Immanuel Kant Quotes on Knowledge
Kant's Critique of Pure Reason undertook to settle the early modern dispute between rationalists and empiricists by showing that genuine knowledge requires both: empirical content supplied by sensible intuition but structured by the a priori categories of the understanding. The doctrine that synthetic a priori judgments are possible — substantively informative claims that nevertheless hold with strict necessity — frames the entire critical project. Kant restricts theoretical knowledge to the domain of possible experience: the unconditioned objects of traditional metaphysics (God, the soul, freedom of the will) lie beyond its reach but reappear as postulates of practical reason.
Quotes
-
Attributed to Immanuel Kant:
“Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity.”
-
“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 -
Attributed to Immanuel Kant:
“It is beyond a doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience.”
-
“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 -
“Immanuel Kant , Kant's Critique of Judgment (1892) Tr. J.H. Bernard”
Moral Teleology supplies the deficiency in physical Teleology , and first establishes a Theology ; because the latter, if it did not borrow from the former without being observed, but were to proceed consistently, could only found a Demonology , which is incapable of any definite concept. -
“Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Ethics by Immanuel Kant, trans. J.W. Semple, ed. with Iintroduction by Rev. Henry Calderwood (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1886) (3rd edition). Chapter: GENERAL DIVISION OF JURISPRUDENCE.”
Freedom is the alone unoriginated birthright of man, and belongs to him by force of his humanity ; and is independence on the will and co-action of every other in so far as this consists with every other person’s freedom.