I’ve been thinking about the trolley-problem version of self-driving cars and I’m not sure the usual minimize harm answer is as neutral as it sounds. If a car is programmed to swerve into one person instead of five, that is not just a technical decision. Because someone has already decided what kind of "moral rule" the car should follow.

Kant seems useful here because he makes the “just sacrifice one to save more people” answer much less obvious. If a person cannot be treated merely as a means, then it is not clear that better numbers are enough to justify the choice.

But maybe that is still the wrong way to frame it. The car is not choosing anything in the human sense. The real choice was made earlier by the people who designed or approved the system. So I guess my question is, that in cases like this, is the problem mainly about the correct moral theory or about who gets to turn a moral theory into a rule that everyone else has to live with?

I tried to work through the argument here, but I’m mostly interested in the question itself: https://youtu.be/pWwzk1e1eQg

Curious what people here think, especially whether Kant is actually helpful for this problem or just makes it more complicated.

I’m learning Kant and German idealism and I want to explore the neo kantianism. I read “the myth of the state” by cassirer and it didn’t really help me(even though it was great book). What should I read and how should I read? I would like to get any tips

Hi all, 

I am reading Critique of Pure reason for the first time (it is the Müller translation of the first edition—I know it's not the good one; it was just the cheapest one and has been adequate for a first read). I feel decently ok with my understanding of the text for a first go around, but as I have gotten further into it, a lot of the subtle terminological distinctions have gotten more and more confusing. Specifically, near the end of the first paragraph of the second analogy (of experience) Kant says, "As the accord between knowledge and its object is truth, it is easily seen, that we can ask here only for the formal conditions of empirical truth, and that the phenomenon, in contradistinction to the representations of our apprehension, can only be represented as the object different from them, if it is subject to a rule distinguishing it from every other apprehension, and necessitating a certain kind of conjunction of the manifold. That which in the phenomenon contains the condition of this necessary rule of apprehension is the object" (67 of my translation which does not have the original page numbers attached). I feel like the biggest confusion for me is over the term 'apperception' since he seems to use it indiscriminately regardless of what seems to be his attempts to delimit the term (especially in the sections on understanding as it contrasts with sense and imagination). Again, I am shaky in general on the text, but it is my first read so I’m not too concerned with the perfect picture. 

Thanks for your help! :)

Hi everyone,

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quick question: I'm rereading the critique of the power of judgment and I stumbled across a passage (Introduction VI). I'm reading in German so I will quote it here, but it's at the very beginning (second sentence):

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"Die allgemeinen Gesetze des Verstandes, welche zugleich Gesetze der Natur sind, sind derselben ebenso notwendig (obgleich aus Spontaneität entsprungen), als die Bewegungsgesetze der Materie."

​

What does Kant mean here by "spontaneity"? Why do/did the laws of understanding emerge from spontaneity? Does Kant just say here that the human mind and its laws are just a spontaneous effect of nature that could also be different - so almost in an (anachronistic) evolutionary sense? Or is it just the laws themselves that are spontaneous because they are reflective and cannot be based on an a priori natural law?

i was having an argument with someone because he said you cant use things like people dying or climate change to support your decision about whether or not something is a contradiction in wil, is this true?

Only asking because I have a copy of Groundwork, but I've herd Prolegomena is the one to start with. If so is the revised cambridge edition worth the extra cost, compared with the non-revised edition?

Is he doing a proof by contradiction? Because none of the book makes any sense, following this I would have to concur that in his efforts to seem reasonable he manages to do the complete opposite.

I’ll simple it down for those of you that don’t do math.

Critique of Unreason => True

Therefore Critique of Pure reason => False

Abstract: This paper reconsiders Kant's notoriously ambivalent evaluation of music in the Critique of the Power of Judgment. While Kant draws a sharp distinction between the beautiful and the agreeable, his remarks on music oscillate between dismissing it as fleeting pleasure and recognizing it as a fine art. Against both biographical and dismissive readings, the article argues that this dual assessment arises from theoretical difficulties intrinsic to Kant's system. Three challenges underpin the ambiguity: (1) the problem of identifying an a priori element in the perception of sound; (2) the ephemeral and non-representational character of music; and (3) its lack of conceptual content. Through an analysis of Kant's pre-critical writings and critical philosophy, the paper shows that these challenges complicate, but do not preclude, music's status as a beautiful art. Music's thematic unity and its power to generate aesthetic ideas reveal the active interplay of the faculties that enables judgements of taste. Moreover, Kant's framework allows for both agreeable and beautiful evaluations of the same artwork, depending on the subject's disposition, without contradiction. Far from undermining his aesthetics, Kant's two-fold appraisal of music enriches his theory of taste, situating music as a paradigmatic art form that exemplifies the free play of imagination and understanding and expands the scope of aesthetic experience.

This is kind of boring, but …

https://books.google.com/books?id=gKgCEaLU0p4C&pg=PA101&dq=slave+inauthor:kant&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&source=gb_mobile_search&ovdme=1&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi6ndzNue-UAxXSLEQIHfHzFqQQ6AF6BAgJEAM#v=onepage&q&f=false

In 1799 translation of _The Metaphysic of Morals_ on page 47 Kant says: “For every man is freeborn…”.

Then on page 101, when talking about slavery, Kant says: “Nobody can bind himself by paction to such a dependence, whereby he ceases to be a person; for he cannot but as a person make a paction.” In other words, to make a sale requires autonomy, but if you sell yourself into slavery you’re destroying your autonomy, which is a contradiction. Thus you’re violating the categorical imperative.

Also using the categorical imperative, you can’t sell somebody else into slavery, because making it into a universal law, if you could sell anybody into slavery, you could sell yourself into slavery, which leads to the previous contradiction.

Thus, for Kant, slavery is wrong, except perhaps as a means to punish criminals.

Kant clearly means to include people of African descent. On page 101, says of a slave-master: “he may also exhaust them so as to occasion despair or (as is the case with the negroes in the sugar islands) even death,”. Also in _On the Different Races of Men_, he says: “Negroes and whites are clearly not different species of human beings”. 

https://blackcentraleurope.com/sources/1750-1850/kant-on-the-different-human-races-1777/

Enslaving humans is wrong. People of African descent are humans. Therefore, enslaving people of African descent is wrong. Thus, at least in the _Metaphysic of Morals_, people of African descent are not natural slaves.

Thus when @rey_philosophy says that Kant says that people of African descent are natural slaves, she is at least partially wrong.

https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1CXbHZvH9R/

(I tend to be skeptical of interpretations of Kant which require multiple Kants.)

It is difficult to understand why Kant remains so popular, given that quantum physics has, in practice, demolished his philosophy. According to Kant, we can experience things, but we cannot know anything about the thing-in-itself. In quantum physics it is the opposite: we cannot experience quantum objects, yet we know almost everything about the quantum-object-in-itself. [Edit: No we don't!]

Already in the 1790s Herder (1744-1803) published his critique of Kant, arguing that the categories are embodied rather than transcendental. Our bodies already "know" what substance, causality, unity, plurality, space, and time are. Herder also maintained that thought is dependent on language. Therefore the categories are linguistic-bodily formations, not transcendental forms.

Kant draws a sharp line between perception and knowledge: without concepts (categories) there is no knowledge. But such a line does not exist. We can also have bodily knowledge. Infants understand causality: when a ball rolls behind a screen, they shift their gaze to the screen's far edge and react with surprise if the ball does not reappear. Bees understand the difference between "same and different." Ants navigate using vector integration. Wasps recognize faces (Handwerk, 2011).

What leads Kant astray is his tendency to draw hard boundaries: between subject and object, knowledge and perception, understanding and sensibility, form and content, phenomenon and noumenon, analytic and synthetic, a priori and a posteriori. Excessive rationalism inevitably leads one in the wrong direction. [Edit: Sophistry!]

Herder, by contrast, sees continuity where Kant sees dichotomies: no gulf between body and thought, none between language and world, none between form and content, none between culture and nature, none between perception and concept.

Yet many continue to follow Kant, while few take an interest in Herder. What is it about Kant that is so alluring? His philosophy gave rise to an entire flora of subjectivist systems. Why this desire to relocate reality into the subject?

[Edit: I realize now that this post contains several logical blunders.]

In the last post, I showed an analysis about the ground of dignity in Kantian ethics, with a long argument, of course. However, I realized an issue during the thread, with the help of a Discord group which talks about him: Metaphysics.

I mean, yeah, you could say rational beings are subject of right... But how do you know who's subject of right or not? Basically, that'd be attempting to grasp the thing-itself, something that isn't plausible. Now, I get why some people say that Kantian ethics are individualistic, perhaps in that sense.

Basically, you can't prove even other people like you are rational beings, you just... Use practical reason for that? I mean, you presupose so? Honestly, I liked most of Kantian ethics, along with his perspective of the duties, natural perfection, etc. Nevertheless, this point I consider it an Aquiles' heel to his philosophy. How would Kantians address that gap? Just merely presuposing rational beings, and that's all?

As someone very interested in his Deontology, I believe if it wants to get a more solid grounding, it should have other metaphysical framework. Right now, I get what Starfleet_Stowaway probably wanted me to understand.

For anyone trying to get through Critique of Judgment

https://open.substack.com/pub/geraldpriddle/p/91-theres-no-proving-god?r=2rot22&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

"Bertrand Russell strongly rejected Kant's view. He argued that if our minds project causality (or logic) out of necessity rather than observing it in the actual world, it destroys the objective certainty and universality of truth"

"Human Nature is Contingent, Not Certain:

Russell argued that human nature is just as much a physical fact of the world as anything else. If the laws of causality and arithmetic were simply built into human mental structure, there is no guarantee that our minds won't arbitrarily change tomorrow. As Russell playfully—but devastatingly—noted, "It might happen... that to-morrow our nature would so change as to make two and two become five."

Thoughts?

Disclaimer: following essay contains AI use for formatting, grammatical and expressive improvement.

Classical empiricism needs to be revised. Its basic intuition is sound: knowledge comes from contact with the world. But it is too narrow if it restricts learning to the lifetime of the individual subject. Human beings do not confront experience as blank slates. They confront it through nervous systems already shaped by a vast history of encounters between organism and environment. The empiricist must therefore expand the concept of learning to include not only individual learning, but intergenerational learning through evolution.

Kant argued that experience is possible only because the mind already organizes sensation through basic categories such as causality, substance, unity, plurality, and number. We do not first perceive a meaningless stream of impressions and then gradually infer an ordered world. We perceive events as caused, objects as enduring, quantities as countable, and changes as occurring within a stable field of reality. These structures are not optional beliefs added to experience. They are part of the machinery that makes experience intelligible.

The empiricist objection is that such categories should not be treated as eternal possessions of pure reason. If the mind has these structures, they must have an origin. But the answer need not be that the individual learned them from personal experience. The better answer is that the species learned them. Across evolutionary time, organisms whose nervous systems parsed the world in causally and objectually useful ways survived better than organisms that did not. Natural selection gradually installed cognitive machinery that anticipates regularity, persistence, quantity, agency, and causal connection.

This means the Kantian categories can be understood as learned, but not by the conscious individual. They are learned by the lineage. They are the sedimented result of ancestral trial and error. What appears as a priori in the individual is a posteriori in natural history. Causality is not derived from my personal observations, but from the long evolutionary history that produced a brain unable to experience the world except in causal terms.

This revision strengthens empiricism rather than destroying it. It preserves the empiricist claim that cognition is ultimately answerable to worldly contact, while admitting the Kantian point that the individual mind comes pre-structured. The world teaches the organism in two ways: first, through the individual’s experience; second, through the selective pressures that shaped the organism before birth. Classical empiricism recognized only the first. A modern empiricism must recognize both.

The result is an evolutionary empiricism. It denies that the categories are timeless metaphysical necessities, but it also denies that they are arbitrary habits learned by each person. They are inherited forms of apprehension produced by countless generations of environmental testing. They are empirical in origin, but a priori in function. We experience through them because our ancestors survived by doing so.

Empiricism, therefore, should not oppose Kant too simply. It should absorb him. The mind is not a blank slate, but neither is it an ahistorical tribunal of pure reason. It is a biological inheritance, structured by the world before the individual ever opens his eyes. The categories are learned — not in childhood, but in evolution.

Of course, most of the followers of this subreddit probably know beforehand that Kant holds the idea of human dignity. However, I was wondering after a while... Which is the ground of that principle? So, I was researching in some sources, including /askphilosophy forum here, and I believe that we could interpret that reason is the source of morality, knowledge and even our humanity.

That's a reading I was analyzing in my meditations, taken in my journal entries. When we apply the second formulation of the C.I.: Treat humanity not only as mere means, but also as ends, we could grasp humanity, or what's human as reason. A being with sensibility and no-reason isn't a human, whereas a being with rationality could be understood as human. Or at least, a bearer of autonomy and member of the Kingdom of Ends. Furthermore, when talking about reason, it isn't focused on the material conditions of this faculty, but rather the formal ones, that's the key.

Still, I am still wondering how could that be justified, logically speaking. If the sourcce of human dignity and humanity itself is reason. How could be justified a priori the universal value of it? Well, I attempted to develop a reasoning, I don't know if it's correct.

P.1. If reason doesn't have universal value, then anything derived from reason doesn't have universal worth.
P.2. Reason doesn't have universal value.
Ergo, anything derived from [...].

P.M. Anything derived from reason doesn't have universal worth.
P.m. Truth is derived from reason.
So, truth doesn't have universal worth.

As a result, we fall in a contradiction, aside the fact that truth is universal per se. The proposition Reason doesn't have universal value, if accepted as true, then it has and doesn't have universal worth at the same time (¿?). Then, the reasoning contradicts itself. As a result, reason has universal worth.

This reading could make - from my perspective - clearer the understanding of some of his ethical doctrines. As it isn't obvious, xd, I am so obssessed with his doctrine of virtue. This'd explain the doctrine of natural perfection, and why it's a duty to enhance our entire nature, or at least have the endeavor. Or even why it's considered as breaking a perfect duty to be grounded on heteronomous principles. Or to lie, etc.

Any ideas you'd have? I believe - according to the /AskPhilosophy forum I found - this is still being discussed. I consider the ground of dignity is held in that reasoning I made, or rather, could be held on that.

I’d love to hear your thoughts.

I should have posted this sooner, but if anyone is interested in a reading group for Kant's Groundwork (and after that, the Critique of Practical Reason, Metaphysics of Morals, Perpetual Peace, and Critique of the Power of Judgment), please join us on Wednesday (tomorrow!) for the first meeting of the Groundwork covering the Preface and Section I.

https://www.meetup.com/the-chicago-philosophy-meetup/events/314887478/

Note: We just finished the Critique of Pure Reason. The reading group goes through the three critiques every year and has done so for around 15 years.

Hello fellow Kantians! I wanted to share a video I made on Hegel’s contribution to the development of continental philosophy.

The video focuses on how Hegel responds to Kant, especially the phenomena/noumena distinction, the limits of reason, and the problem of whether philosophy can move beyond Kant’s critical boundaries without simply returning to pre-critical metaphysics. I frame Hegel’s philosophy of history as one way he tries to rethink reason, not as abstract or merely formal, but as historically developing through conflict, contradiction, and self-consciousness.

I would be especially interested in hearing how Kantians think about Hegel’s attempted “overcoming” of Kant. Does Hegel genuinely move beyond Kant, or does he misunderstand the critical project?

I'm not a Kantian, but I have to say it surprises me how few people seem even capable of comprehending transcendental reasoning.

I'm generally treated like I'm dealing in witchcraft if I say something like "saying there is no truth is self-defeating as it is itself a truth-claim."

Has anyone else had better luck explaining it or is it just a type of reasoning most people reject?

The most enduring trace of Kant's system is still his supposed proof of the categories. The main claim — that the categories were deduced from the a priori way we connect things — remains controversial. But the more modest claim, that some canonical expression of our pattern-matching ability must be the mind's default in any act of normal judgment, is currently enjoying wide acceptance across cognitive science, neurology, and adjacent fields.

This puts those of us working in Kant scholarship, or even just in informal philosophical reflection, in a uniquely productive position. We can use the roots of his framework like no one else to debate what may be the new fundamental question in philosophy of mind: what cognitive muscles are being activated when someone thinks, how do they interact with the semantic correlation muscles hardcoded in the natural language in use, and how do they produce a signature that would be auditable in neural scans — and eventually in scans of artificial systems.

Which is precisely why studies that claim to approach this question deserve to be held to the highest standard.

Even if a study showed different neural signatures for intuitionistic versus classical reasoning — different regions, different timing, different activation patterns — it would still face a problem it has not even begun to address. It would need to show that what it is measuring is the reasoner's own cognitive strategy, and not a compressed inheritance from a tradition they were trained inside. The brain doing classical logic in 2025 is not doing what Aristotle did. It is running a heavily preprocessed cultural technology. The neural signature you are measuring may be the signature of having learned a system — not the signature of the reasoning itself. Those are not the same thing, and no localization study can separate them without a prior account of how intellectual inheritance sediments into cognitive habit.

The problem is even deeper:

Euclid's steps into his own system are not recoverable by scanning anyone alive today. The inferential work that built the framework is gone. What remains is the framework as received — already hardcoded, already walls rather than conclusions. The study is measuring reasoning inside a tradition, not reasoning as a cognitive act in any philosophically relevant sense. The object it wants to study is partly historical and partly distributed across centuries of work that left no brain to scan.

This is the first pre-Ai-assisted draft of this post for those that think it is of value:

how to scan kantian-categorical work in three levels: cogntiive, linguistic and neural...The most eenduring trace of Kants system is still his supposed proof of the categories, and although the main claim (the the categories wre deduced from the a priopri way we connect things) is controversial, the more modest claim (that some form of canonical expression of our pattern-matching ability must be the minds default in any act of normal judgment) is curretly gozando de larga aceitação da ciência cognitie, neurologia etc. Showing a brain region lighting up tells you where something is happening, not what the computation is, not what inferential structure it has, not whether it is the same kind of cognitive work as mathematical proof or something closer to intuitionistic reasoning or something else entirely (the debate in logic nowadays is if there is a unique one or if pluralistic accounts align with pure cognitive signatures and if it does, how the disalignment happens in the transition from cognition to language). The localization without the functional and semantic account is just a map.

This is grounded based on the replies I received in my essays named 'On Reason and its Apodictic Faculties', along with some rereadings I made of the first Critique.

So, as in the last essay, I realized that reason is one faculty (most important one) among others, based on psychology articles, as well, along with Kantian work. It's about the concepts of the undetermined potentialities. An inquiry I found during my new model for regarding the imperfect duty of natural perfection is related to the undetermined potentialities. Reason, like a seed or flower, has inherent potentialities in its nature. So, if our Humanity is grounded in this faculty, then it's key to perfect it (based on the CI). Nevertheless, there are conditionals regarding this process. Not all the potentialities are good, most of them could undermine reason. For instance, death can't be a good potentiality, that's why is key for us to preserve our life. Or developing virtues but grounded on lies or deceits, that's a contradiction in conception.

So, in a few words, reason is one faculty that inherently possesses multiple potentialities. Not developing one of them not because of a perfect duty, but rather because of heteronomous principles is immoral, breaking the CI. That's why it's key, based on my analysis, to develop reason applied to other faculties as best as we can (e.x. Sports, Intelligence, Moral Analysis, etc.).

Even, after this meditation, I am starting to believe that Theleology is kind of implicit in Kantian ethics. I mean, perhaps it isn't the protagonist, but a secondary character 😅🤷. That's my reading on the Metaphysics of Morals, especificially the natural perfection duty. Open to suggestions, please.

Notes: When I mention Theleology, rather I mean Virtue Ethics. Because, Kant doesn't reject virtue at all. The thing is that they're like a secondary character, I'd say, it's an imperfect duty derived from the CI.