Kant and Hegal

Immanuel Kant was the philosophical founder of German Idealism, a school of thought which bared a very strong connection to Romanticism. He was a great believer in democracy and much of his earlier work was centralised around science rather than philosophy. He did not agree with empiricism and his belief in a priori knowledge demonstrated this, as this is something empiricists such as John Locke would have strongly disagreed with.

According to Kant, knowledge was split up into two main categories; Analytic and Synthetic knowledge.
The first meaning that an answer can be found within the subject. An example taken from Bertrand Russell is that 'a tall man is a man.' It follows the laws of contradiction as 'a tall man is not a man' would be contradictory of what is being said. This is an example of pure reason or deductive logic. Kant claimed that this type of knowledge was not very useful and if all our knowledge were to be Analytic, we would not know anything.

His second category of knowledge, Synthetic knowledge is one which Kant preferred. Synthetic knowledge is not analytic. An example would be to say that every rose is a flower, although this part is Analytic, when we say that the rose looks beautiful, the idea of beauty is Synthetic.

A priori knowledge is knowledge that is not taught through experience. An example would be a child who is learning maths. The child may use some marbles to understand mathematical concepts but once the knowledge is learnt, the child will no longer need to use the marbles to understand that same concept.
Synthetic A priori simply combines both synthetic knowledge with a priori knowledge and this is something Kant was a firm believer of. An example to demonstrate this would be geography. We know the country we live in exists, this is the a priori part, however, the idea that other countries also exist is the synthetic part of knowledge. When we put this together we create Synthetic A Priori knowledge.

Kant suggested that the outer world causes matters of sensation and our own human mental apparatus places these sensations into time and space. He claims that both space and time are a mental perception and do not actually exist, he called this 'Intuition.' He created twelve categories of a priori concepts:
1. Of Quantity - unity,plurality and totality
2. Of Quality - reality, limitation and negation
3. Of Relation - substance and accident, cause and effect and reciprocity
4. Of Modality - possibility, existence and necessity.

Kant believed that these categories could be applied to whatever we experience in life, but there is no reason to suppose that they can be applicable to things in themselves.

A big part of Kant's work involved proving the existence of God while dismissing any intellectual proofs. He suggested that there are three proofs of God's existence through pure reason. They are the ontological proof, the cosmological proof and the physiological proof.  The first defines God as the most real being, the second says that if anything exists then an absolute being must exist. Now I know I exist, an absolute being must exist and the third suggests that the universe exhibits an order which is evidence of purpose.

God, freedom and immortality, according to Kant are the three 'ideas of reason'.

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Hegal was another philosopher whom Kant had been very influential on, although Hegal did at times disagree with Kant. Hegal much like Kant, did not agree with empiricism.
Hegal held a belief that nothing was true except the whole which he referred to as the 'absolute.' He believed the whole was made up of a complex system of the sort called an 'organism.' He claimed that separate things in life are not illusions but they each are lesser or greater in terms of reality, which are aspects of the whole.
Hegal used the term 'the absolute idea', this essentially means that we can all be driven on the mere force of logic from any suggested predicate of the absolute to the final conclusion of the dictate. Hegal's dialect method  begins with the idea that the absolute is an 'absolute being' and is 'pure'. He claims that it is impossible to reach the truth without going through all the steps of the dialect. According to Hegal, self consciousness is the highest form of knowledge. Hegal suggests that the best way to find freedom is to simply obey the law, without law he claims that there can never be freedom. An 'organic' society.

Hegal holds the view that the state is there for the purpose of the people, this is a direct disagreement to empiricists who would hold the view that the people are there for the purpose of the state.