Sur kant's language is famously difficult and one of the barriers, in some ways, to understandings of these ideas. He thinks its a really important distinction that philosophers haven't recognized before. We've got to group together the claims which are just definitional, the ones where it's just the meaning of the words which explain why they're true. And separate them from the ones where you need something beyond meaning, beyond definition, in order to come to realize that the claim is true. Sur kant: The world fundamentally does depend on the mind. So te pu, very crudely, and i'm truly treading n on a broken glasser hem, john, the world depends
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the insight into our relationship with the world that Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) shared in his book The Critique of Pure Reason in 1781. It was as revolutionary, in his view, as when the Polish astronomer Copernicus realised that Earth revolves around the Sun rather than the Sun around Earth. Kant's was an insight into how we understand the world around us, arguing that we can never know the world as it is, but only through the structures of our minds which shape that understanding. This idea, that the world depends on us even though we do not create it, has been one of Kant’s greatest contributions to philosophy and influences debates to this day.
The image above is a portrait of Immanuel Kant by Friedrich Wilhelm Springer
With
Fiona Hughes
Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Essex
Anil Gomes
Associate Professor and Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at Trinity College, Oxford
And
John Callanan
Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at King’s College London
Producer: Simon Tillotson