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Immanuel Kant on Knowledge

 

            According to Immanuel Kant, we are never able to know the world in its true form, as what we 'experience', says Kant, is the noumena (the real world) along with our innate concepts or 'categories' which shapes our understanding of the world and allows us to perceive. What we finally experience, Kant calls the phenomena. According to Kant, knowledge cannot exist independent from either noumena or the innate concepts which you already have in your mind. An example of these categories being present in our minds prior to experience of the world is the category is 'causation'. We can never perceive cause from the senses. Therefore we never gained it from the senses. If you were to take an empirical route, you would conclude that causation does not exist. But that is a slight naive interpretation, grounded in stubbornness. We clearly do have an idea of causation, which means if it did not come from our senses, it must have always been there. An example of this idea of causation being present in our minds independent of experience would be if you were to record a room spinning while you were in it, and after were to record you spinning in a room, the changes in sense data you would receive would be the same. But you would still be able to distinguish what caused the changes in sense data in the two situations. Therefore, Kant concludes that we cannot certainly know the real world, because what we experience is what we sense, merged with our innate ideas. We can never know the world in its purest form according to Kant. .
             However, let's say we were to start off with the premise that everything has cause, because nothing can arise out of nothing. It is impossible to comprehend something happening out of nothingness, because there is simply nothing to comprehend, as it isn't possible. This means every event that has ever happened, must have happened due to a prior occurrence. This implies a sort of order in the world; one event causes another and so on – an order of events.


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