Metaphysics (Professor Ordinarius der Logic und Metaphysic) at the University of Königsberg.
In
defense of this appointment, Kant wrote his inaugural dissertation (Inaugural-Dissertation) De Mundi
Sensibilis atque Intelligibilis Forma et Principiis (On the Form and Principles of the Sensible and the
Intelligible World).[1] This work saw the emergence of several central themes of his mature work,
including the distinction between the faculties of intellectual thought and sensible receptivity. To miss
this distinction would mean to commit the error of subreption, and, as he says in the last chapter of the
dissertation, only in avoiding this error does metaphysics flourish.
The issue that vexed Kant was central to what 20th-century scholars called "the philosophy of mind".
The flowering of the natural sciences had led to an understanding of how data reaches the brain.
Sunlight falling on an object is reflected from its surface in a way that maps the surface features (color,
texture, etc.). The reflected light reaches the human eye, passes through the cornea, is focused by the
lens onto the retina where it forms an image similar to that formed by light passing through a pinhole
into a camera obscura. The retinal cells send impulses through the optic nerve and then they form a
mapping in the brain of the visual features of the object. The interior mapping is not the exterior object,
and our belief that there is a meaningful relationship between the object and the mapping in the brain
depends on a chain of reasoning that is not fully grounded. But the uncertainty aroused by these
considerations, by optical illusions, misperceptions, delusions, etc., are not the end of the problems.
Kant saw that the mind could not function as an empty container that simply receives data from
outside. Something must be giving order to the incoming data. Images of external objects must be kept
in the same sequence in which they were received. This ordering occurs through the mind's intuition of
time. The same considerations apply to the mind's function of constituting space for ordering mappings
of visual and tactile signals arriving via the already described chains of physical causation.
It is often claimed that Kant was a late developer, that he only became an important philosopher in his
mid-50s after rejecting his earlier views. While it is true that Kant wrote his greatest works relatively
late in life, there is a tendency to underestimate the value of his earlier works. Recent Kant scholarship
has devoted more attention to these "pre-critical" writings and has recognized a degree of continuity
with his mature work.[75]
Critique of Pure Reason
At age 46, Kant was an established scholar and an increasingly influential philosopher, and much was
expected of him. In correspondence with his ex-student and friend Markus Herz, Kant admitted that, in
the inaugural dissertation, he had failed to account for the relation between our sensible and
intellectual faculties. He needed to explain how we combine what is known as sensory knowledge with
the other type of knowledge—i.e. reasoned knowledge—these two being related but having very
different processes.
Kant also credited David Hume with awakening him from a "dogmatic slumber" in which he had
unquestioningly accepted the tenets of both religion and natural philosophy.[76][77] Hume in his 1739
Treatise on Human Nature had argued that we only know the mind through a subjective—essentially
illusory—series of perceptions.[76] Ideas such as causality, morality, and objects are not evident in
experience, so their reality may be questioned. Kant felt that reason could remove this skepticism, and
he set himself to solving these problems. Although fond of company and conversation with others, Kant
isolated himself, and resisted friends' attempts to bring him out of his isolation.[e] When Kant emerged
from his silence in 1781, the result was the Critique of Pure Reason. Kant countered Hume's empiricism
