Immanuel Kant

Immanuel Kant nel ritratto di Johann Gottlieb Becker, 1768

Firma di Immanuel Kant

Immanuel Kant (Königsberg, 22 aprile 1724 – Königsberg, 12 febbraio 1804) è stato un filosofo tedesco.

Considerato una delle figure più importanti dell'intera storia della filosofia, fu il più significativo esponente dell'Illuminismo tedesco, anticipatore degli elementi basilari della filosofia idealistica e di gran parte di quella successiva. Kant concepì la propria filosofia come una rivoluzione filosofica (o "rivoluzione copernicana"), volta a superare il dogmatismo metafisico, che per Kant caratterizzava il pensiero precedente, e ad assumere i caratteri di una ricerca critica sulle condizioni del conoscere.

Benché molti elementi propri dell'idealismo trascendentale kantiano siano stati nel tempo oggetto di notevoli critiche, soprattutto di natura logica (Brentano, Boole, Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, Kripke)^[1]^[2] e nonostante uno dei pilastri della sua filosofia critica, vale a dire l'idealismo dei concetti di spazio e tempo, sia stato rigettato in toto da molti esponenti della fisica contemporanea (Einstein e i suoi allievi)^[3], Kant rimane un pensatore fondamentale per la comprensione della filosofia moderna, di cui è considerato dai critici una delle figure fondanti; è stato altresì evidenziato l'importante rapporto tra la filosofia kantiana e il Romanticismo^[4].

^ (EN) William Kneale, William Calvert Kneale e Martha Kneale, The Development of Logic, Clarendon Press, 1962, ISBN 9780198247739. URL consultato l'8 novembre 2019.
^ (EN) Richard Rorty, Kripke versus Kant, in London Review of Books, 4 settembre 1980. URL consultato il 2 settembre 2020.
«Since Kant, philosophers have prided themselves on transcending the ‘naive realism’ of Aristotle and of common sense. On this naive view, there is a right way of describing things, corresponding to how they are in themselves, to their real essences. Scientists, philosophers like to say, are especially prone to adopt this unreflective view. They think they are discovering the secrets of nature, but philosophers know that they are really constituting objects by synthesising the manifold of intuition, or predicting the occurrence of sensations, or wielding instruments to cope with the flux of experience, or something equally pragmatic and anthropocentric. This condescending attitude towards common sense, Aristotle and science has been shared by people as far apart as Russell and Bergson, Whitehead and Husserl, James and Nietzsche, Carnap and Cassirer. [...] Just when it seemed that the dialectic which Kant began had culminated in universal acceptance of the relaxed pragmatism of Wittgenstein and Quine, Kripke exploded his bomb.»
^ Don A. Howard e Marco Giovanelli, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Fall 2019, Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2019. URL consultato il 2 settembre 2020.
«A different, but especially interesting example of Einstein’s reliance on a form of theoretical holism is found in a review that Einstein wrote in 1924 of Alfred Elsbach’s Kant und Einstein (1924), one of the flood of books and articles then trying to reconcile the Kant’s philosophy. Having asserted that relativity theory is incompatible with Kant’s doctrine of the a priori, Einstein explains why, more generally, he is not sympathetic with Kant: This does not, at first, preclude one’s holding at least to the Kantian problematic, as, e.g., Cassirer has done. I am even of the opinion that this standpoint can be rigorously refuted by no development of natural science. For one will always be able to say that critical philosophers have until now erred in the establishment of the a priori elements, and one will always be able to establish a system of a priori elements that does not contradict a given physical system. Let me briefly indicate why I do not find this standpoint natural. A physical theory consists of the parts (elements) A, B, C, D, that together constitute a logical whole which correctly connects the pertinent experiments (sense experiences). Then it tends to be the case that the aggregate of fewer than all four elements, e.g., A, B, D, without C, no longer says anything about these experiences, and just as well A, B, C without D. One is then free to regard the aggregate of three of these elements, e.g., A, B, C as a priori, and only D as empirically conditioned. But what remains unsatisfactory in this is always the arbitrariness in the choice of those elements that one designates as a priori, entirely apart from the fact that the theory could one day be replaced by another that replaces certain of these elements (or all four) by others. (Einstein 1924, 1688–1689)»
^ Questo rapporto tra la filosofia kantiana, in particolare quella esposta nella Critica del giudizio, e il Romanticismo è stato invece contestato da K. R. Popper, che nel saggio Alla ricerca di un mondo migliore (A. Armando editore, Roma, 2002, p. 145.), vede in Kant un modello di razionalismo.

[1] (EN) William Kneale, William Calvert Kneale e Martha Kneale, The Development of Logic, Clarendon Press, 1962, ISBN 9780198247739. URL consultato l'8 novembre 2019.

[2] (EN) Richard Rorty, Kripke versus Kant, in London Review of Books, 4 settembre 1980. URL consultato il 2 settembre 2020.
«Since Kant, philosophers have prided themselves on transcending the ‘naive realism’ of Aristotle and of common sense. On this naive view, there is a right way of describing things, corresponding to how they are in themselves, to their real essences. Scientists, philosophers like to say, are especially prone to adopt this unreflective view. They think they are discovering the secrets of nature, but philosophers know that they are really constituting objects by synthesising the manifold of intuition, or predicting the occurrence of sensations, or wielding instruments to cope with the flux of experience, or something equally pragmatic and anthropocentric. This condescending attitude towards common sense, Aristotle and science has been shared by people as far apart as Russell and Bergson, Whitehead and Husserl, James and Nietzsche, Carnap and Cassirer. [...] Just when it seemed that the dialectic which Kant began had culminated in universal acceptance of the relaxed pragmatism of Wittgenstein and Quine, Kripke exploded his bomb.»

[3] Don A. Howard e Marco Giovanelli, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Fall 2019, Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2019. URL consultato il 2 settembre 2020.
«A different, but especially interesting example of Einstein’s reliance on a form of theoretical holism is found in a review that Einstein wrote in 1924 of Alfred Elsbach’s Kant und Einstein (1924), one of the flood of books and articles then trying to reconcile the Kant’s philosophy. Having asserted that relativity theory is incompatible with Kant’s doctrine of the a priori, Einstein explains why, more generally, he is not sympathetic with Kant: This does not, at first, preclude one’s holding at least to the Kantian problematic, as, e.g., Cassirer has done. I am even of the opinion that this standpoint can be rigorously refuted by no development of natural science. For one will always be able to say that critical philosophers have until now erred in the establishment of the a priori elements, and one will always be able to establish a system of a priori elements that does not contradict a given physical system. Let me briefly indicate why I do not find this standpoint natural. A physical theory consists of the parts (elements) A, B, C, D, that together constitute a logical whole which correctly connects the pertinent experiments (sense experiences). Then it tends to be the case that the aggregate of fewer than all four elements, e.g., A, B, D, without C, no longer says anything about these experiences, and just as well A, B, C without D. One is then free to regard the aggregate of three of these elements, e.g., A, B, C as a priori, and only D as empirically conditioned. But what remains unsatisfactory in this is always the arbitrariness in the choice of those elements that one designates as a priori, entirely apart from the fact that the theory could one day be replaced by another that replaces certain of these elements (or all four) by others. (Einstein 1924, 1688–1689)»

[4] Questo rapporto tra la filosofia kantiana, in particolare quella esposta nella Critica del giudizio, e il Romanticismo è stato invece contestato da K. R. Popper, che nel saggio Alla ricerca di un mondo migliore (A. Armando editore, Roma, 2002, p. 145.), vede in Kant un modello di razionalismo.

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