Immanuel Kant adequately defeated?

Question:I have a philosophy teacher who said that Immanuel Kant's arguments have never adequately been defeated. Is this true? Back your answer up with sources.

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: I have a philosophy teacher who said that Immanuel Kant's arguments have never adequately been defeated. Is this true? Back your answer up with sources.

He has been defeated by everyone from the Romantics to the modernists who have found that abstract ideas regarding the happiness and true well-being of mankind do not work in their entirety for everyone. He has also been defeated in the sense of his entire group of people, the Enlightenment democratics, have been proven wrong.

However, his ideas (and his compatriot's ideas) are still in use today. It is only in the philosophical world that he is defeated.

which aspect of Kant's philosophy are you refering to? The axe murderer example seems to defeat his moral theory (in my mind at least).

Kant thought that space and time were "categories" that the human mind imposed upon the world so that we can make sense of it.

I think that the theories of Einstein have adequately proved that space and time are indeed objective things that exist extra-mentally (that is, outside of the mind.)

I found his flaw in "Pure Reason" on the first page, and by the time I was able to determine what he meant by "noumena" I knew he was on the wrong track of proving anything of "reason." "Noumena" are not of reason. If they are unknowable, as he asserts, then we don't know what they are of. We don't even know that they do indeed exist.

Plato put "essences" in the heavens and said phenomena were "mirror" images of the gods.

Aristotle put essences in "the things themselves," as if someday science would be able to extract them as they extract the colors and smells of a plant.

Kant took them back out of the realm of Aristotle's "possibly knowable" existants, and categorically said they were unknowable, without knowing what they were.

How can you say something is unknowable if you don't know what it is?

Ayn Rand solved the problem of essences by demonstrating they are concepts.
"Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology" is a repudiation, a defeat, of "noumena," because she makes the claim that essences CAN be known, that they are NOT in the heavens, that they are NOT in the "things themselves," and that they are what we make them out to be.

How can that be? Pick a word with a dozen definitions. Which is the "essence"???
Why, it is the one that fits the context of the phenomenon for which an essence is sought.

Kant is evil. His philiosophy has been defeated by Ayn Rand's philiosophy of Objectivism. www.aynrand.org -
_______________________________

"If men lived the sort of life Kant demands, who or what would gain from it? Nothing and no one. The concept of "gain" has been expunged from morality. For Kant, it is the dutiful sacrifice as such that constitutes a man's claim to virtue; the welfare of any recipient is morally incidental. Virtue, for Kant, is not the service of an interest—neither of the self nor of God nor of others. (A man can claim moral credit for service to others in this view, not because they benefit, but only insofar as he loses.)

Here is the essence and climax of the ethics of self-sacrifice, finally, after two thousand years, come to full, philosophic expression in the Western world: your interests—of whatever kind, including the interest in being moral—are a mark of moral imperfection because they are interests. Your desires, regardless of their content, deserve no respect because they are desires. Do your duty, which is yours because you have desires, and which is sublime because, unadulterated by the stigma of any gain, it shines forth unsullied, in loss, pain, conflict, torture. Sacrifice the thing you want, without beneficiaries, supernatural or social; sacrifice your values, your self-interest, your happiness, your self, because they are your values, your self-interest, your happiness, your self; sacrifice them to morality, i.e., to the noumenal dimension, i.e., to nothing knowable or conceivable to man, i.e., as far as man living on this earth is concerned, to nothing.

The moral commandment is: thou shalt sacrifice, sacrifice everything, sacrifice for the sake of sacrifice, as an end in itself."
Leonard Peikoff, The Ominous Parallels
___________________________________

"At a sales conference at Random House, preceding the publication of Atlas Shrugged, one of the book salesmen asked me whether I could present the essence of my philosophy while standing on one foot. I did, as follows:

1. Metaphysics: Objective Reality

2. Epistemology: Reason

3. Ethics: Self-interest

4. Politics: Capitalism

If you want this translated into simple language, it would read: 1. "Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed" or "Wishing won't make it so." 2. "You can't eat your cake and have it, too." 3. "Man is an end in himself." 4. "Give me liberty or give me death."

If you held these concepts with total consistency, as the base of your convictions, you would have a full philosophical system to guide the course of your life. But to hold them with total consistency—to understand, to define, to prove and to apply them—requires volumes of thought. Which is why philosophy cannot be discussed while standing on one foot—nor while standing on two feet on both sides of every fence. This last is the predominant philosophical position today, particularly in the field of politics.

In the space of a column, I can give only the briefest summary of my position, as a frame-of-reference for all my future columns. My philosophy, Objectivism, holds that:

1. Reality exists as an objective absolute—facts are facts, independent of man's feelings, wishes, hopes or fears.

2. Reason (the faculty which identifies and integrates the material provided by man's senses) is man's only means of perceiving reality, his only source of knowledge, his only guide to action, and his basic means of survival.

3. Man—every man—is an end in himself, not the means to the ends of others. He must exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself. The pursuit of his own rational self-interest and of his own happiness is the highest moral purpose of his life.

4. The ideal political-economic system is laissez-faire capitalism. It is a system where men deal with one another, not as victims and executioners, nor as masters and slaves, but as traders, by free, voluntary exchange to mutual benefit. It is a system where no man may obtain any values from others by resorting to physical force, and no man may initiate the use of physical force against others. The government acts only as a policeman that protects man's rights; it uses physical force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use, such as criminals or foreign invaders. In a system of full capitalism, there should be (but, historically, has not yet been) a complete separation of state and economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of state and church."

"Introducing Objectivism,"
The Objectivist Newsletter, Aug. 1962, 35. - Ayn Rand

To which arguments are you referring????