Two Stories of Kant

So if you're in your A and B phases, where you have to firstly convince yourself that this stuff is worthwhile and plan on doing it before you jump in the proverbial cold pool of Kant, so to speak, you can tell yourself these two stories that I keep telling myself.

Kant 1:

Was the coolest philosopher of all time. This Kant was a peacemaker. Here is a Jill Vance Buroker from Kant's Critique of Pure Reason anecdote from a primary source:

I have had the good fortune to know a philosopher. He was my teacher. In his prime he had the happy sprightliness of a youth; he continued to have it, I believe, even as a very old man. His broad forehead, built for thinking, was the seat of an imperturbable cheerfulness and joy. Speech, the richest in thought, flowed from his lips. Playfulness, wit, and humor were at his command. His lectures were the most entertaining talks. His mind, which examined Leibniz, Wolff, Baumgarten, Crusius, and Hume, and investigated the laws of nature of Newton, Kepler, and the physicists, comprehended equally the newest works of Rousseau....and the latest discoveries in science. He wieghed them all, and always came back to the unbiased knowledge of naure and to the moral worth of man...No cabal, no sect, no prejudice, no desire for fame could ever tempt him in the slightest away from broadening and illuminating the truth. He incited and gently forced others to think for themselves; despotism was foreign to his mind. This man, whwom I name with greatest gratitude and erspect was Immanuel Kant.


This Kant was a peacemaker because he united two schools of thought: Rationalism and Empiricism. Basically, logic and experience.

There's an experiment that we did in my middle school where we stuck a pen in water and looked at how the pen was distorted from the fracturing of light. Now we know that the pen is a certain way routinely, because we have a set of standards like rulers and so forth. All we know about the pen is from sense perception.

Rationalists as logic-mongerers, said likewise, to prove that we got it there took some sort of rationality, some sort of mindframe. Try getting the town drunk to see straight; he just can't do it. Try to get your friend on LSD to tell you that there is a pen there; he might have a hard time. But empiricists kept telling these Rationalists to spot a triangle walking down the street and they couldn't do it. Sure, Spinoza and Leibniz had all of these decent math proofs from axioms, but what the hell were they good for if they didn't connect with reality?

When Rationalists tried to get good answers out of Newton about what the heck gravity is, Newton said, "Hypothesi non fingo." Which is Latin for "I pose no hypothesis and you figure it out."

Leibniz and Newton were both brilliant, and they really would have stabbed each other if they met. This is because they both invented the calculus separately and independently. In Popular culture (like high school physics-or those 5 minutes of history in High School Math Class) in the United States, we talk about Newton inventing it, but we use Leibnizian notation.

Kant reconciled these two schools of thought. For this, he is considered the greatest philosopher of all time by many.

I'll tell you the other story about Kant later.