Understanding Kant’s Concepts of Reason and Knowledge
2) What is the main difference, according to Kant’s explanation, between the concepts of understanding and the ideas of reason? Ideas de Kant
However, according to Kant, reason is not the only faculty that enables intellectual knowledge. Between sensibility (the ability to receive sensory impressions) and reason is the faculty of understanding. According to Kant, only understanding provides true knowledge because, through its judgments, it connects concepts (mental objects) with sense impressions (data supplied by sensibility), giving meaning to those concepts. If this connection is not possible or, as Kant would say, if a concept of understanding cannot be “subsumed” in any sense impression, then this is a hollow concept, that is, a concept without meaning. However, beyond the dictates of understanding, reason, according to Kant’s explanation, is determined to find the last explanatory principles of the whole reality using its own concepts (which Kant called “ideas” to differentiate these rational concepts from the concepts of understanding), but without referring them to anything sensitive.
2. Theoretical Reason and Practical Reason
According to Aristotle, there are different kinds of knowledge that come from different ways of knowing. First, there is a purely sensible knowledge that Aristotle called “experience.” Experience, as Aristotle conceived it, is common to humans and animals. But humans also have other “ways of knowing” that Aristotle called “intellectual virtues”: science (episteme), intuitive intelligence (nous), wisdom (sophia), art (techne), and prudence (phronesis). Aristotle classified the five intellectual virtues into two groups according to the two parts or functions of the rational soul. The first group belongs to theoretical reason, and it knows things that are necessary and immutable, that is, those that cannot be otherwise. The second group belongs to practical reason, and it deals with contingent and variable entities.
Theoretical Reason
- Science (episteme)
- Intuitive intelligence (nous)
- Wisdom (sophia)
Practical Reason
- Art (techne)
- Prudence (phronesis)
Kant distinguished between theoretical and practical reason, not being these two different reasons, but two different uses of one and the same reason. When these principles refer to the reality of things, that is, if we use reason to know the reality, this is the theoretical use of reason (theoretical reason). However, when these principles are designed to guide human behavior, we are giving reason a practical use (practical reason).
Metaphysics: The term “metaphysics” comes from the Greek language. It means something like “beyond the physics.” It is said that “Metaphysics” was the name given by Andronicus of Rhodes in the first century BC to a set of writings related to what Aristotle called “first philosophy,” because they were collected and edited behind the eight books of Physics.
Ontology: Ontology consists of the study of what exists, the study of Being (or entity). It is a fundamental part of Metaphysics to the point that many people identify them. In short, both Metaphysics and Ontology intend to reach a knowledge of the fundamentals of reality, that is to say, to explain the existence of everything through its elementary principles or causes.