It is difficult to summarize a philosopher’s work when it traverses so many different areas, and when much of this work is extremely systematic, in the sense that it must be understood as a whole if it is to be understood thoroughly. That said, in Kant’s case it is worth drawing a distinction between his metaphysics and his ethics for our purposes. Kant’s approach to metaphysics was revolutionary, and remains exceptionally influential for philosophers both analytic-Anglophonic and theoretical-continental.
Perhaps he was the last metaphysician of whom that was true. His metaphysics turns on what has come to be known as the Copernican revolution in philosophy. This label is due to his analogy to the world of Copernicus, who in order to make sense of his observations of the cosmos, denied the consensus view that the sun moves around the Earth and held (correctly) that the Earth moves around the Sun. In a similar way, Kant’s philosophy holds that, rather than our faculties of perception and intellection allowing us to understand things as they are independently of us, it is these faculties which constitute the things which appear to us.
For Kant, such elements of perception as space and time are a function of the way in which we process reality, rather than indelible parts of that reality. At best, we can make partial inferences about them, at worst we cannot know much (or anything) at all. Various interpretations and adaptations of Kant have taken a more optimistic or pessimistic view on this point.
Kant’s view that what we can know is best understood by analyzing our faculties, especially our faculty for reason, is an important similarity between his metaphysics and his ethics. Kant’s ethics are one of the three most prominent schools of ethical thought today, along with utilitarianism and virtue ethics. His approach is in deontological ethics, meaning that it is based on following certain rules. In order to articulate the basis of this rules based system, Kant argues that all rules are dependent on a certain rule, which is the Categorical Imperative.
All other rules can be derived from this, and – unlike many of the rules which we might take to order our lives – the Categorical Imperative is pre-eminent precisely because it is the law which an ‘autonomous will’ adopts. In other words, morality is both a system of rules and a mirror of human rationality.
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