Immanuel Kant’s analysis of the knowledge
process puts him in the forefront of the world’s greatest
philosophers. The new book Kant is a fascinating
biography of this eighteenth-century German, whose beliefs were
far ahead of his time.
Kant greatly influenced German idealism in
the succeeding generation. When Albert Einstein was fifteen, his
father handed him a copy of Kant’s The Critique of Pure
Reason, and asked him to read it carefully. Throughout his
life, Einstein tried to isolate the a priori factors underlying
physical manifestation. His idea of subjective space-time is
obviously derived from Kant.
Neither Buddha nor Plato attempted anything
like Kant’s endeavors. Kant asked these preliminary questions:
What is it I know? How do I know it? How reliable is sensation
or thought? What is the nature of the subject? Who am I? Is the
mind a blank sheet in which experience writes whatever it
wishes?
Kant believed that sensation is possible only
within two a priori forms of intuition: space and time.
According to Kant, space and time are a priori subjective
projections, within which we behold phenomenal representations.
What we perceive are our own representations of reality within a
spatio-temporal framework, and sensation itself would be
impossible without these a priori forms of intuition.
