Pinhas Ben-Zvi thinks Kant was inconsistent in his revolutionary ideas about the nature of space and time. In the first and second editions of his Critique of Pure Reason (A&B) Immanuel Kant asks: “What, then, are space and time? Are they real existences? Are they only determinations or relations of things, yet such as would …
Joshua Mozersky argues that reality itself might be accessible to us. Immanuel Kant is the grandfather of social constructivism – the theory that people construct reality out of a shared human experience. According to Kant, the world we experience of space, time, matter, and causation, is structured by the human mind. His point is not …
Thomas Morrison asks just what Kant learned from his Critique of Pure Reason. Can we know how things really are regardless of how they appear to us? Throughout history, many philosophers – known as skeptics – have argued that we can not. Part of what Immanuel Kant is attempting in his Critique of Pure Reason …
Matt McManus explains why people have absolute worth. “What is related to general human inclinations and needs has a market price ; that which, even without presupposing such a need, conforms with a certain taste has a fancy price ; but that which constitutes the condition under which alone something can be an end in …
Samantha Neave explores how to be a good person, with the help of Immanuel Kant and the Tooth Fairy. Last night I dreamt I promised my niece a ride on a skipping giraffe. Sadly, when it came to the crunch, my car broke down half way round the safari due to some gorillas landing on …
Matt Qvortrup explains how the Enlightenment’s leading philosopher went looking for a bit of peace. The newspaper Gothaische gelehrte Zeitungen was slightly sarcastic when it wrote about Immanuel Kant in 1784, “It is a favourite idea of Herr Professor Kant that the ultimate goal of the human race is the establishment of a perfect constitution.” …
Randall Curren finds that talking about humor is no laughing matter. Especially on national television. When our president asked me some weeks ago if I would be willing to prepare a philosophy commencement address on the subject of humor for national broadcast I was puzzled. I sized this up as, at best, a clumsy attempt …
Peter Rickman on the unsettling similarities between jokes and philosophy. Tell the average person – perhaps the proverbial man on the Clapham omnibus – that according to Plato, that bus is not real, is merely an appearance or an imitation or an intangible reality, the form or idea of a bus, the bus which “God …
An introduction by Tim Madigan. “It is worth noting that Wittgenstein once said that a serious and good philosophical work could be written that would consist entirely of jokes (without being facetious).”Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir The above passage is rather ambiguous – does it mean that Wittgenstein said such a thing in a …
How many philosophers does it take to change a light bulb?It depends on how you define ‘change’. How many existentialists does it take to change a light bulb?Two – one to bemoan the darkness until the other redefines something else as light. How many analytic philosophers does it take to change a light bulb?None – …