Core profile
Limits speculative metaphysics by arguing that the mind structures experience and cannot know things in themselves as such.
Concepts to watch
Categoriesmetaphysicspractical reason
Thinker profile
Immanuel Kant
Limits speculative metaphysics by arguing that the mind structures experience and cannot know things in themselves as such.
Dates
1724-1804
Tradition
Critical Philosophy
How to study this thinker
- 1Start with the basic problem this thinker is trying to solve.
- 2Name the concepts Aquinas receives, corrects, or resists.
- 3Return to Aquinas and ask how the borrowed insight is reordered.
Aquinas connection
Later challenge
Kant denies that classical metaphysics can know being as being or demonstrate God as Aquinas intends.
Possible Thomistic defense
Thomists respond that being is first known in judgment before any closed system of categories, so metaphysics is not an illicit projection beyond experience.