Enlightenment philosophers were vexed that their expanding empirical science of the external, material world collided with long-standing religious and moral traditions premised solely on internal, a priori knowledge. But for Immanuel Kant, the ‘sensible world’ of appearances emerged from cognitive faculties of the human mind, constitutive of observations gained through human experience. ‘We can cognize of things a priori only what we ourselves have put into them,’ he wrote. Kant analogised his reframing of metaphysics to Copernicus’s heliocentrism, in which the astronomer’s observations made sense only when he placed the Sun, rather than Earth, at the centre. ‘An object of the senses’ like a new planet observed from a telescope, wrote Kant, ‘conforms to the constitution of our faculty of intuition’, resolving the perceived discrepancy between the observable world and the mind’s contemplation of it.
ፍትህ ለሁሉም / Justice for All