D-Board Kant

1

Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals (1785)

Preface

➢ Philosophy and Rational Knowledge can be:

• Formal (concerned with reason itself and universal rules of thinking) o LOGIC: “a cannon for understanding and reason, which is valid for all thinking

and which must be demonstrated” (1)

▪ “Cannot have any empirical part, i.e., a part in which the universal and necessary laws of thought would be based on grounds taken from

experience” (1)

▪ Note how logic is the very opposite of the type of inquiry that Hume carries out

• Material (concerned with objects and the laws that govern them); has an empirical component

o PHYSICS: “it determines the laws of nature as objects of experience” (1) ▪ Empirical component: must determine the laws of nature as an object of

experience.

▪ Laws of nature are laws “according to which everything does happen” (1).

o ETHICS: laws of freedom; it must “determine the will of man insofar as the will is affected by nature” (1).

▪ Laws of freedom are laws “according to which everything ought to happen” (1).

➢ Philosophy can be founded in either

• experience (empiricist, like Hume’s) or

• on a priori pure principles o Logic: when merely formal o Metaphysics: when limited to determinate objects of the understanding

❖ Note: metaphysics is NOT grounded on empirical principles But it is focused on empirical objects

❖ Twofold metaphysics:

• A Metaphysics of Nature (PHYSICS)

• A Metaphysics of Morals (ETHICS)**

**Title of the text we are reading is the “Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals”

o Which means that Kant is concerned with investigating the a priori principles of morality

o As we will see, that is the Categorical Imperative (CI): “always act in such a way that you can also will that the maxim of your action should become a universal law.”