Immanuel Kant Essay Example for Free

Immanuel Kant Essay HYPERLINK http://www. philosophypages. com/ph/kant. htm Immanuel Kant answers the question in the first sentence of the essay: â€Å"Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. † He argues that the immaturity is self-inflicted not from a lack of understanding, but from the lack of courage to use one’s reason, intellect, and wisdom without the guidance of another. He exclaims that the motto of enlightenment is â€Å"Sapere aude†! – Dare to be wise! The German word Unmundigkeit means not having attained age of majority or legal adulthood. Unmundig also means dependent or unfree, and another translation is tutelage or nonage (the condition of not [being] of age). Kant, whose moral philosophy is centred around the concept of autonomy, here distinguishes between a person who is intellectually autonomous and one who keeps him/herself in an intellectually heteronomous, i. e. dependent and immature status. Kant understands the majority of people to be content to follow the guiding institutions of society, such as the Church and the Monarchy, and unable to throw off the yoke of their immaturity due to a lack of resolution to be autonomous. It is difficult for individuals to work their way out of this immature, cowardly life because we are so uncomfortable with the idea of thinking for ourselves. Kant says that even if we did throw off the spoon-fed dogma and formulas we have absorbed, we would still be stuck, because we have never â€Å"cultivated our minds. † The key to throwing off these chains of mental immaturity is reason. There is hope that the entire public could become a force of free thinking individuals if they are free to do so. Why? There will always be a few people, even among the institutional guardians, who think for themselves. They will help the rest of us to â€Å"cultivate our minds. † Kant shows himself a man of his times when he observes that â€Å"a revolution may well put an end to autocratic despotism . . . or power-seeking oppression, but it will never produce a true reform in ways of thinking. † The recently completed American Revolution had made a great impression in Europe; Kant cautions that new prejudice will replace the old and become a new leash to control the â€Å"great unthinking masses. † Immanuel Kants Ideas on Science and Morality According to the 18th-century German thinker Immanuel Kant, no person may possess inherent wisdom about reality. This is best summarized in the philosophers famous expression, Thoughts without content are empty; intuitions without data are blind. Indeed, Kant believes that in order for us to utilize our sensible intuition, we must possess two stimuli, physical sensation and moral duty. The first of the two addresses a portion of Kantian thought known as empirical realism, a reasoning that defines that absolute reality as the entire universe in which all human beings dwell. Every time we acquire external data from that absolute reality, our perception of it assumes a greater degree of accuracy. And what would be the optimal way of acquiring such data with only minimal if any contact with other persons perceptions (which are, like ours, inaccurate, only in different ways, since each human being possesses a unique arsenal of experiences)? Scientific exploration is, therefore, the key to an ultimate comprehension of things-in-themselves. Kant was a fervent admirer of Newtonian thought and the Scientific Method, which permitted scientists to ascend to unprecedented heights in their understanding of and control over nature. The second stimulus to action, moral duty, provides the explanation for the purpose of all human actions toward the comprehension of the universe. This portion of Kants doctrine has been dubbed by the philosopher as transcendental idealism, since it establishes a framework outside the natural world upon which correct actions are based. Kant sees the ultimate virtues to be the attempts to reach three goals which are not yet found in reality, God, freedom, and the immortality of individuals. God, the Creator and Supreme Being of the universe, must be fathomed, properly interpreted, and obeyed in accordance with his true desires. Freedom, the individual liberty to act as one wishes and to grant all others this right, must be instituted through societal reforms and a development of ideology to understand the proper order that would establish such an atmosphere. And, at last, every human being must rise to possess the right to exist for an indefinite length of time that he may 1 / 3 obey the commandments of God and practice his freedoms. Kant states that all which is right and moral must be based upon those three principles. As such, Kant separates the scientific realm (which describes what is) from the moral realm (which explains what ought to be), but he considers these two realms to go hand-in-hand ultimately advocating putting the scientific realm in service to moral one. Kant: The Copernican Revolution in Philosophy The philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) is sometimes called the â€Å"Copernican revolution of philosophy† to emphasize its novelty and huge importance. Kant synthesized (brought together) rationalism and empiricism. After Kant, the old debate between rationalists and empiricists ended, and epistemology went in a new direction. After Kant, no discussion of reality or knowledge could take place without awareness of the role of the human mind in constructing reality and knowledge. Summary of Rationalism The paradigm rationalist philosophers are Plato (ancient); Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz (modern). Don’t trust senses, since they sometimes deceive; and since the â€Å"knowledge† they provide is inferior (because it changes). Reason alone can provide knowledge. Math is the paradigm of real knowledge. There are innate ideas, e. g. , Plato’s Forms, or Descartes’ concepts of self, substance, and identity. The self is real and discernable through immediate intellectual intuition (cogito ergo sum). Moral notions are comfortably grounded in an objective standard external to self — in God, or Forms. Kant says rationalists are sort of right about (3) and (4) above; wrong about (1) and (2). Kant would like (5) to be true. Summary of Empiricism The paradigm empiricist philosophers are Aristotle (ancient); Locke, Berkeley, Hume (modern). Senses are the primary, or only, source of knowledge of world. Psychological atomism. Mathematics deals only with relations of ideas (tautologies); gives no knowledge of world. No innate ideas (though Berkeley accepts Cartesian self). General or complex ideas are derived by abstraction from simple ones (conceptualism). Hume — there’s no immediate intellectual intuition of self. The concept of â€Å"Self† is not supported by sensations either. Hume — no sensations support the notion of necessary connections between causes and effects, or the notion that the future will resemble the past. Hume — â€Å"is† does not imply â€Å"ought†. Source of morality is feeling. Kant thinks empiricism is on the right track re (1), sort of right re (2), wrong re (3), (4), (5), and (6). Summary of Kant’s Argument The epistemological debate between rationalism and empiricism is basically about whether, or to what extent the senses contribute to knowledge. Both rationalism and empiricism take for granted that it’s possible for us to acquire knowledge of Reality, or how things really are, as opposed to how they seem to us. But both rationalism and empiricism overlook the fact that the human mind is limited; it can experience and imagine only within certain constraints. These constraints are both synthetic and a priori. All our possible experience must conform to these SAPs. The SAPs include location in space and time, causality, experiencing self, thing-ness, identity, and various mathematical notions. (Twentieth- century Gestalt psychology’s attack on psychological atomism is based on Kant’s views. ) Therefore, we must distinguish the world we experience, bounded by SAPs, and the world of things as they really are â€Å"in themselves†. Kant calls these two worlds the phenomenal (apparent) world versus the noumenal (real) world. Empiricism pretty much nails what it means to know something, once the SAPs are in place; i. e. , within the phenomenal world, empiricism rules. The phenomenal world is a world of things, publicly observable, describable by science, known to the senses, determined by physical laws. No God, no 2 / 3 freedom, no soul, no values exist in this world. If God, freedom, souls, and values exist, then they must be noumenal and unknowable by any ordinary means. Thus, according to Kant: Both rationalism and empiricism are wrong when they claim that we can know things in themselves. Rationalists are wrong not to trust senses; in the phenomenal world, senses are all we have. Rationalists are right about â€Å"innate ideas†, but not in Plato’s sense of Forms— much more like Descartes’ in argument of the wax. Hume is wrong when he claims the concept of self is unsupported by senses, and thus bogus. Rather, the experiencing self is a pre-condition for having any experience at all (Descartes was right). Hume is wrong when he says the notion that the future will resemble the past is due only to â€Å"custom and habit†. That notion is a SAP; we couldn’t have ordinary experience without it. Hume is wrong when he says the source of morality is feeling. Morality, properly understood, provides the key to linking the noumenal and phenomenal worlds. Kant argues that if morality is real, then human freedom is real, and therefore humans are not merely creatures of the phenomenal world (not merely things subject to laws). Ramifications of Kant’s Views Kant revolutionized philosophy. Kant showed that the mind, through its innate categories, constructs our experience along certain lines (space, time, causality, self, etc. ). Thus, thinking and experiencing give no access to things as they really are. We can think as hard as we like, but we will never escape the innate constraints of our minds. Kant forced philosophy to look seriously at the world for the agent (what Kant calls the phenomenal world) independently of the real world outside consciousness – the world in itself (the noumenal world). Ethics had long recognized the importance for moral evaluation of â€Å"how things seem to the agent. † But the ramifications of Kant’s noumenal-phenomenal distinction extend far beyond ethics. Philosophers like to take credit for all the big events in 19th century intellectual history as direct consequences of Kant’s philosophical legitimizing of the perspective of the subject: Hegel and German idealism, Darwinism, Romanticism, pragmatism, Marxism, the triumph of utilitarianism, Nietzsche, and the establishment of psychology as a science, especially Gestalt psychology. Phenomena and NoumenaHaving seen Kants transcendental deduction of the categories as pure concepts of the understanding applicable a priori to every possible experience, we might naturally wish to ask the further question whether these regulative principles are really true. Are there substances? Does every event have a cause? Do all things interact? Given that we must suppose them in order to have any experience, do they obtain in the world itself? To these further questions, Kant firmly refused to offer any answer. According to Kant, it is vital always to distinguish between the distinct realms of phenomena and noumena. Phenomena are the appearances, which constitute the our experience; noumena are the (presumed) things themselves, which constitute reality. All of our synthetic a priori judgments apply only to the phenomenal realm, not the noumenal. (It is only at this level, with respect to what we can experience, that we are justified in imposing the structure of our concepts onto the objects of our knowledge. ) Since the thing in itself (Ding an sich) would by definition be entirely independent of our experience of it, we are utterly ignorant of the noumenal realm. Thus, on Kants view, the most fundamental laws of nature, like the truths of mathematics, are knowable precisely because they make no effort to describe the world as it really is but rather prescribe the structure of the world as we experience it. By applying the pure forms of sensible intuition and the pure concepts of the understanding, we achieve a systematic view of the phenomenal realm but learn nothing of the noumenal realm. Math and science are certainly true of the phenomena; only metaphysics claims to instruct us about the noumena. POWERED BY TCPDF (WWW. TCPDF. ORG).

Thomas Hardys Far From the Madding Crowd :: Thomas Hardy Far from the Madding Crowd Essays

Thomas Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd The name Thomas Hardy gives to the hero of his novel, Far From the Madding Crowd, is not merely accidental. Hardy deliberately means to associate Gabriel Oak with the Angel Gabriel. God's hero lit up the darkness, and it is important for the reader to note that when Hardy's hero saves a situation from having disastrous consequences, nearly every time he does so in darkness. Gabriel's name is very significant in relation to his character, but he is not just meant to be a holy saint, whose sole purpose is to pour oil on troubled waters. He is a very real person with very human feelings, and this becomes obvious as his relationship with Bathsheba grows. To understand how the relationship between the two main characters has changed at the end of the novel, I need to explain how their relationship began. Previous to chapter four, Gabriel has seen and talked to Bathsheba on quite a few occasions, not least when she saves him from suffocation in chapter three. By chapter four, Gabriel has developed a deep love for Bathsheba and waits for her presence in strikingly the same way as "his dog waited for his meals". He is so captivated by her that he changes his opinion of an attractive woman to suit her features - such as "turning his taste over to black hair, though he had sworn by brown ever since he was a boy." Gabriel decides that marriage is better than his life of solitary isolation, a life which he has always lived quite comfortably before the arrival of Bathsheba, and declares "I'll make her my wife, or upon my soul I shall be good for nothing!" Using a motherless lamb as an excuse to visit Bathsheba to ask for her hand in marriage, he sets off for her aunt's house on "a fine January morning" having made "a toilet of a nicely-adjusted kind". He arrives in hopeful spirits, but it is not Bathsheba that he talks to - it is her aunt, Mrs Hurst. Gabriel's modesty comes through in his conversation with Bathsheba's aunt, and he leaves, mistakenly believing that Bathsheba has "ever so many young men" after her. However, as he is walking back along the down, he turns around to discover Bathsheba running after him. Erroneously he believes that she has chased after him to accept his proposal, so when she only wants to tell him that her aunt had made a mistake in saying she had several young sweethearts, he is understandably dismayed. Bathsheba has quite a flirtatious disposition and toys with Gabriel's

Ciara Favorite Artist Music

My most appreciated song on this earth today is â€Å"Gimme Dat†, by Ciara. This is my most appreciated song because this song fits my personality. It has a combination and a justified amount of both dancing and singing. The song itself puts on a certain performance toward the listeners, and it gives meaning to the singer/songwriter. The style of this song is a very up-beat tempo; it’s a hip-hop song. It’s a song that Deejays would play in clubs and at parties; because people can actually feel the beat of this song and turn it into one of their own. The artist of the song (Ciara) is a very well known artist. Ciara is one of the â€Å"sexiest† female hip-hop & R&B artist that are alive and in action today. She has been making music, singing music, and even choreographing music with her artistic styles ever since 2002. Ciara is a great artist and I think that all her fans would agree with me on that. The song titled, â€Å"Gimme Dat† is about Ciara coming back into show biz. Ciara has been away for a while creating her new album, and when she got herself back into the spotlight, she started with this song to let people know that she’s back and ready to do anything. My favorite part of the song is when Ciara says: â€Å"I been gone for too long, but its time to bring it back; gimme dat bass†! When Ciara uses these words together and then begins to dance right along with it it brings so much power to her video, song and performance. That’s what I really like about music; the performance, the power of the song, the meaning, the routines to the song, etc. This is my favorite song because Ciara really puts joy and a shining light into my heart. She makes me feel like I can come right out and do what I want to do, make whatever I want to make and just give my fans the performance they need. I feel inspired when I listen to this song; because I love dancing, I love singing, I love goofing around and giving my audience/listeners something they would want to hear. The song says: yeah, yeah, you like it when I move it to the beat like dat, got that bong up in your trunk, drop them speakers and turn it up, gimme dat bass†! This song just keeps me in my hype mode; it keeps me going every day. Every single moment I listen to it I’m either always dancing to it, singing to it or fantasing about how great it would be to have been in that video or created my own, that’s similar to it; but of course I would try to have the best song ever; and even though Ciara is great I think I can beat her to that one Grammy!

History of the Thermometer and Lord Kelvin

Lord Kelvin invented the Kelvin Scale in 1848 used on thermometers. The Kelvin Scale measures the ultimate extremes of hot and cold. Kelvin developed the idea of absolute temperature, what is called the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and developed the dynamical theory of heat. In the 19th century, scientists were researching what was the lowest temperature possible. The Kelvin scale uses the same units as the Celcius scale, but it starts at ABSOLUTE ZERO, the temperature at which everything including air freezes solid. Absolute zero is O K, which is - 273 °C degrees Celsius. Lord Kelvin - Biography Sir William Thomson, Baron Kelvin of Largs, Lord Kelvin of Scotland (1824 - 1907) studied at Cambridge University, was a champion rower, and later became a Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Glasgow. Among his other achievements was the 1852 discovery of the Joule-Thomson Effect of gasses and his work on the first transatlantic telegraph cable (for which he was knighted), and his inventing of the mirror galvanometer used in cable signaling, the siphon recorder, the mechanical tide predictor, an improved ships compass. Extracts from: Philosophical Magazine October 1848 Cambridge University Press, 1882 ...The characteristic property of the scale which I now propose is, that all degrees have the same value; that is, that a unit of heat descending from a body A at the temperature T ° of this scale, to a body B at the temperature (T-1) °, would give out the same mechanical effect, whatever be the number T. This may justly be termed an absolute scale since its characteristic is quite independent of the physical properties of any specific substance. To compare this scale with that of the air-thermometer, the values (according to the principle of estimation stated above) of degrees of the air-thermometer must be known. Now an expression, obtained by Carnot from the consideration of his ideal steam-engine, enables us to calculate these values when the latent heat of a given volume and the pressure of saturated vapor at any temperature are experimentally determined. The determination of these elements is the principal object of Regnaults great work, already referred to, but, at present, his researches are not complete. In the first part, which alone has been as yet published, the latent heats of a given weight, and the pressures of saturated vapour at all temperatures between 0 ° and 230 ° (Cent. of the air-thermometer), have been ascertained; but it would be necessary in addition to know the densities of saturated vapour at different temperatures, to enable us to determine the latent heat of a given volume at any temperature. M. Regnault announces his intention of instituting researches for this object; but till the results are made known, we have no way of completing the data necessary for the present problem, except by estimating the density of saturated vapour at any temperature (the corresponding pressure being known by Regnaults researches already published) according to the approximate laws of compressibility and expansion (the laws of Mariotte and Gay-Lussac, or Boyle and Dalton). Within the limits of natural temperature in ordinary climates, the density of saturated vapour is actually found by Regnault (Études Hydromà ©triques in the Annales de Chimie) to verify very closely these laws; and we have reasons to believe from experiments which have been made by Gay-Lussac and others, that as high as the temperature 100 ° there can be no considerable deviation; but our estimate of the density of saturated vapour, founded on these laws, may be very erroneous at such high temperatures at 230 °. Hence a completely satisfactory calculation of the proposed scale cannot be made till after the additional experimental data shall have been obtained; but with the data which we actually possess, we may make an approximate comparison of the new scale with that of the air-thermometer, which at least between 0 ° and 100 ° will be tolerably satisfactory. The labour of performing the necessary calculations for effecting a comparison of the proposed scale with that of the air-thermometer, between the limits of 0 ° and 230 ° of the latter, has been kindly undertaken by Mr. William Steele, lately of Glasgow College, now of St. Peters College, Cambridge. His results in tabulated forms were laid before the Society, with a diagram, in which the comparison between the two scales is represented graphically. In the first table, the amounts of mechanical effect due to the descent of a unit of heat through the successive degrees of the air-thermometer are exhibited. The unit of heat adopted is the quantity necessary to elevate the temperature of a kilogramme of water from 0 ° to 1 ° of the air-thermometer; and the unit of mechanical effect is a metre-kilogramme; that is, a kilogramme raised a metre high. In the second table, the temperatures according to the proposed scale, which correspond to the different degrees of the air-thermometer from 0 ° to 230 °, are exhibited. The arbitrary points which coincide on the two scales are 0 ° and 100 °. If we add together the first hundred numbers given in the first table, we find 135.7 for the amount of work due to a unit of heat descending from a body A at 100 ° to B at 0 °. Now 79 such units of heat would, according to Dr. Black (his result being very slightly corrected by Regnault), melt a kilogramme of ice. Hence if the heat necessary to melt a pound of ice be now taken as unity, and if a metre-pound be taken as the unit of mechanical effect, the amount of work to be obtained by the descent of a unit of heat from 100 ° to 0 ° is 79x135.7, or 10,700 nearly. This is the same as 35,100 foot-pounds, which is a little more than the work of a one-horse-power engine (33,000 foot pounds) in a minute; and consequently, if we had a steam-engine working with perfect economy at one-horse-power, the boiler being at the temperature 100 °, and the condenser kept at 0 ° by a constant supply of ice, rather less than a pound of ice would be melted in a minute.