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Installment 1
 Phil-1030-008

Immanuel Kant

Immanuel Kant seemed to believe that what we see in the world around us is a kind of tinted reality. A 'rose-tinted reality' to be exact. That we wander this big blue ball perceiving the world in a reality as we know it through our experiences. Kant was very interested in the relation we have with reality or in other words, the understanding of metaphysics. He talks about wanting to know what reality actually is and breaks it into two parts, the noumenal and phenomenal world. The noumenal world is the portion of reality that we can not experience. Which means that we cannot physically see, interact or sense it. It is the deeper level of what truly exists. While the phenomenal world is what we can sense through sight, smell, taste, touch and hearing. It is what we inter act with in our everyday lives. With theses two worlds Kant brings in the question of "How is synthetic a priori of knowledge?" Meaning that in order for a person to gain any knowledge about something, he would have to experience and or observe whatever it is they want to know in order to gain any information that experience had to provide. You wouldn't know that a knife was sharp until you cut yourself. You wouldn't know that French silk pie was truly sweet by just thinking about it but would have to take a bite of a slice and experience it's sweetness. Overall, Kant thought that knowledge that reveals truth about the world, but is understood independently of experience, is possible. His intuition was that by thinking, we could find new discoveries about our reality that was genuine and accurate by definition. Noting that through logical arguments he was proving that, in a sense, we are seeing the world through 'pink' lenses and the multitude of pink shades (rose-tinted) and how they present what we experience around us. 

Turning to Immanuel Kant's view on morals I find some of it a bit difficult to agree on. For instance, Kant's view on lying states that no matter the event or circumstance that you should not lie. He believes that is morally wrong because you could not make a general principle that everyone should always lie when it suited them. That means that if you're family, friends, or people in general were being held captive, that given the chance that you could hoodwink the bad guy and save them before he assassinated them all, that the process of lying to save everyone is morally wrong. Why is this? Would you the victim not  hope for someone to intervene? Even if it was lying to the person who was going to murder you? Now put Kant's previous belief with that of his belief on morality. Would the person(s) who intervene on the possible assassination of innocent people be considered 'Good Samaritans'? In Kant's case, they would only be Good  Samaritans if they acted without emotion via compassion to help. I don't believe that those who lie out of compassion to save the masses can't be a good samaritan based on emotions. For the sole fact that those who didn't have compassion or felt strongly about justice wouldn't have helped out in the first place.