1001Philosophers

Aristotle vs Immanuel Kant on Knowledge

Aristotle holds that knowledge is the grasp of necessary connections between substances and their properties, achieved through demonstration from principles known by induction. Kant agrees that genuine knowledge is universal and necessary but denies that experience alone could deliver this; necessity is supplied by a priori categories that the mind brings to experience. Aristotelian knowing reads necessity off the world; Kantian knowing reconstructs it as a precondition of experience itself.

About this topic

Epistemology is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature, sources, and limits of knowledge. Philosophers have asked what distinguishes knowledge from mere opinion, whether it requires certainty or can be probabilistic, and how perception, reason, memory, and testimony each contribute. Ancient skeptics challenged the possibility of knowledge altogether, while rationalists located its source in reason and empiricists in experience. Contemporary epistemology investigates justification, reliability, and the social conditions under which beliefs count as knowing.

For a side-by-side overview of the two philosophers more broadly, see the full Aristotle vs Immanuel Kant comparison. To browse philosophy more widely on this theme, see the Knowledge quotes hub.

Representative quotes on knowledge

Aristotle on knowledge

  • “All men by nature desire to know.”

    Metaphysics Book I, 980a.21 : Opening paragraph of Metaphysics | Variant: All men by nature desire knowledge. | The first sentence is in the Oxford Dictionary of Scientific Quotations (2005), 21:10

  • “The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.”

    Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers

  • “Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history, for poetry expresses the universal and history only the particular.”

    διὸ καὶ φιλοσοφώτερον καὶ σπουδαιότερον ποίησις ἱστορίας ἐστίν: ἡ μὲν γὰρ ποίησις μᾶλλον τὰ καθόλου, ἡ δ᾽ ἱστορία τὰ καθ᾽ ἕκαστον λέγει.

  • “My lectures are published and not published; they will be intelligible to those who heard them, and to none beside.”

    Letter to Alexander the Great as quoted by William Whewell , History of the Inductive Sciences (1837), Ch. 2, Sect. 2

  • “Of things said without any combination, each signifies either substance or quantity or qualification or a relative or where or when or being-in-a-position or having or doing or being affected . To give a rough idea, examples of substance are man, horse; of quantity: four-foot, five-foot; of qualification: white, grammatical; of a relative: double, half, larger; of where: in the Lyceum, in the market-place; of when: yesterday, last-year; of being-in-a-position: is-lying, is sitting; of having: has-shoes-on, has-armour-on; of doing: cutting, burning; of being-affected: being-cut, being-burned.”

    1b25-2a10; J. L. Ackrill (tr.), 1984-1995

All 10 Aristotle quotes on knowledge →

Immanuel Kant on knowledge

  • “All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason.”

    All human knowledge begins with intuitions, proceeds from thence to concepts, and ends with ideas.

  • “Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.”

    A 51, B 75

  • “A lecture at Königsberg (1775), as quoted in A New Dictionary of Quotations on Historical Principles from Ancient and Modern Sources (1946) by H. L. Mencken , p. 955”

    The wish to talk to God is absurd . We cannot talk to one we cannot comprehend — and we cannot comprehend God; we can only believe in Him. The uses of prayer are thus only subjective.

  • “A lecture at Königsberg (1775), as quoted in A New Dictionary of Quotations on Historical Principles from Ancient and Modern Sources (1946) by H. L. Mencken , p. 1017”

    Religion is too important a matter to its devotees to be a subject of ridicule. If they indulge in absurdities, they are to be pitied rather than ridiculed.

  • “The body is a temple.”

    A lecture at Königsberg (1775), as quoted in A New Dictionary of Quotations on Historical Principles from Ancient and Modern Sources (1946) by H. L. Mencken , p. 1043

All 10 Immanuel Kant quotes on knowledge →

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