Modern Philosophy Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Modern Philosophy - Essay Example Kant’s investigations into the Rationalists’ and the Empiricists’ definitions of the origin of knowledge led to what Kant described as his â€Å"Copernican Revolution† in philosophy wherein he refuted the long-held belief that the mind is passive; Kant, instead, credit the rational, thinking mind for providing us with a systematic structuring of a representation of the world that makes our experience of it possible (McCormick). That is, how the world appears to us depends on how our mind perceives it based on our position and movement, thus the reference to Copernicus’ revolutionary theory. Based on this definition, Kant struggled to answer the question of what can we know and what can we not know. Kant argued that our knowledge is then constrained to the universal laws of mathematics and the empirical sciences and cannot extend to speculative metaphysics because our mind cannot fathom beyond what it holds within the spatiotemporal framework. A good starting point in any in-depth discussion of Kant’s philosophy and, especially, how he revolutionized the way the world, in general, and philosophers, in particular, think is to revisit the series of events that led him to his thesis and resulting treatises. Kant was indoctrinated in Wolff’s modified dogmatic rationalism, the thought prevalent in Germany during Kant’s academic years between 1747 and 1781; he taught about reason being the basis of knowledge (Turner). Towards the end of that period though, Kant started to question this belief. There were contradictions in the physical sciences he could not reconcile using the rationalists’ point of view and he began to reject the validity of metaphysical reasoning because of its shaky foundations (Turner). On top of it all, Kant revealed that it was his careful reading of David Hume’s analysis of the principle of causation that "interrupted my dogmatic slumbers and gave my investigations in th e field of speculative philosophy a