Immanuel Kant: A Guide to Transcendental Idealism

By M. James Ziccardi

This book examines the core components of Immanuel Kant’s unique and revolutionary philosophy, Transcendental Idealism. In it the reader will discover concise yet thorough descriptions of the most important aspects of Kantianism, including such topics as:

•The limits of theoretical knowledge
•Kant’s Copernican Revolution
•The distinction between the phenomenal and the noumenal
•The antinomies and dialectical logic
•Synthetic a priori knowledge
•Kantian ethics (deontology)
•The Categorical Imperative
•Kant’s ideas on free will, the immortality of the soul, and the existence of God.

A brief biography of the life of Immanuel Kant is also included in the book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: M. James Ziccardi
• Release date: Jan 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311517500

M. James Ziccardi

M. James Ziccardi lives in Southern California with his wife and daughter and has been a software analyst for over twenty-five years. Reading and writing about philosophy is his passion.

Book preview

Immanuel Kant: A Guide to Transcendental Idealism

Copyright © 2014 by M. James Ziccardi

Smashwords Edition

Cover Art by Emil Doerstling (1900)

Section 1 - Biography of Immanuel Kant

Immanuel Kant was born on April 22, 1724 in the Baltic port city of Königsberg, then the capital of the German Province of East Prussia. At the end of World War II, the city was renamed to Kaliningrad after the Soviet Union had captured it from the Nazis. It is now part of the Russian Federation. By all accounts, Kant lived a rather uneventful yet highly regimented life, which might seem surprising for someone whose ideas would prove to be so instrumental in the shaping of all subsequent Western thought. He neither married nor had any children. In fact, aside from a handful of his brighter former students, of whom he maintained regular correspondences, and a few fellow faculty members at the University of Königsberg, Kant lived his entire adult life essentially friend free. It appears, however, that this did not negatively affect Kant, for he was often fond of quoting Aristotle, telling his associates, My friends, I have no friends. Nonetheless, despite his solitary adult life, Kant was not an unhappy person, for it was his work that he loved and lived for above all else. When he died in Königsberg on February 12, 1804, it was said that during his entire life he never travelled more than forty miles from the place of his birth.

Kant was raised in a home of poverty and devout Pietism, an eighteenth-century Lutheran movement, which, not unlike Puritanism, called for a zealous display of individual piety and preached a strict devotion to Christian principles. Kant’s father, whose own father had emigrated from Scotland to East Prussia in the preceding century, was a leather worker by trade who struggled to make ends meet by making straps for horse harnesses. Although he was able to provide a modest living for his family, Kant’s father’s poor business skills always seemed to lead to financial hardship. Kant’s German mother, who herself had come from a family of saddle makers, was a wholly uneducated though highly intelligent woman. As such, she would prove to be young Immanuel’s greatest source of inspiration.

Kant, who was baptized under the name Emanuel, but later changed it to Immanuel after learning Hebrew, was the fourth of the family’s nine children. Those surviving past childhood include Kant, a younger brother who would later go on to become a rather successful businessman, and three sisters. Throughout the whole of his adult life, Kant rarely met with any of his siblings - a choice which, to the chagrin of his family, was entirely his own. On one of the few occasions where it is reported that Kant met face to face with one of his sisters, Kant is said to have not even recognized her. After the encounter, Kant could only apologize to his associates for his family’s lack of culture. Nevertheless, out of a strict sense of duty Kant would send money to his sisters on a regular basis for the rest of his life.

Kant’s education began informally while he was still too young for school. His mother would take him on long walks in the courtside where she would point out to him and name all the plants, animals, and other facts of nature they encountered along the way. As a devout Pietist, she also took this time to instill in the young boy a deep sense of moral obligation. This combination of a love of knowledge and a strict reverence for person duty would become the cornerstone of Kant’s later philosophy. Between the ages of eight and sixteen, Kant attended a local Pietist school, which, above all else, stressed the importance of leading a devout Christian life. Consequently, it was during this same time that Kant developed an aversion towards all formal religion. And although he would remain a religious person throughout his life, Kant never attended church services from that point on. It was also during this time that in 1737, when Kant was only thirteen years old, his mother died. Some have claimed that the death of his mother was a primary factor in Kant’s choosing to lead a solitary life.

At the age of eighteen, Kant was admitted into the University of Königsberg where he took up an education in theology. Although his education was financed for the most part by the local Pietist community, Kant was able to earn extra money while working as a tutor for some of his less acute classmates. Shortly after entering the University, however, Kant began to lose interest in theology and opted instead for the more challenging fields of mathematics and physics. And following a reading of Isaac Newton’s monumental work on the subjects, Philosophae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy), Kant’s new interests became permanent. Accordingly, Kant’s earlier ideas, which sprang from an education steeped in the traditions of the European rationalism, and particularly the metaphysics of German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Leibniz, now began to give way to ideas of empiricism. As we shall see later on, these ideas of Kant would burst forth upon a reading of Scottish philosopher David Hume’s famous work, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748).

In 1746, when Kant was twenty-two years old, his father died leaving the family in abject poverty. As such, Kant’s sisters were either taken in by other families or forced to accept menial jobs as house servants. As for himself, Kant was left with no other option than to leave the University before earning his degree. For the next nine years, Kant supported himself by once again working as a tutor for some of the more wealthy families in and around Königsberg. It was during this time that Kant did his travelling, for it was often the case that he was invited to accompany his clients on their summer holidays, sometimes venturing as far away as forty miles.

Although Kant never married, he was in fact twice engaged. But because he took so long in his deliberations, by the time he finally made up his mind to commit to