Philosophy of Being and Knowledge

Epistemology (Philosophy of Knowledge)

Kantianism

The German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) made a seminal contribution to the philosophy of knowledge, so significant that it is often referred to as the "Copernican Revolution in philosophy." Kant's starting point was the analysis of judgments, which he categorized into three types according to their roles in knowledge:

• Synthetic A Posteriori: These judgments describe individual facts and gather data. For example, "The water in this container has just boiled at 100°C." Such judgments merely describe reality and do not advance science, as science deals with universal laws rather than particular descriptive judgments that document facts.
• Analytical: These judgments express universal laws, independent of their relation to reality. For instance, "The square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides" (Pythagorean Theorem) expresses a mathematical truth that holds under all circumstances. The truth of such judgments is not dependent on reality; the Pythagorean Theorem remains true even if there are no triangular objects in the world. These judgments do not contribute to science because their aim is to understand reality, and analytical a priori judgments express universal truths without touching upon reality.
• Synthetic A Priori: These judgments transform information about particular facts into universal laws. For example, "Water boils at 100°C." Forming such judgments is the task of science. Their distinct feature is that they provide knowledge in the form of universal laws and are connected to reality.

Kant next addressed the mechanisms required for forming synthetic a priori judgments. He posited that while synthetic a posteriori judgments can be formed solely through experience, and analytical judgments require only the understanding, synthetic a priori judgments—being the goal of knowledge—necessitate both understanding and experience. The understanding generates these judgments by processing experience. Thus, Kant's position emerged as a middle ground between rationalism and empiricism. Whereas rationalists believed that new knowledge requires only the understanding and empiricists asserted that experience alone suffices, Kant demonstrated that knowledge arises only from the interaction of understanding and experience.

According to Kant, knowledge proceeds through three stages. The first stage involves the senses recording experiential data, where both objective and subjective factors are at play. Humans perceive facts in a specific temporal and spatial sequence. Kant considered time and space to be subjective categories of sensory perception that enable the organization of experience. Once the senses have received the data, the second stage begins, where the understanding processes this data. Kant believed that the understanding, when encountering a fact, attempts to answer a series of standard questions related to the fact. These questions are always the same and are what Kant called categories. He argued that categories do not encompass the entire object of knowledge; beyond categories, there is no other mechanism of knowing things. This implies that humans can only access a portion of knowledge about an object; the rest remains unknown to the understanding. What is covered by categories and known to the understanding is termed by Kant as "the thing for us," while what lies beyond the categories is "the thing in itself." Once the understanding has analyzed the information, it must be integrated into the individual's worldview, for knowledge is valuable only when it is coherent with all other knowledge possessed by the individual. This task falls to the third stage of knowledge—intellect. The intellect synthesizes knowledge, creating a universal worldview. It does so by addressing fundamental questions: about God, the world, and the human soul.

Thus, Immanuel Kant recognized the problematic aspects of both traditional epistemological positions—rationalism and empiricism—and sought to provide his own explanation of the problem of knowledge based on a synthesis of rationalism and empiricism. Kant’s major work on knowledge is titled "Critique of Pure Reason." The very title reflects Kant's stance: while empiricists believed that the understanding is a tabula rasa prior to encountering experience, Kant argued that if the understanding were pure without experience, it could not form knowledge. The understanding does not contain pre-existing knowledge as rationalists claimed, nor is it pure as empiricists suggested; it contains inherent capacities that enable it to process experiential data.