The Practice of Moral Judgement''. Harvard University Press, 1993.

Korsgaard, Christine. ''Creating the Kingdom of Ends''. Cambridge; New York, NY, US: Cambridge University Press, 1996. ISBN 0-521-49644-6, ISBN 0-521-49962-3 (pbk.) (not a commentary, but a defense of a broadly Kantian approach to ethics)

McDowell, John. ''Mind and World.'' Harvard University Press, 1994. ISBN 0-674-57609-8. (offers a Kantian solution to a dilemma in contemporary epistemology regarding the relation between mind and world)

Parfit, Derek. ''On What Matters'' (2 vols). New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. ISBN ISBN 9780199265923

Pinker, Steven. ''The Stuff of Thought''. Viking Press, 2007. ISBN 978-0-670-06327-7. (Chapter 4 "Cleaving the Air" discusses Kant's anticipation of modern cognitive science)

Wood, Allen. ''Kant's Ethical Thought''. Cambridge; New York, NY, US: Cambridge University Press, 1999. ISBN 0-521-64836-X. (comprehensive, in-depth study of Kant's ethics, with emphasis on formula of humanity as most accurate formulation of the categorical imperative)

External links

(More German works at Wikisource)

(More German works at Project Gutenberg)

(More English works at The University of Adelaide Library)

Digital edition of Kant's Collected Works, vols. 1-23 in German

Works by Immanuel Kant in audio format from LibriVox

Stephen Palmquist's Glossary of Kantian Terminology

Kant's Categories as grammatical reifications

Kant's Ethical Theory Kantian ethics explained, applied and evaluated

Kant & Ethics Extensive links and discussions from Lawrence Hinman at University of San Diego

Notes on Deontology A conveniently brief survey of Kant's deontology

Kant on the Web on Stephen Palmquist's website

Kant Links

Kant Can: Allen Wood Clears A Path To Kants Complex Philosophies

Kant's Epistemology and Metaphysics according to the Friesian school

German Idealist Foundations of Durkheim's Sociology and Teleology of Knowledge

Several Kant's works in clickable pdf

Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (14 sections on Kant)

International Kant Interview - 2004

Readable versions of Prolegomena, Groundwork for the Metaphysic of Morals, Critique of Pure Reason, and Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (J. Bennett translations)

Kant's moral philosophy and the question of pre-emptive war, Revue Sens Public

Kant in the Classroom background information for Kant's lectures

Works: text, concordances and frequency list

Kant's Death Mask

The ''Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy'' has several entries on Kant:

Immanuel Kant

Kant's Philosophical Development

Kant's Critique of Metaphysics

Kant's Theory of Judgment

Kant's Philosophy of Science

Kant's View of the Mind and Consciousness of Self

Kant's Aesthetics and Teleology

Kant's Philosophy of Religion

Kant's Moral Philosophy

Kant and Leibniz

Category:1724 births Category:1804 deaths Category:18th-century German people Category:18th-century philosophers Category:18th-century Prussian people Category:Continental philosophers Category:Deontological ethics Category:Enlightenment philosophers Category:Epistemologists Category:German idealism Category:German philosophers Category:German Christians Category:German anthropologists Category:German logicians Category:German Lutherans Category:German people of Scottish descent Category:Idealists Kantianism Kantian philosophers Category:Members of the Prussian Academy of Sciences Category:Moral philosophers Category:Natural philosophers Category:Ontologists Category:People from East Prussia Category:People from Kaliningrad Category:People from Königsberg Category:People of Baltic German descent Category:Philosophers of art Category:Philosophers of law Category:Philosophers of science Category:Philosophy of sexuality Category:Political liberals (international relations) Category:Political theorists Category:University of Königsberg faculty Category:University of Königsberg alumni

af:Immanuel Kant als:Immanuel Kant am:አማኑኤል ካንት ar:إيمانويل كانت an:Immanuel Kant ast:Immanuel Kant az:İmmanuel Kant bn:ইমানুয়েল কান্ট zh-min-nan:Immanuel Kant be:Імануіл Кант be-x-old:Імануіл Кант bcl:Immanuel Kant bg:Имануел Кант bs:Immanuel Kant br:Immanuel Kant ca:Immanuel Kant cv:Иммануил Кант cs:Immanuel Kant cy:Immanuel Kant da:Immanuel Kant de:Immanuel Kant et:Immanuel Kant el:Iμμάνουελ Καντ eml:Immanuel Kant es:Immanuel Kant eo:Immanuel Kant ext:Immanuel Kant eu:Immanuel Kant fa:ایمانوئل کانت hif:Immanuel Kant fo:Immanuel Kant fr:Emmanuel Kant fy:Immanuel Kant ga:Immanuel Kant gd:Immanuel Kant gl:Immanuel Kant gan:康德 ko:이마누엘 칸트 hy:Իմանուիլ Կանտ hi:इमानुएल कांट hr:Immanuel Kant io:Immanuel Kant id:Immanuel Kant ia:Immanuel Kant is:Immanuel Kant it:Immanuel Kant he:עמנואל קאנט jv:Immanuel Kant ka:იმანუელ კანტი kk:Иммануил Кант rw:Emmanuel Kant sw:Immanuel Kant ku:Immanuel Kant mrj:Кант, Иммануил la:Immanuel Kantius lv:Imanuels Kants lb:Immanuel Kant lt:Immanuel Kant li:Immanuel Kant hu:Immanuel Kant mk:Имануел Кант ml:ഇമ്മാനുവേൽ കാന്റ് mt:Immanuel Kant mr:इम्मॅन्युएल कांट arz:ايمانويل كانط ms:Immanuel Kant mn:Иммануил Кант nah:Immanuel Kant nl:Immanuel Kant ne:इमानुएल क्यान्ट ja:イマヌエル・カント no:Immanuel Kant nn:Immanuel Kant oc:Immanuel Kant pnb:کانٹ ps:امانوېل کانت pms:Immanuel Kant tpi:Immanuel Kant nds:Immanuel Kant pl:Immanuel Kant pt:Immanuel Kant kaa:Immanuel Kant ro:Immanuel Kant rm:Immanuel Kant qu:Immanuel Kant rue:Іммануіл Кант ru:Кант, Иммануил sa:इमान्युएल काण्ट sc:Immanuel Kant sq:Immanuel Kant scn:Immanuel Kant simple:Immanuel Kant sk:Immanuel Kant sl:Immanuel Kant ckb:ئیمانوێل کانت sr:Имануел Кант sh:Immanuel Kant fi:Immanuel Kant sv:Immanuel Kant tl:Immanuel Kant ta:இம்மானுவேல் கண்ட் tt:Иммануил Кант te:కాంట్ th:อิมมานูเอล คานต์ tr:Immanuel Kant uk:Іммануїл Кант ur:کانٹ vep:Kant Immanuel' vi:Immanuel Kant vo:Immanuel Kant fiu-vro:Kanti Immanuel war:Immanuel Kant yi:אימאנועל קאנט yo:Immanuel Kant zh-yue:康德 diq:Immanuel Kant bat-smg:Imanoelės Kants zh:伊曼努尔·康德

name	Geoffrey Warnock
birth date	16 August 1923
birth place	Leeds, England
death date	October 08, 1995
death place	Axford, Wiltshire, England
known for	Philosopher and Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University
alma mater	New College, Oxford
title	Sir
children	5
spouse	Mary Warnock
website	}}

Sir Geoffrey James Warnock (16 August 1923 – 8 October 1995) was a philosopher and Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University. Before his knighthood (in the 1986 New Year Honours), he was commonly known as G. J. Warnock.

Life

Warnock was born in Leeds, northern England and was educated at Winchester College. He then served with the Irish Guards until 1945, before entering New College, Oxford with a classics scholarship. He was elected to a Fellowship at Magdalen College, Oxford in 1949. After spending three years at Brasenose College, he returned to Magdalen as a Fellow and tutor in philosophy. In 1970, he was elected to Principal of Hertford College, Oxford (1971 to 1988), where there is now a society and student house named after him. He was also the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford from 1981 to 1985.

Warnock married Mary Warnock, a philosophy fellow of St Hugh's College, Oxford and later Baroness Warnock, in 1949. They had two sons and three daughters. He retired to live near Marlborough, Wiltshire in 1988 and died in 1995 at Axford in Wiltshire.

Works

''Berkeley'', Penguin Books, 1953.

''English Philosophy Since 1900'', 1st edition, Oxford University Press, 1958; 2nd edition, Oxford University Press, 1969.

''The Object of Morality'', Methuen, 1971. ISBN 0416137806.

References

External links

Geoffrey Warnock on Kant Discussion with Bryan Magee — 5-part YouTube video series

Photograph of Geoffrey and Mary Warnock by Steve Pyke

Category:1923 births Category:1995 deaths Category:People from Leeds Category:Old Wykehamists Category:Alumni of New College, Oxford Category:Fellows of Magdalen College, Oxford Category:Fellows of Brasenose College, Oxford Category:Principals of Hertford College, Oxford Category:Vice-Chancellors of the University of Oxford Category:English philosophers Category:British knights Category:George Berkeley scholars

is:Geoffrey Warnock

This is a list of people whose names in English are commonly appended with the phrase "''the Great''", or who were called that or an equivalent phrase in their own language. Other languages have their own suffixes such as ''e Bozorg'' and ''e azam'' in Persian and Urdu respectively.

In Persia, the title "the Great" at first seems to be a colloquial version of the Old Persian title "Great King". This title was first used by the conqueror Cyrus II of Persia.

The Persian title was inherited by Alexander III of Macedon (336–323 BC) when he conquered the Persian Empire, and the epithet "Great" eventually became personally associated with him. The first reference (in a comedy by Plautus) assumes that everyone knew who "Alexander the Great" was; however, there is no earlier evidence that Alexander III of Macedon was called "''the Great''".

The early Seleucid kings, who succeeded Alexander in Persia, used "Great King" in local documents, but the title was most notably used for Antiochus the Great (223–187 BC).

Later rulers and commanders began to use the epithet "the Great" as a personal name, like the Roman general Pompey. Others received the surname retrospectively, like the Carthaginian Hanno and the Indian emperor Ashoka the Great. Once the surname gained currency, it was also used as an honorific surname for people without political careers, like the philosopher Albert the Great.

As there are no objective criteria for "greatness", the persistence of later generations in using the designation greatly varies. For example, Louis XIV of France was often referred to as "The Great" in his lifetime but is rarely called such nowadays, while Frederick II of Prussia is still called "The Great". A later Hohenzollern - Wilhelm I - was often called "The Great" in the time of his grandson Wilhelm II, but rarely later.

Rulers

Abbas I of Persia (1571–1629), Shah of Iran

Akbar (1542–1605), ruler of the Mughal Empire of South Asia, mainly India

Alain I of Albret (1440–1522), French aristocrat

Alexander the Great (356-323 BC), King of Macedonia, Persia, Greece, Egypt, and all of Mesopotamia

Alexander I of Georgia (1386–1446), King of Georgia

Alfonso III of León (c. 848-910), King of León, Galicia and Asturias

Alfred the Great (848/849-899), King of Wessex

Antiochus III the Great (c. 241–187 BC), ruler of the Seleucid Empire

Ashoka the Great (c. 304–232 BC), Indian emperor of the Maurya dynasty

Ashot I of Iberia “the Great”(died 826/830), presiding prince of Iberia (modern Georgia),

Askia Mohammad I (c. 1442–1538), ruler of the Songhai Empire

Bhumibol Adulyadej (born 1927), King of Thailand

Bolesław I Chrobry (967-1025), sometimes called "the Great", first King of Poland

Bruno the Great (925–965), Archbishop of Cologne and Duke of Lotharingia (also listed in the following section)

Buddha Yodfa Chulaloke (1736–1809), founder and ruler of the Rattanakosin Kingdom (in what is now Thailand)

Cnut the Great (c. 985 or 995-1035), King of Denmark, England, Norway and parts of Sweden

Casimir III the Great (1310–1370), King of Poland

Catherine the Great (1729–1796), Empress of Russia

Chandragupta II (reigned 375-413/415), also known as Vikramaditya, ruler of the Gupta empire in India

Charlemagne (died 814), King of the Franks and Emperor of the Romans

Chulalongkorn (1853–1910), King of Siam (now Thailand)

Chlothar II (584-629), King of Neustria and King of the Franks

Conrad, Margrave of Meissen (c. 1097-1157), Margrave of Meissen

Constantine I (c. 272-337), Roman emperor

Cyaxares the Great (c. 625-585 BC), third king of Media

Cyrus the Great (c. 600 BC or 576 BC–530 BC), founder and ruler of the Persian or Achaemenid Empire

Darius the Great (550 – 486 BC), third ruler of the Persian Empire

Devapala (died 850), ruler of the Pala Empire in the Indian subcontinent

Dionysius I, Greek tyrant of Syracuse

Ferdinand I of León and Castile (c. 1015–1065), King of León and Count of Castile

Frederick the Great (1712–1786), King of Prussia

Genghis Khan (1162?-1227), founder and Great Khan of the Mongol Empire

Gero (c. 900–965), ruler of Marca Geronis, a very large march in Europe

Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden (1594–1632), King of Sweden, founder of the Swedish Empire, and noted military leader

Gwanggaeto the Great, King of Goguryeo, one of the Three Kingdoms of Korea

Hanno the Great, the name of three leaders of Carthage, in the 4th, 3rd, and 2nd centuries BC

Henry I, Duke of Burgundy (946–1002)

Henry IV of France (1553–1610), King of France and King of Navarre

Herod the Great (73/74 BC-4 BC), King of Judea

Hugh the Great (898-956), Duke of the Franks and Count of Paris

Hugh Magnus of France (1007–1025), co-King of France

Hugh I, Count of Vermandois (1057–1101)

Humphrey I de Bohun (died c. 1123), Anglo-Norman aristocrat

Ivan III of Russia (1440–1505), Tsar of Russia

John I of Portugal (1358–1433), King of Portugal and the Algarve

John II of Aragon (1398–1479), King of Aragon and, through his wife, King of Navarre

Justinian I (483-565), Byzantine Emperor

Kamehameha I (c. 1758-1819), first King of Hawai'i

Kanishka (died c. 127), ruler of the Kushan Empire in Central Asia and parts of India

Kvirike III of Kakheti (1010–1029), King of Kakheti in eastern Georgia

Kublai Khan (1215–1294), Mongol ruler in the 13th century and Emperor of China; founder of the Yuan Dynasty

Llywelyn the Great (c. 1172–1240), Prince of Gwynedd and de facto ruler of most of Wales

Louis I of Hungary (1326–1382), King of Hungary, Croatia and Poland

Mangrai the Great (1238–1317), Lanna, northern Thailand

Emperor Meiji (1852–1912), Emperor of Japan

Mircea I of Wallachia (1355–1418)

Mithridates II of Parthia (died 88 BC), ruler of the Parthian Empire (in present day Iran)

Mithridates VI of Pontus (134 BC–63 BC), ruler of Pontus and the Bosporan Kingdom

Mstislav I of Kiev (1076–1132), Grand Prince of Kievan Rus

Naresuan (1555–1605), King of Ayutthaya

Narai (1633–1688), King of Ayutthaya (in what is now modern Thailand)

Odo the Great (died c. 735), Duke of Aquitaine

Otto I, Holy Roman Emperor (912-973)

K'inich Janaab' Pakal (603-683), ruler of the Mayan city-state of Palenque

Parakramabahu I of Polonnaruwa (1123–1186), King of Sri Lanka

Peter Krešimir IV of Croatia (died 1075), King of Croatia

Peter the Great (1672–1725), Tsar of Russia

Peter III of Aragon (1239–1285), King of Aragon and King of Sicily

Pompey (106 BC-48 BC), military and political leader of the late Roman Republic, rival of Julius Caesar

Radama I (1793–1828), first king of greater Madagascar

Raja Raja Chola I (c. 947-1014), Indian emperor of the Cholas.

Rajendra Chola I (reigned 1014–1044), Tamil King of India

Ramesses II (reigned 1279 BC – 1213 BC), considered the greatest pharaoh of Ancient Egypt

Ram Khamhaeng (around 1237 to 1247-1298), King of Sukhothai (in present day Thailand)

Ramon Berenguer III, Count of Barcelona (1082–1131), also Count of Provence and various other counties

Rhodri the Great (c. 820–878), King of Gwynedd (in present day Wales)

Roman the Great (after 1160-1205), Grand Prince of Kiev

Saladin (c. 1138-1193), Kurdish Sultan of Egypt and Syria, founder of the Ayyubid dynasty, and victor over the Crusaders

Samudragupta (c. 335–375), ruler of the Gupta empire in the Indian subcontinent

Sancho III of Navarre (c. 992-1035), King of Kingdom of Navarre

Sargon of Akkad (died c. 2215 BC), ruler of the Akkadian Empire

Sejong the Great (1397–1450), Korean king

Shapur II (309-379), king of the Sassanid Empire, Persia

Simeon I of Bulgaria (864/865-927), ruler of the First Bulgarian Empire

Stephen III of Moldavia (1433–1504), Prince of Moldavia (Romania)

Stephen Uroš IV Dušan of Serbia (c. 1308-1355), King of Serbia and Emperor of the Serbs and Greeks

Taksin (1734–1782), King of the Thonburi Kingdom (Thailand)

Tamar (1160-1123), Queen of the Georgian Empire

Timur (1336–1405), better known as Tamerlane, founder of the Timurid Dynasty

Theobald II, Count of Champagne (1090–1151), Count of Blois and of Chartres as Theobald IV, Count of Champagne and of Brie

Theodoric the Great (454-526), King of the Ostrogoths, regent of the Visigoths and a viceroy of the Byzantine Empire

Theodosius I (347-395), Roman emperor

Tigranes the Great (140-55 BC), Emperor of Armenia

Tiridates III of Armenia (285-339), King of Armenia

Umar (c. 586 to 590–644), second caliph of the Muslim Empire

Valdemar I of Denmark (1131–1182), King of Denmark

Valentinian I (364-375), Roman Emperor

Vladimir I of Kiev (c. 958-1015), ruler of Kievan Rus

Vytautas (c. 1350-1430), archduke of the Lithuanian Grand Duchy

William I, Count of Burgundy (1020–1087), Count of Burgandy and Mâcon

William V, Duke of Aquitaine (969-1030), also Count of Poitou

Xerxes I (519-465 BC), King of Kings of the Achaemenid Empire (Persia)

Yu the Great (c. 2200-2100 BC), legendary ruler in ancient China

Religious figures

Abraham the Great of Kashkar (ca. 492-586), monk and saint of the Assyrian Church of the East

Abraham Kidunaia (died c. 366, hermit, priest, and Christian saint of Mesopotamia

Albertus Magnus (1193/1206–1280), medieval German philosopher and theologian

Anthony the Great (c. 251–356), early Christian saint of Egypt

Babai the Great (c. 551–628), Assyrian church leader

Basil of Caesarea (330-379), Greek bishop and theologian

Bruno the Great (925–965), Archbishop of Cologne and Duke of Lotharingia (also listed in the previous section)

Euthymius the Great (377-473), abbot and Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox saint

Gertrude the Great (1256-c. 1302), German Benedictine, mystic, theologian and Roman Catholic saint

Pope Gregory I (c. 540-604)

Hiyya the Great, 3rd-century rabbi, Palestine

Pope John Paul II (1920–2005)

Pope Leo I (c. 391 or 400-461)

Macarius of Egypt (c. 300-391), Egyptian hermit

Pope Nicholas I (c. 800-867)

Photius I of Constantinople (c. 810–c. 893), Eastern Orthodox saint and Patriarch of Constantinople

William of Maleval (died 1157), founder of the Catholic congregation of Williamites

Other

Beli Mawr, a figure in medieval Welsh literature and genealogies

Emmy the Great, folk singer

Matteo Rosso the Great, Roman politician and father of Pope Nicholas III

Prokop the Great, Hussite general in Bohemia

See also

Epithet

List of monarchs by nickname

List of nicknames of European Royalty and Nobility: G-I

James, son of Zebedee, also known as James the Greater, one of the twelve apostles of Jesus

Ajax (mythology), called Ajax the Greater

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, whose common honorific "Mahatma" means "Great Soul"

Notes

Category:Monarchs Great, List of people known as The Category:Greatest Nationals Category:Epithets

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Rick Roderick (1949–2002) was born in Abilene, Texas, son of (by his own description) a "con-man" and a "beautician". He was a teacher of philosophy at several universities, where he was much revered by many students for a socratic style of teaching combined with a brash and often humorous approach. His breakthrough into wider circles came with his engagement with The Teaching Company where he recorded several memorable lecture series. Rick Roderick died in 2002 from a congestive heart condition.

Academic career

Roderick first studied communication (self-admittedly in order to focus on anti-establishment student and anti-war activities), but moved after a few years towards philosophy. He received his B.A. at the University of Texas at Austin, did post-graduate work at Baylor University and finally earned his Ph.D. at the University of Texas.

Since 1977, Professor Roderick taught at Baylor University, the University of Texas, Duke University and National University in Los Angeles. He was the recipient of the Oldright Fellowship at the University of Texas and served as associate editor to The Pawn Review and Current Perspectives in Social Theory. Dr. Roderick was the editor of the Baylor Philosophy Journal and a member of the Phi Sigma Tau National Honor Society of Philosophy. He presented more than 25 papers, and published 13 reviews and literary criticisms, as well as numerous articles in professional journals.

Roderick was the author of the book ''Habermas and the Foundations of Critical Theory'' (1986), which has been translated to German as: ''Habermas und das Problem der Rationalität. Eine Werkmonographie'' (1989).

Selected publications

1986, ''Habermas and the foundations of critical theory'', Macmillan, 194 pages. ISBN 0333396553

1986, ''Rick Roderick - Reading Derrida Politically (Contra Rorty)'', PRAXIS International, issue: 4 / 1986

The Teaching Company series

"Philosophy and Human Values", 1990

"Nietzsche and the Post-Modern Condition", 1991

"Self Under Siege - Philosophy in the 20th Century", 1993

"Mill on Liberty", guest lecture from "The Great Minds of Western Intellectual Tradition" (1st ed), Part IV, Philosophy in the Epoch of Ideology, 2000

See also

American philosophy

List of American philosophers

References

External links

http://rickroderick.org - Video clips and transcripts

Download Rick Roderick lecture series in video and audio format

What happened to Rick Roderick?: The Bill Hicks of Philosophy – lectures and other material can be found here

Rick Roderick's page at The Teaching Company

Category:American philosophers Category:University of Texas at Austin alumni Category:Baylor University alumni Category:Duke University faculty Category:1949 births Category:2002 deaths

region	Western Philosophy
era	18th-century philosophy
birth date	May 07, 1711
birth place	Edinburgh, Scotland
death date	August 25, 1776
death place	Edinburgh, Scotland
school tradition	Scottish Enlightenment; Naturalism, Skepticism, Empiricism, Utilitarianism, Classical liberalism
main interests	Epistemology, Metaphysics, Philosophy of Mind, Ethics, Political Philosophy, Aesthetics, Philosophy of Religion, Classical Economics
alma mater	University of Edinburgh
influences	Locke, Descartes, Berkeley, Hobbes, Hutcheson, Newton, Pascal, Leibniz, Epicurus, Cicero, Malebranche, Earl of Shaftesbury, Sextus Empiricus, Pyrrho, Pierre Bayle
influenced	Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, Henry Home, Thomas Reid, Dugald Stewart, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, Immanuel Kant, Jeremy Bentham, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, Arthur Schopenhauer, African Spir, Auguste Comte, John Stuart Mill, Baron d'Holbach, Johannes Nikolaus Tetens, Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley, Thomas Robert Malthus, William James, Johann Georg Hamann, Alexius Meinong, Edmund Husserl, Bertrand Russell, Ernest Mach, Albert Einstein, Karl Popper, A. J. Ayer, J. L. Mackie, Noam Chomsky, Simon Blackburn, David Kellogg Lewis, W.V.O. Quine, John Searle, Daniel Dennett, Jerry Fodor, Kenneth Binmore, Gilles Deleuze
notable ideas	Problem of causation, Bundle theory, Induction, Association of ideas, Is–ought problem, Utility, Science of man }}

David Hume (25 August 1776) was a Scottish philosopher, historian, economist, and essayist, known especially for his philosophical empiricism and skepticism. He was one of the most important figures in the history of Western philosophy and the Scottish Enlightenment. Hume is often grouped with John Locke, George Berkeley, and a handful of others as a British Empiricist.

Beginning with his ''A Treatise of Human Nature'' (1739), Hume strove to create a total naturalistic "science of man" that examined the psychological basis of human nature. In stark opposition to the rationalists who preceded him, most notably Descartes, he concluded that desire rather than reason governed human behaviour, saying: "Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions." A prominent figure in the skeptical philosophical tradition and a strong empiricist, he argued against the existence of innate ideas, concluding instead that humans have knowledge only of things they directly experience. Thus he divides perceptions between strong and lively "impressions" or direct sensations and fainter "ideas," which are copied from impressions. He developed the position that mental behaviour is governed by "custom"; our use of induction, for example, is justified only by our idea of the "constant conjunction" of causes and effects. Without direct impressions of a metaphysical "self," he concluded that humans have no actual conception of the self, only of a bundle of sensations associated with the self.

Hume advocated a compatibilist theory of free will that proved extremely influential on subsequent moral philosophy. He was also a sentimentalist who held that ethics are based on feelings rather than abstract moral principles. Hume also examined the normative is–ought problem. He held notoriously ambiguous views of Christianity, but famously challenged the argument from design in his ''Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion'' (1777).

Kant credited Hume with waking him up from his "dogmatic slumbers" and Hume has proved extremely influential on subsequent philosophy, especially on utilitarianism, logical positivism, William James, philosophy of science, early analytic philosophy, cognitive philosophy, and other movements and thinkers. The philosopher Jerry Fodor proclaimed Hume's ''Treatise'' "the founding document of cognitive science." Also famous as a prose stylist, Hume pioneered the essay as a literary genre and engaged with contemporary intellectual luminaries such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith (who acknowledged Hume's influence on his economics and political philosophy), James Boswell, Joseph Butler, and Thomas Reid.

Life

David Hume, originally David Home, son of Joseph Home of Chirnside, advocate, and Katherine Falconer, was born on 26 April 1711 (Old Style) in a tenement on the north side of the Lawnmarket in Edinburgh. He changed his name in 1734 because the English had difficulty pronouncing 'Home' in the Scottish manner. Throughout his life Hume, who never married, spent time occasionally at his family home at Ninewells by Chirnside, Berwickshire.

Education

Hume attended the University of Edinburgh at the unusually early age of twelve (possibly as young as ten) at a time when fourteen was normal. At first he considered a career in law, but came to have, in his words, "an insurmountable aversion to everything but the pursuits of Philosophy and general Learning; and while [my family] fanceyed I was poring over Voet and Vinnius, Cicero and Virgil were the Authors which I was secretly devouring." He had little respect for the professors of his time, telling a friend in 1735, "there is nothing to be learnt from a Professor, which is not to be met with in Books."

Hume made a philosophical discovery that opened up to him "...a new Scene of Thought," which inspired him "...to throw up every other Pleasure or Business to apply entirely to it." He did not recount what this "Scene" was, and commentators have offered a variety of speculations. Due to this inspiration, Hume set out to spend a minimum of ten years reading and writing. He came to the verge of nervous breakdown, after which he decided to have a more active life to better continue his learning.

Career

As Hume's options lay between a traveling tutorship and a stool in a merchant's office, he chose the latter. In 1734, after a few months occupied with commerce in Bristol, he went to La Flèche in Anjou, France. There he had frequent discourse with the Jesuits of the College of La Flèche. As he had spent most of his savings during his four years there while writing ''A Treatise of Human Nature'', he resolved "to make a very rigid frugality supply my deficiency of fortune, to maintain unimpaired my independency, and to regard every object as contemptible except the improvements of my talents in literature". He completed the ''Treatise'' at the age of 26.

Although many scholars today consider the ''Treatise'' to be Hume's most important work and one of the most important books in Western philosophy, the critics in Great Britain at the time did not agree, describing it as "abstract and unintelligible". Despite the disappointment, Hume later wrote, "Being naturally of a cheerful and sanguine temper, I soon recovered from the blow and prosecuted with great ardour my studies in the country". There, he wrote the ''Abstract'' Without revealing his authorship, he aimed to make his larger work more intelligible.

After the publication of ''Essays Moral and Political'' in 1744, Hume applied for the Chair of Pneumatics and Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. However, the position was given to William Cleghorn, after Edinburgh ministers petitioned the town council not to appoint Hume because he was seen as an atheist.

During the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion, Hume tutored the Marquis of Annandale (1720–92), who was officially described as a "lunatic". This engagement ended in disarray after about a year. But it was then that Hume started his great historical work ''The History of England'', which took fifteen years and ran over a million words, to be published in six volumes in the period between 1754 and 1762, while also involved with the Canongate Theatre. In this context, he associated with Lord Monboddo and other Scottish Enlightenment luminaries in Edinburgh. From 1746, Hume served for three years as Secretary to Lieutenant-General St Clair, and wrote ''Philosophical Essays Concerning Human Understanding'', later published as ''An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding''. The ''Enquiry'' proved little more successful than the ''Treatise''.

Hume was charged with heresy, but he was defended by his young clerical friends, who argued that—as an atheist—he was outside the Church's jurisdiction. Despite his acquittal, Hume failed to gain the Chair of Philosophy at the University of Glasgow.

It was after returning to Edinburgh in 1752, as he wrote in ''My Own Life'', that "the Faculty of Advocates chose me their Librarian, an office from which I received little or no emolument, but which gave me the command of a large library". This resource enabled him to continue historical research for ''The History of England''.

Hume achieved great literary fame as a historian. His enormous ''The History of England'', tracing events from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution of 1688, was a best-seller in its day. In it, Hume presented political person as a creature of habit, with a disposition to submit quietly to established government unless confronted by uncertain circumstances. In his view, only religious difference could deflect people from their everyday lives to think about political matters.

However, Hume's volume of ''Political Discourses'' (published by Kincaid & Donaldson, 1752) was the only work he considered successful on first publication.

Religion

Hume wrote a great deal on religion. However, the question of what were Hume's personal views on religion is a difficult one. The Church of Scotland seriously considered bringing charges of infidelity against him.

In works such as ''On Superstition and Enthusiasm'', Hume specifically seems to support the standard religious views of his time and place. This still meant that he could be very critical of the Catholic Church, referring to it with the standard Protestant epithets and descriptions of it as superstition and idolatry as well as dismissing what his compatriots saw as uncivilised beliefs. He also considered extreme Protestant sects, which he called ''enthusiasts'', to be corrupters of religion. Yet he also put forward arguments that suggested that polytheism had much to commend it in preference to monotheism.

It is likely that Hume was skeptical both about religious belief (at least as demanded by the religious organisations of his time) and of the complete atheism promoted by such contemporaries as Baron d'Holbach. Paul Russell suggests that perhaps Hume's position is best characterised by the term "irreligion". O'Connor (2001, p19) writes that Hume "did not believe in the God of standard theism. ... but he did not rule out all concepts of deity". Also, "ambiguity suited his purposes, and this creates difficulty in definitively pinning down his final position on religion". When asked if he was an atheist, Hume would say he did not have enough faith to believe there was no god.

The perception of Hume as an atheist with an axe to grind is an oversimplification and contrasts his views on extremist positioning. Hanvelt dubs Hume as an Aristotelian in his view that rhetoric is a form of ethical studies, which ultimately make it political.

Later life

From 1763 to 1765, Hume was Secretary to Lord Hertford in Paris. He met and later fell out with Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He wrote of his Paris life, "I really wish often for the plain roughness of The Poker Club of Edinburgh ... to correct and qualify so much lusciousness". For a year from 1767, Hume held the appointment of Under Secretary of State for the Northern Department. In 1768, he settled in Edinburgh; he lived from 1771 until his death in 1776 at the southwest corner of St. Andrew's Square, in Edinburgh's New Town, at what is now 21 Saint David Street. (A popular story, consistent with some historical evidence, suggests the street was named after Hume.)

James Boswell saw Hume a few weeks before his death (which was from some form of abdominal cancer). Hume told him he sincerely believed it a "most unreasonable fancy" that there might be life after death. This meeting was dramatized in semi-fictional form for the BBC by Michael Ignatieff as ''Dialogue in the Dark''. Hume asked that he be interred in a "simple roman tomb"; in his will he requests that it be inscribed only with his name and the year of his birth and death, "leaving it to Posterity to add the Rest." It stands, as he wished it, on the southwestern slope of Calton Hill, in the Old Calton Cemetery, not far from his New Town home.

Hume's "Science of man"

In the introduction to ''A Treatise of Human Nature'', Hume writes "'Tis evident, that all the sciences have a relation, more or less, to human nature ... Even ''Mathematics'', ''Natural Philosophy'', and ''Natural Religion'', are in some measure dependent on the science of Man". Also, "the science of man is the only solid foundation for the other sciences", and the method for this science assumes "experience and observation" as the foundations of a logical argument. Because "Hume's plan is to extend to philosophy in general the methodological limitations of Newtonian physics", Hume is characterised as an empiricist.

Until recently, Hume was seen as a forerunner of the logical positivist movement; a form of anti-metaphysical empiricism. According to the logical positivists, unless a statement could be verified by experience, or else was true or false by definition (i.e. either tautological or contradictory), then it was meaningless (this is a summary statement of their verification principle). Hume, on this view, was a proto-positivist, who, in his philosophical writings, attempted to demonstrate how ordinary propositions about objects, causal relations, the self, and so on, are semantically equivalent to propositions about one's experiences.

Many commentators have since rejected this understanding of Humean empiricism, stressing an epistemological, rather than a semantic reading of his project. According to this view, Hume's empiricism consisted in the idea that it is our knowledge, and not our ability to conceive, that is restricted to what can be experienced. To be sure, Hume thought that we can form beliefs about that which extends beyond any possible experience, through the operation of faculties such as custom and the imagination, but he was skeptical about claims to ''knowledge'' on this basis.

Induction

Few philosophers are as associated with induction as David Hume; Hume himself, however, rarely used the term and when he did, he used it to support a point he was arguing. He gave no indication that he saw any problem with induction. Induction became associated with Hume only in the early twentieth century; John Maynard Keynes may have been the first to draw the connection. The connection is now standard, but is based on what current scholars mean by "induction", not how Hume used the term in his writings.

The cornerstone of Hume's epistemology is the so-called Problem of Induction. This may be the area of Hume's thought where his skepticism about human powers of reason is most pronounced. Understanding the problem of induction is central to grasping Hume's philosophical system.

The problem concerns the explanation of how we are able to make inductive inferences. Inductive inference is reasoning from the observed behaviour of objects to their behaviour when unobserved; as Hume says, it is a question of how things behave when they go "beyond the present testimony of the senses, and the records of our memory". Hume notices that we tend to believe that things behave in a regular manner; i.e., that patterns in the behaviour of objects will persist into the future, and throughout the unobserved present. This persistence of regularities is sometimes called Uniformitarianism or the Principle of the Uniformity of Nature.

Hume's argument is that we cannot rationally justify the claim that nature will continue to be uniform, as justification comes in only two varieties, and both of these are inadequate. The two sorts are: (1) demonstrative reasoning, and (2) probable reasoning. With regard to (1), Hume argues that the uniformity principle cannot be demonstrated, as it is "consistent and conceivable" that nature might stop being regular. Turning to (2), Hume argues that we cannot hold that nature will continue to be uniform because it has been in the past, as this is using the very sort of reasoning (induction) that is under question: it would be circular reasoning. Thus no form of justification will rationally warrant our inductive inferences.

Hume's solution to this problem is to argue that, rather than reason, natural instinct explains the human ability to make inductive inferences. He asserts that "Nature, by an absolute and uncontroulable necessity has determin'd us to judge as well as to breathe and feel". Although many modern commentators have demurred from Hume's solution, some have notably concurred with it, seeing his analysis of our epistemic predicament as a major contribution to the theory of knowledge. For example, the Oxford philosopher John D. Kenyon writes:

Reason might manage to raise a doubt about the truth of a conclusion of natural inductive inference just for a moment in the study, but the forces of nature will soon overcome that artificial skepticism, and the sheer agreeableness of animal faith will protect us from excessive caution and sterile suspension of belief.

Causation

The notion of causation is closely linked to the problem of induction. According to Hume, we reason inductively by associating constantly conjoined events, and it is the mental act of association that is the basis of our concept of causation. There are three main interpretations of Hume's theory of causation represented in the literature: (1) the logical positivist; (2) the skeptical realist; and (3) the quasi-realist.

The logical positivist interpretation is that Hume analyses causal propositions, such as "A caused B", in terms of regularities in perception: "A caused B" is equivalent to "Whenever A-type events happen, B-type ones follow", where "whenever" refers to all possible perceptions.

power and necessity... are... qualities of perceptions, not of objects... felt by the soul and not perceived externally in bodies

This view is rejected by skeptical realists, who argue that Hume thought that causation amounts to more than just the regular succession of events. When two events are causally conjoined, a necessary connection underpins the conjunction:

Shall we rest contented with these two relations of contiguity and succession, as affording a complete idea of causation? By no means ... there is a ''necessary connexion'' to be taken into consideration.

Hume held that we have no perceptual access to the necessary connection, hence ''skepticism'', but we are naturally compelled to believe in its objective existence, ergo ''realism''. He thus concluded that there are no necessary connections, only constant conjunctions.

Referring to the Law of Causality, Hume wrote, "I never asserted so absurd a proposition as that something could arise without a cause."

It has been argued that, whilst Hume did not think causation is reducible to pure regularity, he was not a fully fledged realist either: Simon Blackburn calls this a quasi-realist reading. On this view, talk about causal necessity is an expression of a functional change in the human mind, whereby certain events are predicted or anticipated on the basis of prior experience. The expression of causal necessity is a "projection" of the functional change onto the objects involved in the causal connection: in Hume's words, "nothing is more usual than to apply to external bodies every internal sensation which they occasion.

The self

According to the standard interpretation of Hume on personal identity, he was a Bundle Theorist, who held that the self is nothing but a bundle of experiences ("perceptions") linked by the relations of causation and resemblance; or, more accurately, that the empirically warranted idea of the self is just the idea of such a bundle. This view is forwarded by, for example, positivist interpreters, who saw Hume as suggesting that terms such as "self", "person", or "mind" referred to collections of "sense-contents". A modern-day version of the bundle theory of the mind has been advanced by Derek Parfit in his Reasons and Persons (1986).

However, some philosophers have criticised the bundle-theory interpretation of Hume on personal identity. They argue that distinct selves can have perceptions that stand in relations of similarity and causality with one another. Thus perceptions must already come parceled into distinct "bundles" before they can be associated according to the relations of similarity and causality: in other words, the mind must already possess a unity that cannot be generated, or constituted, by these relations alone. Since the bundle-theory interpretation portrays Hume as answering an ontological question, philosophers who see Hume as not very concerned with such questions have queried whether the view is really Hume's, or "only a decoy". Instead, it is suggested, Hume might have been answering an epistemological question, about the causal origin of our concept of the self. In the Appendix to the Treatise, Hume declares himself dissatisfied with his account of the self in Book 1 of the Treatise, and the question of why he is dissatisfied has received a number of different answers.

Another interpretation of Hume's view of the self has been argued for by James Giles. According to this view, Hume is not arguing for a bundle theory, which is a form of reductionism, but rather for an eliminative view of the self. That is, rather than reducing the self to a bundle of perceptions, Hume is rejecting the idea of the self altogether. On this interpretation Hume is proposing a 'No-Self Theory' and thus has much in common with Buddhist thought. Alison Gopnik has argued that Hume was in a position to learn about Buddhist thought during his time in France in the 1730s.

Practical reason

Hume's anti-rationalism informed much of his theory of belief and knowledge, in his treatment of the notions of induction, causation, and the external world. But it was not confined to this sphere, and permeated just as strongly his theories of motivation, action, and morality. In a famous sentence in the ''Treatise'', Hume circumscribes reason's role in the production of action:

Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.

It has been suggested that this position can be lucidly brought out through the metaphor of "direction of fit": beliefs—the paradigmatic products of reason—are propositional attitudes that aim to have their content fit the world; conversely, desires—or what Hume calls passions, or sentiments—are states that aim to fit the world to their contents. Though a metaphor, it has been argued that this intuitive way of understanding Hume's theory that desires are necessary for motivation "captures something quite deep in our thought about their nature".

Hume's anti-rationalism has been very influential, and defended in contemporary philosophy of action by neo-Humeans such as Michael Smith and Simon Blackburn. The major opponents of the Humean view are cognitivists about what it is to act for a reason, such as John McDowell, and Kantians, such as Christine Korsgaard.

Ethics

Hume's views on human motivation and action formed the cornerstone of his ethical theory: he conceived moral or ethical sentiments to be intrinsically motivating, or the providers of reasons for action. Given that one cannot be motivated by reason alone, requiring the input of the passions, Hume argued that reason cannot be behind morality.

Morals excite passions, and produce or prevent actions. Reason itself is utterly impotent in this particular. The rules of morality, therefore, are not conclusions of our reason.

Hume's sentimentalism about morality was shared by his close friend Adam Smith, and Hume and Smith were mutually influenced by the moral reflections of Francis Hutcheson.

Hume's theory of ethics has been influential in modern day ethical theory, helping to inspire various forms of emotivism, error theory and ethical expressivism and non-cognitivism and Alan Gibbard.

Free will, determinism, and responsibility

Hume, along with Thomas Hobbes, is cited as a classical compatibilist about the notions of freedom and determinism. The thesis of compatibilism seeks to reconcile human freedom with the mechanist belief that human beings are part of a deterministic universe, whose happenings are governed by the laws of physics.

Hume argued that the dispute about the compatibility of freedom and determinism has been kept afloat by ambiguous terminology:

From this circumstance alone, that a controversy has been long kept on foot... we may presume, that there is some ambiguity in the expression.

Hume defines the concepts of "necessity" and "liberty" as follows:

Necessity: "the uniformity, observable in the operations of nature; where similar objects are constantly conjoined together..".

Liberty: "''a power of acting or not acting, according to the determinations of the will''..".

Hume then argues that, according to these definitions, not only are the two compatible, but Liberty ''requires'' Necessity. For if our actions were not necessitated in the above sense, they would "...have so little in connexion with motives, inclinations and circumstances, that one does not follow with a certain degree of uniformity from the other." But if our actions are not thus hooked up to the will, then our actions can never be free: they would be matters of "chance; which is universally allowed not to exist".

Moreover, Hume goes on to argue that in order to be held morally responsible, it is required that our behaviour be caused, i.e. necessitated, for

Actions are, by their very nature, temporary and perishing; and where they proceed not from some ''cause'' in the character and disposition of the person who performed them, they can neither redound to his honour, if good; nor infamy, if evil

This argument has inspired modern day commentators. However, it has been argued that the issue of whether or not we hold one another morally responsible does not ultimately depend on the truth or falsity of a metaphysical thesis such as determinism, for our so holding one another is a non-rational human sentiment that is not predicated on such theses. For this influential argument, which is still made in a Humean vein, see P. F. Strawson's essay, ''Freedom and Resentment''.

Problem of miracles

In his discussion of miracles in ''An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding'' (Section 10) Hume defines a miracle as "a transgression of a law of nature by a particular volition of the Deity, or by the interposition of some invisible agent". Given that Hume argues that it is impossible to deduce the existence of a Deity from the existence of the world (for he says that causes cannot be determined from effects), miracles (including prophecy) are the only possible support he would conceivably allow for theistic religions.

Hume discusses everyday belief as often resulted from probability, where we believe an event that has occurred most often as being most likely, but that we also subtract the weighting of the less common event from that of the more common event. In the context of miracles, this means that a miraculous event should be labelled a miracle only where it would be even more unbelievable (by principles of probability) for it not to be. Hume mostly discusses miracles as testimony, of which he writes that when a person reports a miraculous event we [need to] balance our belief in their veracity against our belief that such events do not occur. Following this rule, only where it is considered, as a result of experience, less likely that the testimony is false than that a miracle occur should we believe in miracles.

Although Hume leaves open the possibility for miracles to occur and be reported, he offers various arguments against this ever having happened in history:

People often lie, and they have good reasons to lie about miracles occurring either because they believe they are doing so for the benefit of their religion or because of the fame that results.

People by nature enjoy relating miracles they have heard without caring for their veracity and thus miracles are easily transmitted even where false.

Hume notes that miracles seem to ''occur'' mostly in "ignorant" and "barbarous" nations and times, and the reason they don't occur in the "civilized" societies is such societies aren't awed by what they know to be natural events.

The miracles of each religion argue against all other religions and their miracles, and so even if a proportion of all reported miracles across the world fit Hume's requirement for belief, the miracles of each religion make the other less likely.

Despite all this Hume observes that belief in miracles is popular, and that "The gazing populace receive greedily, without examination, whatever soothes superstition and promotes wonder".

Critics have argued that Hume's position assumes the character of miracles and natural laws prior to any specific examination of miracle claims, and thus it amounts to a subtle form of begging the question. They have also noted that it requires an appeal to inductive inference, as none have observed every part of nature or examined every possible miracle claim (e.g., those yet future to the observer), which in Hume's philosophy was especially problematic.

Hume's main argument concerning miracles is the following. Miracles by definition are singular events that differ from the established Laws of Nature. The Laws of Nature are codified as a result of past experiences. Therefore a miracle is a violation of all prior experience. However the probability that something has occurred in contradiction of all past experience should always be judged to be less than the probability that either my senses have deceived me or the person recounting the miraculous occurrence is lying or mistaken, all of which I have past experience of. For Hume, this refusal to grant credence does not guarantee correctness – he offers the example of an Indian Prince, who having grown up in a hot country refuses to believe that water has frozen. By Hume's lights this refusal is not wrong and the Prince is thinking correctly; it is presumably only when he has had extensive experience of the freezing of water that he has warrant to believe that the event could occur. So for Hume, either the miraculous event will become a recurrent event or else it will never be rational to believe it occurred. The connection to religious belief is left inexplicit throughout, save for the close of his discussion wherein Hume notes the reliance of Christianity upon testimony of miraculous occurrences and makes an ironic remark that anyone who "is moved by faith to assent" to revealed testimony "is aware of a continued miracle in his own person, which subverts all principles of his understanding, and gives him a determination to believe what is most contrary to custom and experience."

Design argument

One of the oldest and most popular arguments for the existence of God is the design argument: that order and "purpose" in the world bespeaks a divine origin. Hume argued that for the design argument to be feasible, it must be true that order and purpose are observed only when they result from design. But order is often observed to result from presumably mindless processes like the generation of snowflakes and crystals. Design can account for only a tiny part of our experience of order.

Political theory

It is difficult to categorize Hume's political affiliations. His thought contains elements that are, in modern terms, both conservative and liberal, as well as ones that are both contractarian and utilitarian, though these terms are all anachronistic. Thomas Jefferson banned Hume's ''History'' from the University of Virginia, fearing that it "has spread universal toryism over the land". Yet, Samuel Johnson thought Hume "a Tory by chance... for he has no principle. If he is anything, he is a Hobbist". His central concern is to show the importance of the rule of law, and stresses throughout his political ''Essays'' the importance of moderation in politics. This outlook needs to be seen within the historical context of eighteenth century Scotland, where the legacy of religious civil war, combined with the relatively recent memory of the 1715 and 1745 Jacobite risings, fostered in a historian such as Hume a distaste for enthusiasm and factionalism that appeared to threaten the fragile and nascent political and social stability of a country that was deeply politically and religiously divided. He thinks that society is best governed by a general and impartial system of laws, based principally on the "artifice" of contract; he is less concerned about the form of government that administers these laws, so long as it does so fairly (though he thought that republics were more likely to do so than monarchies).

Hume expressed suspicion of attempts to reform society in ways that departed from long-established custom, and he counselled peoples not to resist their governments except in cases of the most egregious tyranny. However, he resisted aligning himself with either of Britain's two political parties, the Whigs and the Tories. Hume writes

My views of ''things'' are more conformable to Whig principles; my representations of persons to Tory prejudices.

McArthur says that Hume believed that we should try to balance our demands for liberty with the need for strong authority, without sacrificing either. McArthur characterizes Hume as a 'precautionary conservative': whose actions would have been "determined by prudential concerns about the consequences of change, which often demand we ignore our own principles about what is ideal or even legitimate", He supported liberty of the press, and was sympathetic to democracy, when suitably constrained. Douglass Adair has argued that Hume was a major inspiration for James Madison's writings, and the ''Federalist No. 10'' in particular. Hume was also, in general, an optimist about social progress, believing that, thanks to the economic development that comes with the expansion of trade, societies progress from a state of "barbarism" to one of "civilisation". Civilised societies are open, peaceful and sociable, and their citizens are as a result much happier. It is therefore not fair to characterise him, as Leslie Stephen did, as favouring "...that stagnation which is the natural ideal of a skeptic."

Though it has been suggested Hume had no positive vision of the best society, he in fact produced an essay titled ''Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth'', which lays out what he thought was the best form of government. His pragmatism shone through, however, in his caveat that we should only seek to implement such a system should an opportunity present itself, which would not upset established structures. He defended a strict separation of powers, decentralisation, extending the franchise to anyone who held property of value and limiting the power of the clergy. The Swiss militia system was proposed as the best form of protection. Elections were to take place on an annual basis and representatives were to be unpaid. It is also important to note that the ideal commonwealth laid out by Hume was held to be ideal only for the British Isles in the 18th century. According to Hume "good constitutions... will ensure that the private interest of men, even of bad men, will controlled and directed as to serve and produce the public good. Such is the aim of free government, which Hume calls the "happiest" society... Liberty in the sense of free government is, Hume says, "the perfection of civil society"... The wise statemen... in attempting to improve a constitution will adapt his innovations to the "ancient fabric", so as not to disturb society. His caution may be reiforced by reflections on the limits of human foresight".

Contributions to economic thought

Through his discussions on politics, Hume developed many ideas that are prevalent in the field of economics. This includes ideas on private property, inflation, and foreign trade.

Hume does not believe, as Locke does, that private property is a natural right, but he argues that it is justified since resources are limited. If all goods were unlimited and available freely, then private property would not be justified, but instead becomes an "idle ceremonial". Hume also believed in unequal distribution of property, because perfect equality would destroy the ideas of thrift and industry. Perfect equality would thus lead to impoverishment.

Hume was among the first to develop automatic price-specie flow, an idea that contrasts with the mercantile system. Simply put, when a country increases its in-flow of gold, this in-flow of gold will result in price inflation, and then price inflation will force out countries from trading that would have traded before the inflation. This results in a decrease of the in-flow of gold in the long run.

Hume also proposed a theory of beneficial inflation. He believed that increasing the money supply would raise production in the short run. This phenomenon would be caused by a gap between the increase in the money supply and that of the price level. The result is that prices will not rise at first and may not rise at all. This theory was later developed by John Maynard Keynes.

As historian of England

In 1754 to 1762 Hume published the ''History of England'', a 6-volume work of immense sweep, which extends, says its subtitle, "From the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688". Inspired by Voltaire's sense of the breadth of history, Hume widened the focus of history, away from merely Kings, Parliaments, and armies, to literature and science as well. He argued that the quest for liberty was the highest standard for judging the past, and concluded that after considerable fluctuation, England at the time of his writing had achieved "the most entire system of liberty, that was ever known amongst mankind."

Hume's coverage of the political upheavals of the 17th century relied in large part on the Earl of Clarendon's ''History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England'' (1646-69). Generally Hume took a moderate Royalist position and thought revolution was unnecessary. Hume's indeed was considered a Tory history, and emphasized religious differences more than constitutional issues. He was anti-Presbyterian, anti-Puritan, anti-Whig, and pro-monarchy. Historians have debated whether Hume posited a universal unchanging human nature, or allowed for evolution and development.

Hume was an early cultural historian of science. His short biographies of leading scientists explored the process of scientific change. He developed new ways of seeing scientists in the context of their times by looking at how they interacted with society and each other. He covers over 40 scientists, with special attention paid to Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle, and Isaac Newton. Hume awarded the palm of greatness to William Harvey.

The ''History'' sold well and was influential for nearly a century when it was superseded by Goldsmith's history (which itself was partly plagiarized from Hume's). By 1894, there were at least 50 editions. There was also an often-reprinted abridgement, ''The Student's Hume'' (1859).

Works

''A Kind of History of My Life'' (1734) Mss 23159 National Library of Scotland. A letter to an unnamed physician, asking for advice about "the Disease of the Learned" that then afflicted him. Here he reports that at the age of eighteen "there seem'd to be open'd up to me a new Scene of Thought..." that made him "throw up every other Pleasure or Business" and turned him to scholarship. ''A Treatise of Human Nature: Being an Attempt to introduce the experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects''. (1739–40) Hume intended to see whether the ''Treatise of Human Nature'' met with success, and if so to complete it with books devoted to Politics and Criticism. However, it did not meet with success. As Hume himself said, "It fell ''dead-born from the press'', without reaching such distinction as even to excite a murmur among the zealots" and so was not completed. ''An Abstract of a Book lately Published: Entitled A Treatise of Human Nature etc''. (1740) Anonymously published, but almost certainly written by Hume in an attempt to popularise his ''Treatise''. Of considerable philosophical interest, because it spells out what he considered "The Chief Argument" of the ''Treatise'', in a way that seems to anticipate the structure of the ''Enquiry concerning Human Understanding''.

''Essays Moral and Political'' (first ed. 1741–2) A collection of pieces written and published over many years, though most were collected together in 1753–4. Many of the essays are focused on topics in politics and economics, though they also range over questions of aesthetic judgement, love, marriage and polygamy, and the demographics of ancient Greece and Rome, to name just a few of the topics considered. The Essays show some influence from Addison's ''Tatler'' and ''The Spectator'', which Hume read avidly in his youth.

''A Letter from a Gentleman to His Friend in Edinburgh: Containing Some Observations on a Specimen of the Principles concerning Religion and Morality, said to be maintain'd in a Book lately publish'd, intituled A Treatise of Human Nature etc''. Edinburgh (1745). Contains a letter written by Hume to defend himself against charges of atheism and scepticism, while applying for a Chair at Edinburgh University.

''An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding'' (1748) Contains reworking of the main points of the ''Treatise'', Book 1, with the addition of material on free will (adapted from Book 2), miracles, the Design Argument, and mitigated scepticism. ''Of Miracles'', section X of the ''Enquiry'', was often published separately,

''An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals'' (1751) A reworking of material from Book 3 of the ''Treatise'', on morality, but with a significantly different emphasis. Hume regarded this as the best of all his philosophical works, both in its philosophical ideas and in its literary style.

''Political Discourses'', (part II of ''Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary'' within vol. 1 of the larger ''Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects'') Edinburgh (1752). Included in ''Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects'' (1753–6) reprinted 1758–77.

''Political Discourses''/''Discours politiques'' (1752–1758), ''My ovn life'' (1776), ''Of Essay writing'', 1742. Bilingual English-French (translated by Fabien Grandjean). Mauvezin, France, Trans-Europ-Repress, 1993, 22 cm, V-260 p. Bibliographic notes, index.

''Four Dissertations'' London (1757). Included in reprints of ''Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects'' (above).

''The History of England'' (Sometimes referred to as ''The History of Great Britain'') (1754–62) More a category of books than a single work, Hume's history spanned "from the invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution of 1688" and went through over 100 editions. Many considered it ''the'' standard history of England until Thomas Macaulay's ''History of England''.

''The Natural History of Religion'' (1757)

"My Own Life" (1776) Penned in April, shortly before his death, this autobiography was intended for inclusion in a new edition of "Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects". It was first published by Adam Smith who claimed that by doing so he had incurred "ten times more abuse than the very violent attack I had made upon the whole commercial system of Great Britain". (Ernest Campbell Mossner, The Life of David Hume) ''Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion'' (1779) Published posthumously by his nephew, David Hume the Younger. Being a discussion among three fictional characters concerning the nature of God, and is an important portrayal of the argument from design. Despite some controversy, most scholars agree that the view of Philo, the most sceptical of the three, comes closest to Hume's own.

Hume's influence

Attention to Hume's philosophical works grew after the German philosopher Immanuel Kant credited Hume with awakening him from "dogmatic slumbers" (''circa'' 1770).

According to Schopenhauer, "there is more to be learned from each page of David Hume than from the collected philosophical works of Hegel, Herbart and Schleiermacher taken together".

A. J. Ayer (1936), introducing his classic exposition of logical positivism, claimed: "The views which are put forward in this treatise derive from the logical outcome of the empiricism of Berkeley and Hume." Albert Einstein (1915) wrote that he was inspired by Hume's positivism when formulating his Special Theory of Relativity. Hume was called "the prophet of the Wittgensteinian revolution" by N. Phillipson, referring to his view that mathematics and logic are closed systems, disguised tautologies, and have no relation to the world of experience. David Fate Norton (1993) asserted that Hume was "the first post-sceptical philosopher of the early modern period".

Hume's Problem of Induction was also of fundamental importance to the philosophy of Karl Popper. In his autobiography, ''Unended Quest'', he wrote: "'Knowledge' ... is ''objective''; and it is hypothetical or conjectural. This way of looking at the problem made it possible for me to reformulate Hume's ''problem of induction''". This insight resulted in Popper's major work The Logic of Scientific Discovery. In his Conjectures and Refutations, p 55, he writes:

"I approached the problem of induction through Hume. Hume, I felt, was perfectly right in pointing out that induction cannot be logically justified".

See also

George Anderson (minister)

Hume Studies

Age of reason

Contributions to liberal theory

Human science

Hume's fork

Hume's Law

Hume's principle

Liberalism

The Missing Shade of Blue

Scientific scepticism

Further reading

Ardal, Pall (1966). Passion and Value in Hume's Treatise. Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press.

Beauchamp, Tom and Rosenberg, Alexander, ''Hume and the Problem of Causation'' New York, Oxford University Press, 1981.

Ernest Campbell Mossner. ''The Life of David Hume''. Oxford University Press, 1980. (The standard biography.)

Peter Millican. ''Critical Survey of the Literature on Hume and his First Enquiry''. (Surveys around 250 books and articles on Hume and related topics.) Davidhume.org

David Fate Norton. ''David Hume: Commonsense Moralist, Skeptical Metaphysician''. Princeton University Press, 1978.

Garrett, Don (1996). Cognition and Commitment in Hume's Philosophy. New York & Oxford, Oxford University Press.

J.C.A. Gaskin. ''Hume's Philosophy of Religion''. Humanities Press International, 1978.

P. J. E. Kail (2007) Projection and Realism in Hume's Philosophy, Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Norman Kemp Smith''.The Philosophy of David Hume''. Macmillan, 1941. (Still enormously valuable.)

Frederick Rosen, ''Classical Utilitarianism from Hume to Mill'' (Routledge Studies in Ethics & Moral Theory), 2003. ISBN 0-415-22094-7

Russell, Paul (1995). Freedom and Moral Sentiment: Hume's Way of Naturalizing Responsibility. New York & Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Russell, Paul (2008). The Riddle of Hume's Treatise: Skepticism, Naturalism and Irreligion New York & Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Stroud, B. (1977). Hume, Routledge, London & New York. (Complete study of Hume's work parting from the interpretation of Hume's naturalistic philosophical programme).

Hesselberg, A. Kenneth (1961). Hume, Natural Law and Justice. Duquesne Review

Gilles Deleuze, ''Empirisme et subjectivité. Essai sur la Nature Humaine selon Hume'' (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1953) trans. ''Empiricism and Subjectivity'' (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991)

Fieser, James (2011) . ''David Hume (1711-1776) ''University of Tennessee, U. S. A. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Footnotes

References

Anderson, R. F. (1966). ''Hume's First Principles'', University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln.

Ayer, A. J. (1936). ''Language, Truth and Logic''. London.

Bongie, L. L. (1998) ''David Hume — Prophet of the Counter-Revolution''. Liberty Fund, Indianapolis,

Broackes, Justin (1995). ''Hume, David'', in Ted Honderich (ed.) ''The Oxford Companion to Philosophy'', New York, Oxford University Press,

Daiches D., Jones P., Jones J. (eds )''The Scottish Enlightenment: 1730–1790 A Hotbed of Genius'' The University of Edinburgh, 1986. In paperback, The Saltire Society, 1996 ISBN 0-85411-069-0

Einstein, A. (1915) ''Letter to Moritz Schlick'', Schwarzschild, B. (trans. & ed.) in ''The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein'', vol. 8A, R. Schulmann, A. J. Fox, J. Illy, (eds.) Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ (1998), p. 220.

Flew, A. (1986). ''David Hume: Philosopher of Moral Science'', Basil Blackwell, Oxford.

Fogelin, R. J. (1993). ''Hume's scepticism''. In Norton, D. F. (ed.) (1993). ''The Cambridge Companion to Hume'', Cambridge University Press, pp. 90–116.

Garfield, Jay L. (1995) ''The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way'' Oxford University Press

Giles, J. (1997) ''No Self to be Found: The Search for Personal Identity'' University Press of America.

Graham, R. (2004). ''The Great Infidel — A Life of David Hume''. John Donald, Edinburgh.

Harwood, Sterling (1996). "Moral Sensibility Theories", in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Supplement) (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co.).

Hume, D. (EHU) (1777). ''An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding''. Nidditch, P. N. (ed.), 3rd. ed. (1975), Clarendon Press, Oxford.

Hume, D. (1751). ''An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals''. David Hume, ''Essays Moral, Political, and Literary'' edited with preliminary dissertations and notes by T.H. Green and T.H. Grose, 1:1–8. London: Longmans, Green 1907.

Hume, D. (1740). ''A Treatise of Human Nature'' (1967, edition). Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Hume, D. (1752–1758). ''Political Discourses''

:Bilingual English-French (translated by Fabien Grandjean). Mauvezin, France, Trans-Europ-Repress, 1993, 22 cm, V-260 p. Bibliographic notes, index.

Husserl, E. (1970). ''The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology'', Carr, D. (trans.), Northwestern University Press, Evanston.

Kolakowski, L. (1968). ''The Alienation of Reason: A History of Positivist Thought'', Doubleday, Garden City.

Morris, William Edward, ''David Hume'', The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2001 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)

Norton, D. F. (1993). ''Introduction to Hume's thought''. In Norton, D. F. (ed.), (1993). ''The Cambridge Companion to Hume'', Cambridge University Press, pp. 1–32.

O'Connor, D. (2001). ''Routledge philosophy guidebook to Hume and religion'', Routledge, London.

Penelhum, T. (1993). ''Hume's moral philosophy''. In Norton, D. F. (ed.), (1993). ''The Cambridge Companion to Hume'', Cambridge University Press, pp. 117–147.

Phillipson, N. (1989). ''Hume'', Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London.

Popkin, Richard H. (1993) "Sources of Knowledge of Sextus Empiricus in Hume's Time" Journal ''of the History of Ideas'', Vol. 54, No. 1. (Jan., 1993), pp. 137–141.

Popkin, R. & Stroll, A. (1993) ''Philosophy''. Reed Educational and Professional Publishing Ltd, Oxford.

Popper. K. (1960). ''Knowledge without authority''. In Miller D. (ed.), (1983). ''Popper'', Oxford, Fontana, pp. 46–57.

Robinson, Dave & Groves, Judy (2003). ''Introducing Political Philosophy''. Icon Books. ISBN 1-84046-450-X.

Russell, B. (1946). ''A History of Western Philosophy''. London, Allen and Unwin.

Robbins, Lionel (1998). ''A History of Economic Thought: The LSE Lectures''. Edited by Steven G. Medema and Warren J. Samuels. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.

Spiegel, Henry William,(1991). ''The Growth of Economic Thought'', 3rd Ed., Durham: Duke University Press.

Stroud, B. (1977). ''Hume'', Routledge, London & New York.

Taylor, A. E. (1927). ''David Hume and the Miraculous'', Leslie Stephen Lecture. Cambridge, pp. 53–4.

External links

David Hume at the Online Library of Liberty

Books by David Hume at the Online Books Page

Audio books by David Hume at Librivox

David Hume resources including books, articles, and encyclopedia entries

David Hume readable versions of the ''Treatise'', the two ''Enquiries'', the ''Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion'', and four essays

A Bibliography of Hume's Early Writings and Early Responses

El Monetarismo Amable de David Hume

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