Lesson 2.5: The Thing-In-Itself

Glossary

Kant’s Metaphysics

Transcendental Idealism — Kant’s view that human beings experience only appearances, not things-in-themselves, and that our experience of those appearances is structured by human cognition.

Thing-in-Itself — A thing considered as it exists independently of human cognition or perception.

Noumenal Realm — Reality considered independently of human cognition: things-in-themselves. We cannot directly experience or scientifically investigate the noumenal realm.

Phenomenal Realm — Reality as it appears to us. The phenomenal realm is structured by human cognition and is the realm in which scientific inquiry is possible.

Faculty of Understanding — Our capacity to judge and organize experience. Kant argues that the understanding contributes structure to the world as we experience it.

Forms of Intuition — The basic forms through which human beings experience objects. For Kant, space and time are forms of human intuition rather than features of things-in-themselves.

Important clarification: The phenomenal and noumenal realms are not two separate worlds. They are two ways of considering the same reality: as it appears to us and as it exists independently of our cognition.

Knowledge and Judgment

Analytic Statement — A statement in which the predicate is already contained within the concept of the subject. For example, “All bachelors are male.”

Synthetic Statement — A statement that connects a subject with a predicate that is not already contained within the concept of the subject. For example, “All bachelors are happy.”

A Priori Justification — Justification that does not depend upon any particular sensory experience or empirical observation.

A Posteriori Justification — Justification that does require some particular sensory experience or empirical observation.

Synthetic A Priori Judgment — A judgment whose justification is independent of particular experience but which nevertheless tells us something objectively true about the world of human experience. Kant regarded geometry as an important example.

The key idea behind these distinctions is that Kant believed reason alone can give us some genuine knowledge about the world as we experience it.

Freedom and Moral Agency

Freedom — The ability to be governed by reason; more specifically, the capacity to impose rational rules upon oneself.

Libertarian Free Will — The kind of freedom required, in this lesson, for genuine moral responsibility: the ability to choose in a way that is not completely determined by prior causes and the laws of nature.

Rational Being — A being that is free and capable of living according to rational principles it imposes upon itself.

Moral Personhood — The status of having moral rights. In Kant’s framework, moral personhood belongs to rational beings.

Postulate of Practical Reason — Something that cannot be theoretically proven but that practical reason requires us to assume. Kant treats freedom in this way: we cannot prove that we are noumenally free, but moral responsibility requires us to regard ourselves as free.

This last distinction is especially important given the clarification from the video: Kant does not claim that transcendental idealism proves libertarian freedom. Freedom must be assumed from the practical or moral standpoint.

Two Approaches to Morality

Deontology — The view that an action’s being right or wrong depends upon the rules, duties, or intentions behind the action. It holds that some actions are inherently wrong.

Consequentialism — The view that an action is right or wrong depending upon its consequences. The same kind of action may therefore be right in one context and wrong in another.

Reason and the Moral Law

Pure Practical Reason — The use of reason to determine what we ought to do independently of our particular desires and the empirical consequences of our actions.

Moral Law — The universal moral requirements that Kant believes can be discovered through reason rather than observation of consequences.

Hypothetical Imperative — A command of reason that depends upon a particular desired outcome: if you want some end, you should perform the actions necessary to achieve it.

Categorical Imperative — A command of reason that applies regardless of what a person happens to want. Kant believes morality takes the form of a categorical imperative: a moral law commanded upon us by our own reason.

Duty and Moral Worth

Duty — What the moral law requires us to do.

Acting from Duty — Performing an action because one is motivated by respect for the moral law, even when one does not particularly want to perform it.

Moral Worth — The moral value an action possesses when it is performed from duty. For Kant, merely doing the right thing is not sufficient for genuine moral worth; what matters is why you did it.

Maxim — The principle that motivates an action. Kant argues that the moral worth of an action comes from the maxim behind it rather than from the consequences the action happens to produce.