Melvourne: We need to get beyond this anthropocentric view of the world that was initiated by the copernican revolution. Phenomenology, which started at the beginning of the twentieth century with husse insists that we have to start where the mind encounters the world. And one part thing, which i guess is really important in philosophy after kant, is that kant is interested in how we can use our rational faculties when we can gain knowledge with them or when we can't gained knowledge with them. In a way, he sets the framework in which all the philosophers after kant approach the questions that they're interested in.
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