SOCI 230 Lecture Notes - Lecture 12: German Idealism, Immanuel Kant, Noumenon
8 May 2017
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Immanuel kant and george fredrick hegel: attempted to distinguish between 1) world of ideal or metaphysics= ultimate principles that were beyond empirical reality and 2) the natural/empirical world. Phenomenon= appearances in natural/empirical world: how they appear to us. Noumenon= things in themselves, non-empirical, not visible cannot be described, yet exist in form only. We (cid:272)a(cid:374)"t describe the world as is. We can only prescribe to it to the form in which we perceive it. Perceive through aprior categories, which exist prior to humans and is base of understanding. Human mind organized by these categories, making it possible to understand them: important because categories make sense of complexity of society, even though they are generalizations. How is knowledge possible for kant: reason: aprior categories that are universal and exist in the mind, observation of phenomena: empirical level of testing and establishing laws.
