{"quotes":[{"text":"We are humanity, Kant says. Humanity needs us because we are it. Kant believes in duty and considers remaining alive a primary human duty. For him one is not permitted to “renounce his personality,” and while he states living as a duty, it also conveys a kind of freedom: we are not burdened with the obligation of judging whether our personality is worth maintaining, whether our life is worth living. Because living it is a duty, we are performing a good moral act just by persevering.","author":"Jennifer Michael Hecht","tags":["duty","freedom","humanity","kant","suicide"],"id":17036,"author_id":"Jennifer+Michael+Hecht"},{"text":"Plato and Aristotle are my teachers. Even Kant is my teacher, but my greatest teacher is my failures.","author":"Debasish Mridha","tags":["aristotle","debasish-mridha","debasish-mridha-m-d","education","failure","inspirational","kant","philosophy","plato","quotes","teacher","teachers"],"id":40493,"author_id":"Debasish+Mridha"},{"text":"A similar experiment may be tried in metaphysics as regards the *intuition* of objects. If the intuition had to conform to the constitution of objects, I would not understand how we could know anything of them *a priori*; but if the object (as object of the senses) conformed to the constitution of our faculty of intuition, I could very well conceive such a possibility. As, however, I cannot rest in these intuitions if they are to become knowledge, but have to refer them as representations, to something as their object, and must determine this object through them, I can assume either that the *concepts* through which I arrive at this determination also conform to the object, and I would again be as perplexed about how I can know anything about it *a priori*; or else that the objects, or what is the same thing, the *experience* in which alone they are known (as objects that are given to us), conform to those concepts. In the latter case, I recognize an easier solution because experience itself is a kind of knowledge that requires understanding; and this understanding has its rules which I must presuppose as existing within me even before objects are given to me, and hence *a priori*. These rules are expressed in *a priori* concepts to which all objects of experience must necessarily conform, and with which they must agree. With regard to objects, insofar as they are thought merely through reason and thought indeed as necessary, and which can never, at least not in the way in which reason thinks them, be given in experience, the attempts at thinking them (for they must admit of being thought) will subsequently furnish an excellent touchstone of what we are adopting as our new method of thought, namely, that we know of things *a priori* only that which we ourselves put into them.'―from_Critique of Pure Reason_. Preface to the Second Edition. Translated, edited, and with an Introduction by Marcus Weigelt, based on the translation by Max Müller, pp. 18-19.","author":"Immanuel Kant","tags":["epistemology","kant","metaphysics","ontology","philosophy"],"id":50930,"author_id":"Immanuel+Kant"},{"text":"He who would know the world must first manufacture it.","author":"Immanuel Kant","tags":["epistemology","kant","knowledge","philosophy"],"id":68686,"author_id":"Immanuel+Kant"},{"text":"Thus we find that the unconditioned condition of the goodness of anything is rational nature...To play this role, however, rational nature must itself be something of unconditional value--and end in itself.","author":"Christine M. Korsgaard","tags":["ethics","kant","moral-philosophy"],"id":111105,"author_id":"Christine+M.+Korsgaard"},{"text":"The ‘I’ is a bare consciousness, accompanying all concepts. In the ‘I’, ‘nothing more is represented than a transcendental subject of thoughts’. ‘Consciousness in itself (is) not so much a representation…as it is a form of representation in general.’ The ‘I think’ is ‘the form of apperception, which clings to every experience and precedes it.’Kant grasps the phenomenal content of the ‘I’ correctly in the expression ‘I think’, or—if one also pays heed to including the ‘practical person’ when one speaks of ‘intelligence’—in the expression ‘I take action’. In Kant’s sense we must take saying “I” as saying “I think.” Kant tries to establish the phenomenal content of the “I” as *res cogitans*. If in doing so he calls this “I” a ‘logical subject’, that does not mean that the “I” in general is a concept obtained merely by way of logic. The “I” is rather the subject of logical behavior, of binding together. ‘I think’ means ‘I bind together’. All binding together is an ‘*I* bind together’. In any taking-together or relating, the “I” always underlies—the ὑποκείμενον [hypokeimenon; subjectum; subject]. The *subjectum* is therefore ‘consciousness in itself’, not a representation but rather the ‘form’ of representation. That is to say, the “I think” is not something represented, but the formal structure of representing as such, and this formal structure alone makes it possible for anything to have been represented. When we speak of the “form” of representation, we have in view neither a framework nor a universal concept, but that which, as εἶδος [eidos], makes every representing and everything represented be what it is. If the “I” is understood as the form of representation, this amounts to saying that it is the ‘logical subject’.Kant’s analysis has two positive aspects. For one thing, he sees the impossibility of ontically reducing the “I” to a substance; for another thing, he holds fast to the “I” as ‘I think’. Nevertheless, he takes this “I” as subject again, and he does so in a sense which is ontologically inappropriate. For the ontological concept of the subject *characterizes not the Selfhood of the “I” qua Self, but the self-sameness and steadiness of something that is always present-at-hand*. To define the “I” ontologically as “*subject*” means to regard it as something always present-at-hand. The Being of the “I” is understood as the Reality of the *res cogitans*.'―from_Being and Time_. Translated by John Macquarrie \u0026 Edward Robinson, pp. 366-367.","author":"Martin Heidegger","tags":["heidegger","kant","metaphysics","ontology","philosophy","reality"],"id":125698,"author_id":"Martin+Heidegger"},{"text":"The more narrow-minded a system is the more it will please worldly-wise people. Thus the system of the materialists, the doctrine of Helvetius and also Locke has recieved the most acclaim amongst his class. Thus Kant even now will find more followers than Fichte.","author":"Novalis","tags":["fichte","helvetius","kant","locke","materialism"],"id":134003,"author_id":"Novalis"},{"text":"To clarify the existentiality of the Self, we take as our ‘natural’ point of departure Dasein’s everyday interpretation of the Self. In *saying* “*I*,” Dasein expresses itself about ‘itself’. It is not necessary that in doing so Dasein should make any utterance. With the ‘I’, this entity has itself in view. The content of this expression is regarded as something utterly simple. In each case, it just stands for me and nothing further. Also, this ‘I’, as something simple, is not an attribute of other Things; it is not *itself* a predicate, but the absolute ‘subject’. What is expressed and what is addressed in saying “I,” is always met as the same persisting something. The characteristics of ‘simplicity’, ‘substantiality’, and ‘personality’, which Kant, for instance, made the basis for his doctrine ‘of the paralogisms of pure reason’, arise from a genuine pre-phenomenological experience. The question remains whether that which we have experienced ontically in this way may be Interpreted ontologically with the help of the ‘categories’ mentioned.Kant, indeed, in strict conformity with the phenomenal content given in saying “I,” shows that the ontical theses about the soul-substance which have been inferred [*erschlossenen*] from these characteristics, are without justification. But in so doing, he merely rejects a wrong *ontical* explanation of the “I”; he has by no means achieved an *ontological* Interpretation of Selfhood, nor has he even obtained some assurance of it and made positive preparation for it. Kant makes a more rigorous attempt than his predecessors to keep hold of the phenomenal content of saying “I”; yet even though in theory he has denied that the ontical foundations of the ontology of the substantial apply to the “I,” he still slips back into *this same* inappropriate ontology. This will be shown more exactly, in order that we may establish what it means ontologically to take saying “I” as the starting point for the analysis of Selfhood. The Kantian analysis of the ‘I think’ is now to be added as an illustration, but only so far as is demanded for clarifying these problems.'―from_Being and Time_. Translated by John Macquarrie \u0026 Edward Robinson, p. 366.","author":"Martin Heidegger","tags":["heidegger","kant","metaphysics","ontology","philosophy"],"id":172303,"author_id":"Martin+Heidegger"},{"text":"Kant thought things, not because they were true, but because he was Kant.","author":"W. Somerset Maugham","tags":["kant","truth"],"id":175423,"author_id":"W.+Somerset+Maugham"},{"text":"If you view yourself as having a value-conferring status in virtue of of your power of rational choice, you must view anyone who has the power of rational choice as having...A value conferring status.","author":"Christine M. Korsgaard","tags":["ethics","kant","moral-philosophy"],"id":189231,"author_id":"Christine+M.+Korsgaard"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":26,"pages":3,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}