Kant Essay -- essays research papers

Isaac Newton had a new approach to the existence of space and time that contradicted that of great philosophers such as Leibniz and Descates. Newton felt that space and time are infinite and independent of the body and mind, that the bodies and minds of the world existed in space and time and even without the presence of physical bodies there still would be space and time. He stated there â€Å"are positions in space and time which are independent of the material entities† that existed in them and that the principles of empty space and time are possible. In the Prolegomena, Immanuel Kant seems to have agreed in part with Newton’s views of space and time and attempted to support Newton by presenting two forms of judgment that would maintain Newton’s thesis, these being judgments of perception and judgments of experience.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Kant first described the ability of a judgment of perception to become a judgment of experience. Judgments of perception are our own purely individual perceptions of an object or feeling and may not be the same experience as that of another persons. He states that judgments of perception are merely subjective intuitions of an object and have no objective validity. He believed that judgments of perception â€Å"require no pure concept of understanding, but only the logical connection of perception in a thinking subject.† Kant feels that for a judgment of perception to become a judgment of experience, the subjective observation of the object must be the same for all subjective perceptions thereby becoming universally true to all people, only then will the judgment becomes objectively valid and a pure concept and only then do we have an experiance. An example presented in the Prolegomena to address the difference between judgments of perception and judgments of experience also helps to understand how a judgment of perception becomes a judgment of experience through the notion of causality. The example stated is when the sun shines on a rock, the rock grows warm. This would be a judgment of perception if the statement remained as shown. We cannot say that just because the sun is shinning it caused the rock to warm. When we change the statement to the sun warms the rock, then this statement presents additional information to the original perception, that of cause. With the addition of causality, the statement becomes objecti... ...niverse does not conform to the laws of geometry. He showed that space-time may be a four-dimensional curve of space and that the fourth dimension is time itself. This new form of physics makes more sense if we assume that space and time are able to exist independent of the mind.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Even though Kant was able to base many of the laws of science in philosophy, he was not able to show that space and time are tools we use to perceive our world and could never exist themselves absent of the mind. Scientific laws must be judgments of experience and universally objective to be considered laws of science because they need to have the ability to give all observers the same experience of a phenomenon. Where Kant is wrong is his belief of space and time as dependent upon the mind. New discoveries in physics have shown that space and time must be able to exist in the absence of the mind, proving that Kant was wrong in his presumption that space and time could never exist absolutely. Science today may have its elementary basis in philosophy, but the higher principles of science, particularly that of physics, are outside the understanding and thinking of philosophy.