Critique of Practical Reason

Author: Immanuel Kant
Publisher:
Publication Date: 2003-08-01
Features: The author, Immanuel Kant, was one of the most important thinkers of the 18th-century European Enlightenment. He was born on April 22, 1724, in K?nigsberg, East Prussia, to a modest family of small-scale artisans. From a young age, he developed a moral character grounded in religious principles. At the age of 8, he entered a local school, where he received rigorous education, laying a solid foundation for his later philosophical research and scientific exploration. In 1740, at the age of 16, Kant entered the University of K?nigsberg for his studies. Due to financial difficulties in 1746, he worked as a private tutor for nine years. In 1755, he completed his studies and secured a teaching position at his alma mater, the University of K?nigsberg, where he taught physics, philosophy, logic, metaphysics, moral philosophy, gunnery, fortification, and natural geography. In 1770, he was promoted from lecturer to professor of logic and metaphysics, holding this position until his retirement. During the 1780s, he served as the rector of the University of K?nigsberg twice. He remained unmarried throughout his life and passed away in his hometown on February 12, 1804. Practical reason holds a dominant and leading position in the entire philosophical system of Kant. Morality is superior to cognition, and ethics is superior to epistemology; action is superior to knowledge. Only the moral laws prescribed by practical reason in the human heart possesses objective universal validity and can become universal and necessary moral principles. Why is this critique not titled Critique of Pure Practical Reason but simply Critique of Practical Reason? Although its correspondence with the Critique of Speculative Reason seems to require the former name, the work provides a full explanation for this title. The critique should solely demonstrate the existence of pure practical reason and, for this purpose, examine the entire practical capacity of critique. If it succeeds in this regard, it will be unnecessary to critique pure capacity itself to discover whether reason has overstepped itself with such an excessive demand (as happened with speculative reason). For if it is practically real as pure reason, it has proven its reality and the reality of its concept through facts, and all sophistries that could possibly claim its reality are futile. With this capacity, transcendental freedom is now established, and the freedom here referred to is in its absolute sense. Speculative reason requires this sense of freedom when applying the concept of causality, in order to extricate itself from the inevitable antinomies it falls into when it seeks to think the unconditional in the series of causal connections. However, speculative reason can only establish the concept of freedom in a probable, i.e., not inconceivable, manner and cannot guarantee its objective reality. Moreover, speculative reason proceeds in this way only to avoid assuming the inconceivable of what it must at least acknowledge as conceivable, thereby endangering the existence of reason and plunging it into the abyss of skepticism.