Through most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the most influential figures of Western philosophy wrote in French: Descartes, Pascal, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau. French was literally the lingua franca. In the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars, France was battered and, as its birthrate fell, the influence of the great power to its east rose. It should be no surprise then that as Prussia emerged as the dominant power in the heart of Europe that continental philosophy came to be led by German thinkers and writers. That continued to be the case right up until Germany’s defeat in the Second World War.
Marx was not the first of the German philosophers to achieve preeminence. That was Immanuel Kant. Recently Kant has come under attack for a few essays he authored that were explicitly racist. These articles had rarely been of interest in the English-speaking world until the past few decades, and they have little to do with the focus of his thought. So however much they may inflame us, they are only marginally relevant to a judgment of his importance, and it would be wrong to dismiss his philosophy on the basis of them.
Kant’s work was a reaction to the philosophy of David Hume. Hume’s writings are referred to as empiricist. It is vital to note that we do not mean by this that Hume was empirical. Rather, the term empiricist is employed with respect to Hume’s theory of knowledge, which was founded in his belief that humans learn through perception and experience. Kant challenged this idea. He did so in an enormously long, complicated book entitled The Critique of Pure Reason. In a sense, its intention was the exact opposite of this one. Through it, Kant aimed to defend a priori reasoning. Kant’s argument on its behalf is subtle, and, if accepted, it has a wide range of implications. Much of his brief commences with an undeniable, almost commonplace observation: while objective reality undoubtedly exists, our process of understanding and perceiving it involves our own thinking.
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