This guy really inspires me. Not just with his thought provoking writings and philosophy, but the fact he was able to never be limited by his own name.
WRONG. Philosophy is WAY more than that. The fact that you put out that perspective worded that way reflects on your own philosphy actually. I think you mean to major in philosophy is a waste which I've heard many times over. And while it is hard to find a job based on it these days, it does in fact empower you to know law, religion, politics, and life itself way better. Philosphy is often centered on questioning things and not just blindly following like many religions tell us to do. And I can bet you are a follower of a religion aren't you? Also I'm guessing you are repeatedly told that health or STEM stuff pays way more. Although often true, somebody has to make laws pertaining to both. Where do you think it stems from???
This video only introduced Kant's ethical ideas. It would be nice to have another video on Kantian metaphysics and epistemology- especially his solution to Hume's problem
Regarding Kant's "solution" to Hume's problem, here's a little dialogue for fun that summarizes how far Kant took us and what was still left in need of explanation: Kant: Causality is rescued contra Hume because causality is a necessary condition for the possibility of having any experiences in the first place. Sceptic: Where does it come from? Kant: It's something our mind does when synthesizing our ideas, which it does a priori. Hence, synthetic a priori knowledge. Sceptic: How does the mind do this synthesizing? Kant: Well, by a faculty. Sceptic: "A faculty"?? That seems a little hand-wavey. How do we know this faculty exists? And assuming that it does and that concepts like causality are simply "something our mind does," wouldn't this mean that we only have "knowledge" of how things appear to our mind and not of how things actually are in the world? *Kant has left the chat*
@@nietzschesghost8529 This is a false representation of the epistemological framework exuded by Kant. Kant did have some perceptual dissonance, for which Schopenhauer would later resurrect. But, your prognostications and analogies don't precisely portray the logical propositions which followed the theory. For example, you appear present induction as inscrutable because one may not necessarily be conscious of the genesis of all action, but this would be superfluous, as this conundrum continges on another subject. Nonetheless, the action resides within-subject as will and as you state it does so a priori, but you then begin to identify a noumena which you represent as a valid antithesis to the epistemological framework, but necessarily has already been accounted for and is conceived as 'Noumena'. In your final sect of an analogous dialogue, you practically strawman the entirety of the epistemological theory and utilize solipsism. You just identify that our knowledge is contingent on our own perception to which we condition the object to have a purpose. The world as object is a void and non-contextual, although I do respect your commitment to potentially discovering some dissonance in the Kantian framework, you appear to have very little involvement with it theoretically, I can tell by the final skeptic statement. How things actually are, as the purpose is completely conditioned by us as subjects and believe me, you can find some valid criticisms of Transcendental Idealism, Object-Oriented Ontology being one of them.
@@jackwebb7946 Having gone through grad school and read philosophy articles that were dense given their technicality, I can recognize the difference between "This writing is dense because it is technical" and "This writing is dense because this person thinks being obscure is a necessary characteristic of philosophy" (which it is not). I'm glad to read your comment if you rewrite it with clarity in mind. But unless I have to sift through your ideas to use as a source in a paper, I'm not going to dissect your bloated comment because A) it's not worth the time and B) I'm not even sure that _you_ know what you're talking about, so I shouldn't expend my energy on something that's possibly not coherent in the first place. Secondly, my comment was written to be just as funny as it was a serious jab at Kant. Nevertheless, the criticisms I mounted against Kant were precisely the sort of things that the German Idealists were wrestling with when dealing with Kant's philosophy. So whatever else you want to say about my silly little post, it's not un-involved theoretically speaking. It's the launching point for German Idealism.
@Carollus Edward if you believe in altruism or kant then youll always be a slave to society. you have to make exceptions for yourself and do evil thing to succeed. look at every president or oligarch in history cheating lying and stealing is the best way to survive in society. authority has three fundamental forces observation judgmental and jurisdiction power you only to negate one of those three to bypass authority. also authority is split into two categories inhibitive and coercive authority. there are ways to push back against or negate each one.
But this guy’s ideas are very abstract and not practical. Religion is the only thing that can really stop a man from committing bad things such as stealing and killing as opposed to reason and thinking. Rationality will get out of the window when a man is hungry and has to bring food to his hungry kids at home. The only thing that can stop him by giving him hope that he’ll find something without having to steal is religion. His idea didn’t even came close to finding a replacement to religion because there isn’t any.
@@Muxammadamiin actually, he seems to have started with the wrong premise about religion. The purpose of religion (at least the Christian religion) is not to make one good, but to make one understand that we fail in our attempt to be good and have redemption for that failure in the perfect sacrifice of Christ. The response to that understanding is to glorify God.
Great. One of the first philosophical quotes that ever resonated with me came from Kant: 'Two things awe me most: the starry sky above me and the moral law within me.' I love it. I might disagree with morality being elevated to such a cosmic level in principle, but I love it still. So inspiring.
Because we are normal people who don't have extreme power, anyone have extreme power would have moral law within them? sdalin? hitler? chairman mao? This is my second thought a few months after i digested kant's quote.
Why? It seems to me that morality is by far the most important concept, period. Without morality, there would be no evaluation function for anything; there would be no point in anything, whether it be choices we make or even the universe existing. Who cares if the universe exists or not if there's no value that can be assigned to it? And how do you get value without a moral basis for the evaluation function? Thus, morality is the root of all meaning, the only thing that matters.
@@YSFmemoriesit depends how you define morality. If you’re saying all rightness and wrongness (including conventionally amoral correctness and incorrectness) are morality then sure. If you mean morality in a thou shalt not kill sense, then I don’t think there is any fundamental metaphysical truth to that, it’s just a psychological consensus.
@@KennyVibes465 no, for example, 1+1=2 or 1+1=3. One is correct and one is incorrect, but neither is meaningful without a greater moral context. Who cares if someone makes an incorrect statement if it doesn't matter? Thou shall not kill by itself may possibly be a mistaken statement to take as objective morality. But there has to be something, or else literally nothing matters.
We like the deceive ourselves about our actual level of attractiveness. But when it's brought up in another context see how we bristle. We carry a lot of ugliness and imperfection (by our own biological standards) both outwardly and inwardly.
As harsh as it may sound, it tends to be an accurate description of "unappealing" and "undesirable for propagation." This apt description tends to frustrate anybody who falls in the same category. In spite of how much they oppose its unfairness.
First episodes of Immanuel Kant Series (please upvote): - ua-cam.com/video/Inv84W0GOZA/v-deo.html - ua-cam.com/video/x_etgTmp-wc/v-deo.html Any feedback/comments would be appreciated!😁
Romando what was your end goal in making that statement? To come off as a enlightened and intelligent? You just sound like your run-of-the mill try hard pseudo-intellectual.
dustin hudson, maybe he is just showing his interest in it, and philosophy teaches us not to necessarily always take things at face value unless there is close to or beyond reasonable doubt. Oh and you should take the a before enlightened and put it before run in your comment.
The fact that this comment has 2nd most likes. First one being a joke. Shows a lot about people who watch these. The first most liked also tells something! Thanks for the comment!
rich and talented people have the god given right to avoid the accountability of the masses period. the categorical imperative is blasphemy on all levels.
Person of wisdom of his era. He must have been agnostic. He inspired many people after him , that is in itself the greatest achievement of any human's life. Long live Kant's philosophy.
I thought Kant's greatest contribution was in epistemology (Critique of Pure Reason), which engendered the analytic/continental split in modern and contemporary philosophy. Why didn't you even mention this aspect of his philosophy?
+clement mogo I think the school of life focuses on topics that can be directly applied to your own life. And ethics is more suited for that then epistemology.
+clement mogo The Critique of Pure Reason is not a work of epistemology. There is a bit of epistemology in it, but Kant would correct you by saying that the Critique is a work of meta-metaphysics, in other words, a "prolegomena [introductory theory] to any future metaphysics," explaining how metaphysics is to be done and how to critique it.
+clement mogo No way, he was completely wrong on that. The commonly used analytic-synthetic dichotomy doesn't hold up to close scrutiny. Although intuitively powerful, it's based on an incomplete view of concepts. This has been argued persuasively in the essay I'll link below. The short version is this: dividing all knowledge into two classes -- the analytic and synthetic -- is to detach the meaning of concepts from things that exist in reality. Either you define concepts with reference to things or relationships that exist (true), or you don't (false). If you define concepts in a way that references reality, all concepts are "analytic" and true -- if a concept refers to reality then any definition of it by reference to its attributes is a tautology. To be sure my explanation is incomplete and so I give you the source material: "Analytic-synthetic dichotomy" by Dr. Leanord Peikoff. www.proctors.com.au/mrhomepage.nsf/985f14ab922be306482577d5003a2040/4864f5fe3809763a4825789c000dc50a/$FILE/The%20Analytic%20Synthetic%20Dichotomy.pdf
Kant did not have a so-called analytic-synthetic dichotomy. Peikoff's criticism is better aimed at A. J. Ayer in Language, Truth and Logic, whom he references in the document you cited. Also, Peikoff only says that Kant gave the dichotomy its present name. That is somewhat accurate. But notice that he did not say that Kant created it, and as he said it existed before Kant named it. One would think that naming an evil would be praiseworthy. Instead, Peikoff shoots the messenger. Kant was not a promulgator of a dichotomy that he did not believe in.
No, the categorical imperative isn't the "golden rule": "do unto others as you would have them do unto you", as this is way to subjective for Kant to accept it as the foundation of ethics. It requires you to ask what the underlying principle, the maxim, of your action is and points out that you should only commit that action if you could wish that this underlying maxim became law for everyone within the society, so everyone alwas acts on it.
***** No I am stating that the golden rule can only be the same as the golden rule if all people in fact do desire the same. If you are for instance a masochist you might want to be hit by someone. The golden rule would now tell you to hit that person. But of cause that is a ridicolous claim to make, it is obviously wrong to just hit people. If you use trhe golden rule now you would have the maxim "it is OK to hit people". You would now have to imagine a world where it is OK to hit people is a general law. That is undesierable therefore hitting is wrong. You could of cause also use the purpose-dignity-interpretation of Kant's theory and just conclude that just randomly hitting someone else is against the selfpurpose of that person and therefore infringes on their dignity which is a much easier waay to get to the conclusion that hitting is wrong.
The school of life videos may be as short as 5 minutes, but truly, i pause 20 -30 times to contemplate and ponder upon, and so it is like a journey that atleast eats an hour, and presents a sense or a language to the world and to the fellow fellows.
I think you may have misinterpreted the categorical imperative here. From my understanding, it is morally wrong to do things that when applied to the entire world isn't logical. For example, it is wrong to lie because if everyone in the world were to lie, there would be no grounds for expecting someone to be telling the truth, therefore, making it impossible to lie. A lie implies that the person being lied to expects you are telling the truth, but if no one was ever expected of telling the truth, a lie wouldn't be logically possible. I may have explained it poorly, but it's difficult to explain regardless
Bennett thats the first part of it. Kant distinguishes between two kinds of duty. The universal law of a morally bad decision can either be contradictive or not desirable. The opposite of the action that would lead to this universal law is either an absolute duty or an incomplete duty (it's sort of hard to translate this). But you are right, they didnt really explain what the CI is saying.
if the lier has enough evidence that confirms his lies and enough ways to hide contrary evidence, yes, he could convince someone to believe it even if they are skeptical at first.
It is not practicable, and if you take for example, egoism; if everyone would be egoistic, there would be no humanity existing, because the extremest form of egoism is destructive, and since a living beeing has the natural instinct to stay alive and unfold himself, destroying themselves, which happens by egoistic behavior, is against their nature and therefore objectively wrong. That's what I think, and I just right now discovered, that Kant had the same idea.
So a couple issues with this video. First, no talk about Kant's ethics is even possible without talking about his metaphysics and epistemology. Without that, his ethics is nonsensical. Second, the categorical imperative is not the golden rule. In fact, he specifically states that it's importantly different than the golden rule in a footnote as to try to make sure people don't make this common mistake. The fact that Kant specifically went out of his way to emphasize this point (which, considering how dry, dense, complex, and free of examples his works are, says a lot), it's very important to not see the CI in this way. Third, Kant's goal with his entire philosophy was to diliniate the limits of theoretical reason (facts and judgments) and the realms of practical reason (ethics). In addition, the goal was to explain how religion provides access beyond what reason can offer us. That's why the books are called "critique of pure reason", "critique of practical reason", and "critique of judgment". Critique here means, examining the limits of, pure reason refers to theoretical knowledge (cognition and empirical sense data), and judgment refers to our subjective aesthetic tastes and teleological tastes. So the Critiques are examining the limits of our theoretical knowledge, and our aesthetic judgments of beauty. Once the limits of these domains of reason are understood (the phenomenal world), the concept of god is all that remains to explain the remaining aspects that cannot be explained by these domains. (the noumena) So the purpose of his philosophy wasn't just to find out where religion went wrong; it was to explain where god's role, and the role of revelation in how the world works.
Thanks for putting this together. I felt the same way. I think this is a lingering issue with these video series, which is manufacturing a sentimental lesson in the end in the name of creating 'easy to swallow' philosophy pills. There is no way you can do this without looking stupid in the eyes of people who are genuinely interested in philosophy. But it'll definitely work for high school students who are desperately looking for a catchy sentence to copy for their homework the night before the deadline. What do you expect from Alain de botton anyways.... At least I don't. Fake philosopher of the 21st century.
Knowledge for the sake of knowledge is good. But this channel is focused on practical knowledge and much of Kant's "philosophy" is in a way useless, something which is justified about his abstract and complex way of writting about simple and every day things...
@@Soytu19 I hope you were being ironic. Kant's philosophy is not useless in any way, as it solved many problems and to be honest a lot of science seriously requires the underlying foundation nowdays which relativists and dialectics argumented (but without proof) away: the principles a priori.
4:14 - 4:16 I can't tell you how many times I've had to correct people on this. Kant did NOT say "never treat others merely as means to an end." That proscription would make life in society very difficult, as no employer could ever hire an employee and would have to do all the work. So The School of Life will really need to reconsider its interpretation of Kant's words. Kant's idea is to treat others ALSO as ends in themselves, and not merely as means to an end.
@@melanie851I've never read primary source Kant, but if he can turn an elegant Bible passage into that trainwreck of a sentence shown here, I'm not surprised
Had an intro Philosophy professor in undergrad explain Kant so well it literally gave me my 3rd out of body experience in Fuggin class, because l lost myself so much. He finished the lecture and snapped me back like a Genuine Yogi, and l was stupified. The mind is crazy strong and reality, well, reality ain't. 😊
Your description of the first aspect of the Categorical Imperative is wrong (although it is unfortunately an inaccuracy that many people don't realise is an inaccuracy). If the categorical imperative is simply stating 'do unto others as you would like others to do unto you' it is essentially a Utilitarian statement; it is similar to saying 'do x otherwise y' or 'be kind to others otherwise they may not be kind to you' which is a very consequentialist thing to say. Kantian ethics is the major competitor of consequentialist ethical philosophy, and that is because Kant is not saying 'do unto others as you wish others to do onto you' because if he were saying so, there would be no tension between deontology and consequentialism. Rather the first aspect of the categorical imperative that you quote in this section, regarding only being able to hold a maxim that can be made universal, is about steering away from contradiction. Here is probably the best example: let us say you wish to steal something. Your maxim will then be 'it is ok to steal'. Now if that maxim were made universal, everyone would be allowed to steal whenever they like. Arguably stealing could be happening all of the time. But stealing presupposes the concept of 'property' - you can't steal something if we don't hold a concept of property. But if the maxim you are holding were made universal, and people started to steal all of the time, then it seems that property doesn't actually seem to exist anymore and therefore neither does stealing. As such, you can't make the maxim 'it is ok to steal' a universal, because if it were we would have entirely negated the concept of stealing in the first place and created a contradiction, and therefore you cannot hold the maxim 'it is ok to steal.' Under Kant's ethics, if a maxim passes this test of contradiction and universality, it can go on to be tested under his other aspects of the categorical imperative. If it does not, it is not something a moral agent should be doing. Of course, Kant's categorical imperative is still under scrutiny for exactly what he meant by it, but the above explanation is generally considered the best one at this point. Also the most remarkable aspect of Kant's 'What is Enlightenment?' which you mention at the beginning of the video, is that Kant conceives of the enlightenment as a process, a process of 'exiting from' to achieve maturity. This is a very similar idea of Enlightenment that Foucault holds many decades later, and indeed he based his on Kant.
If you ever read Kant in its original form, you know just what a damn genius he was! It is nearly impossible to comprehend what he is writing... It takes hundreds or rereads just to kinda get an idea what he ment. So increadibly dense! Thats true, marvellous work.
There are two major factual errors in this video worth pointing out so that viewers are not misled. 1. Kant explicitly denies that the categorical imperative is at all similar to the golden rule. This occurs in a footnote to the Groundwork Of The Metaphysics of Morals at 4: 430 where he warns against this assimilation and calls the golden rule "trite". 2. The Critique of the Power of Judgement was not published in 1793, as the video claims, but in 1790.
note to self: make videos like this with animation. take cool sayings from Kant and other philosophers and resay them for the public in a modern, understandable way.
+Doc Eon wasn´t it even upgrade of the golder rule? I remember the example of speeding ticket. Policeman shoulnd´t under golden rule give speeding tickets, since he don´t want to get them. Under categorical imperative on the other hand he does, because he needs them in society.
+Elador1000 Well, exactly. The religious versions of the rule appeal to our emotions, specifically our fear of bad things happening to ourselves. Kant considered this a poor basis for morality, and instead appealed to our reason.
That was very educational, I've been greatly enlightened and am eternally in debt for the service you have paid to me and the knowledge you have bestowed upon me. Thank you for the good work you do day in and day out. -Mcaulay Culkin
The School of Life, please do a video on Carl Sagan. He's one of the very few people in this world I admire. I know he was a scientist, not a philosopher. But I feel much of his philosophy would greatly benefit mankind in today's irrational world.
I really enjoy your videos even though I just discovered them recently. It's a far shot but I have difficulty finding good educational material about Art History and I was wondering if you might find it worth doing a series about different Artists and why then influenced our contemporary culture so much. You guys are the best, keep up the good work.
I had understood the categorical imperative differently. One of the things I love about Kant's moral theory is that moral duties can be derived purely from logic: If we expect everyone to behave morally, then it should be possible for everyone to behave morally. So, if you imagine a world where everyone behaves a certain way and arrive at a paradox, it is immoral. For example, if murder is defined as killing an innocent person NOT in self defense, and everyone practiced murder on a regular basis, there would be no innocents. We would all be killing in self-defense, thus, no one would be a murderer. (So, if everyone is a murderer, no one is a murderer. That's a paradox, so murder is immoral.) Also, in order to behave morally, one must have control over their actions (we wouldn't say that an object passively being acted on is being "moral") so if everyone was treated as a means- and was not allowed to act autonomously, morality would not exist. So, it's immoral to treat someone as a means.
I like that part of Kant too, although he said you can’t lie under any circumstance whatsoever. However, would it be OK to save someone, according to the first formulation of the Categorical Imperative, by lying? It seems to be contradictory if you should save someone but you can’t lie under any circumstance.
What is generally missing from this synopsis as well as in Modern Philosophical theory is the conclusion that all philosophers, even Kant, derive there theoretical conclusions by barrowing from others and developing it from their own social interactions. As an example, the International Prototype of Kilogram is that object by which sets the standard of weight in mass throughout the world. It can be redefined as Plank's constant but anyone under the IPK system would not know by what to identify it as unless it had a relationship to the IPK. The true Paradox of mankind is summed up by the desires of man. All humanity lives life as though we are void of consequences after death yet not one human truly wants to die. Why is this? What relationship is death to morality? Unless there is a law that transcends life and death we will never choose others benefitting over our own selfish existence. Yet GOD built within all humanity a morality derived from the conscience that leads us to understand the total depravity of mankind and the need for the Ubermansch, a Savior for all mankind.
@@monk1808 for Kant, the actions are inmoral or moral objectively; so, for him, if you lied you would do an inmoral action. But if you don't save this person, it would be more inmoral.
Amazing and extremely important nowadays. We live in a secularist western society where radicalism atheism is becoming so strong and disrespectful towards religion believers, that categorical imperative is an extremely powerful concept justified merely by reasons about why you should respect other's regardless of their beliefs.
That was never Kants goal or way of thinking. He stated that we will never get to know the thing itself. We can only state how we look to the thing itself but we will never get it fully. Also the categorical imperative is not the golden rule infact it is about derivating ethics by reason and by analysing the goal of an action and not the action itself
I've read that, in addition to all this, Kant was an exceptional classroom teacher, a "spellbinding" lecturer. He was a great philosopher with a lifelong passion for the sciences and for geography; he loved his daily walk. I read that in the end his mind began to fail him. I wondered at this, since he kept it in such great shape! It is kind of uncanny to look on the map and see where Konigsberg is today, and what it is called....
+Will Molloy The A in Kant is pronounced like the A in the British pronunciation of the word "can't", but shorter. I hope that helps. Source: German is my native language.
+Mustafa Kulle *Good Luck*, and I mean that your going to need. PS: I've been attempting to read his wonderful works, I'm getting by and he isn't as intellectually taxing as Hegel though. But you'll get it down :-)
+Nathan Wellington Hegel and Kant are two great philosopher to read in a row, and for both, i needed my philosophy class to understand entirely hehe. I guess it is well described somewhere on the web
+Ian Moone Although Molyneux is exactly the type of libertarian Kant argues against. Not to mention he's a sexist climate science denier who thinks mental illness and psychiatry are government plots.
+rugbyguy59 He's pretty fucking cool, though. I don't personally know about most of the things you mentioned, but his stand on climate change is not denial. He is only convinced that government-funded science perverts the scientific method with faulty incentives to misrepresent data. As of Climate Change being a field that receives lots of large government money - Moleneux official stand is "sceptical of implied significance of findings".
Kant's a priori comprehensive judgment is a concept that has put an end to the modern epistemological debate. I think we should be grateful that we can comfortably learn such a meticulously and logically structured concept while studying philosophy. Kant's categorical order is sometimes treated as if it were really natural in modern times. How can we not respect a philosopher who has influenced our lives this much? 10913
Dear SOL,why didn't you explain his transcendental idealism? I think you should have done the video earlier because Kant had influenced many thinkers like Schopenhauer (who was a Kantian)and Nietzsche( someone heavily influenced by Schopenhauer and one who was deeply critical of Kantian morality and metaphysics) If this vid had been done earlier, the ideas from Kant could have been linked up with the other philosophers and help foster a deeper understanding.
The very first time I heard of Immanuel Kant was from Ricky Gervais on the old XFM radio shows. He was winding Karl Pilkington up by saying Kant as a swear word because he could get away with it in a cockney accent. :D
Kant had opinions on everything, and said plenty on ethics and aesthetics. But this isn't why he's important! He _shook the entire world of philosophy_ by asserting that: We can never really know "things-in-themselves" (the world's true nature). We can only know the _appearance_ of the world ('phenomena'), as represented in our minds through our in-built intuition of time, space, causality, etc. etc. I like the School of Life - nice format and pleasantly presented. But honestly, if this is to be your only Kant video, you need to start again from square one, and do a little more in-depth research & study.
I studied Physics in order to better understand modern philosophy, as well I scanned the works of Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel and other thinkers in hope to learn more about God's existence. However, being themselves only humans, they could not give much knowledge. At last I met the Bible. The effect was like turning on a powerful lamp in a dark room.
Wild. I was thinking about morality this morning, and I basically said the categorical imperative as my conclusion. I said we should ask ourselves "would it be beneficial to society if this behavior was universally practiced" to see if something is moral. I had never heard of this before... I guess I'm a Kantian.
Where does morality come from and does one's own desire to live morally in union or against social benefit, prevent the ultimate cost of life, being death? Is morality of 'social benefit' a social construct or an ultimate truism that transcends culture and language?
@@DANIELRODRIGUEZ-yr3et I would argue that it is an ultimate truism that transcends culture and language as a Christian. But I also realize that's a difficult question to flesh out and most people's view of morality is philosophically vapid.
@@natebozeman4510 There are examples of people behaving this way across many spectrums of religious thought but humanity as a whole has never seen a society that behaved this way. The 'Golden Rule' has been attributed to many philosophers, pre-dating Jesus, but none of them have defined what this means. A Christian philosopher criticizes Christendom by using a Christian world view, constructed by a Christian morality and his posterity sees this as Modernity? What nonsense to think that man, devoid of omnipotence, could conclude anything other than that which he knows. So where does the God complex come from? In order for man to understand, he must be taught. And to be taught, he must have a teacher. The understanding of Order is not found but revealed. Revealed by what or whom? It always returns to the Genesis of all things.
Bloody hell, I'm tired of people comparing the categorical imperative to the golden rule. They are not the same. The golden rule is a selfish, utilitarian way of thinking about things. If I am nice to my neighbor and he is nice in return, do I care if my neighbor is rude to his milkman? The golden rule says no. The categorical imperative hints at a transcendental morality that, when obeyed by everyone in society, will rid society of its flaws. It is a much grander idea than the golden rule. Again, "act only unto that maxim whereby, at the same time, you will that it be universal law" means that you should only act on actions that (when diffused onto the rest of humanity) will not produce any logical conflicts or paradoxes. Kant was all about reason, whereas the golden rule is a phrase used to keep kids in check. This ideal formula means that you can literally rid society of its murderers, thieves, cheaters, etc.
I see. So whereas the Golden Rule is more primitive, in that it only focuses on minimizing one's own suffering, using others as means to reflect your good actions back on to oneself. Whereas, the Categorical Imperative is more general, in that it focuses on minimizing group suffering and takes focus away from actions being done back onto one's self, and puts focus towards one's actions being replicated in society. Your comment is pretty useful.
@@noahhysi8622 in the wording of your comment, you've brought up another angle to distinguish the CI from the Golden Rule. If you do actions only so that others may do them unto you, you are not acting per the categorical imperative. Your action is motivated by a return. Also, you are using people as means only. If you acted per the categorical imperative, particularly the second formulation, then you would not care if the other person respects you or not. You do your duty without regard for the return.
This reminds me of Clark Kent/Superman from the DC comics and his relationship with the American Way: a guy who is fighting for people's liberty by understanding his local ideals in the spiritual senses as in how to do good and live a better life instead of abusing them for votes and political domination. Immanuel Kant must have been a very nice guy too.
Not really, he more or less invented scientific racism and created a racial hierarchy with whites at the top and Native Americans at last. He was pretty influential in laying the foundations for racism to propagate for the next few centuries.
This just screams Chidi Anagonye wherever and however you look it at (For those who don’t know he’s an ethics and philosophy teacher from the tv show “The Good Place”)
Inevitable. Human's sense has to use it always in order to sense something. space and time are also conditions for sensing anything and that's why we will never get to the thing itself, according to my understanding of the Critique of pure reasob
Your videos are always well produced with rich philosophical content. I wish I could show all your videos to my secondary students however the occasional pin-up and the like are needlessly bawdy. It's a matter of taste for some, but I know my students (and their parents) do not see through to the content. Thank you for your hard work in making these resources. I wish to use more in the future.
i really like your videos and i want to thank you. but in this video you made a big mistake about the categorical imperative. the categorical imperative has nothing to do with "do unto others as you would have them do unto you". you don't imagine the consequences of your action, you don't imagine any consequences. whether your action is "good" or "bad" dosen't depend on the possible consequences, but on your intention, your maxim. if your intention (it is probably the wrong word for it, but i'm from germany and don't know a better one) is good then you acted in a morally way. it's a big difference. if you're acting in accordance with the golden rule you thing about what YOU want to be treated like; it's egocentric and depends on your personal preferences. when kant wrote the categorical imperative, he wanted to build an instructions, that applies for everyone in the same way. if everyone would act in accordance with the CI, there would be only peace and love (idealized), while acting in accordance with the GR, there still would be problems, because everyone does what's best in his own opinion (if you like getting hit, then go on and hit other people). i hope you see what i mean and noticed the difference. greetings.
I only came here because I'm currently reading Sophie's world and Kant's perception to human's free will by following moral law was so hard to comprehend.
Why did you not talk about Kant's Transcendental Idealism? (Noumena and phenomena, synthetic and analytic propositions, his ideas on space and time etc.)
Google's crazy man, I googled a bunch of stuff about Perpetual Peace for my college class and all of a sudden I have 3 kant videos in my recommended on UA-cam
It seems that you only need some glue and a few hours , to finally understand "Critique of Pure Reason" by Kant. I haven't tried it myself yet, but here is how it goes: There is this very original thing called " Kant für die Hand", made by the author Hanno Depner. He had prepared a 3D model of all the important ideas presented in that book! You put the carton pieces together, among which you have drawers like Einheit, Allheit, Vielheit for example, you build one idea upon another, and at the end, you have the whole thing in front of you! You can look at it from several perspectives and experiment with it as much as you want. It is a bit hard to describe, but you can watch the video of the process of making that model, it is just 2 minutes. So search on youtube for this: "Kant für die Hand, Hanno Depner". They say it is a great idea, because Kant thought that our thinking has an architectural structure; so indeed everything you have to deal with in life has to be in its place in your mind and one of the most important missions of philosophy is to help you for this. So he probably would have liked this architectural modal of his book! When you don't understand something, asking help from an expert is usually a very bad idea, since they make stuff even more complicated for you. But there is this German gentleman I like, Marcus Willaschek, simply because when he talks I understand what he says! He is a Kant expert. He says that not everything Kant wrote is difficult and if you wanted to read something more accessible and fun, his essay " Conjectural Beginning of Human History" would be a good idea to begin with. That's where Kant tells us the story of Genesis in the way he understands it and also says: “Conjectures cannot make too high a claim on one’s assent. They cannot announce themselves as serious business, but at best only as a permissible exercise of the imagination guided by reason, undertaken for the sake of relaxation and mental health” By the way, I very much liked the idea of Kant, of having some rules around a conversation with people. Usually when we meet with our beloved friends who are equally distracted and confused folks as ourselves, our conversations don't go deep enough into what really matters to all of us. We rather anxiously jump from one subject to the other without even noticing it. Alain de Botton talks about this in a very thought provoking podcast. Just search for: A point of view, The Art of Conversation BBC 4. Thank you very much for this wonderful lesson!
This video assumes that everybody has the same moral standards and the same definition of good. What if, for instance, you believe that a purely physical sexual affair does not demean your love for your partner, but don't know if your partner agrees. Kant says that it's okay for you to cheat on them since you wouldn't mind if that became 'universal law'. But you might be hurting your partner, which shouldn't be 'good'. What about vegetarians who believe that killing animals is cruel, and people who think capital punishment is/isn't morally acceptable? We all have different ideas of what is good for the world, and we might be acting against the notions of good of others and hurt them in the process, while acting within our own conscience.
5 років тому+2
Excelente video. La verdad ayuda a comprender mejor a este gran pensador.
This is a very good abstract of Kant the Philosopher for those of us who hear names like - Kant, Hume, Hegel occasionally in our lives, but have no idea who/what they did to warrant such fame and adulation.
This is a pretty good video, but Kant actually goes out of his way to differentiate Categorical Imperative from the golden rule in The Metaphysics of Morals.
Immanuel Kant at dinner parties:
“Why is no one having a good time? I specifically requested it”
your default picture gives me anxiety...
I see that B99 reference
tryna have this energy for the rest of my life
Monica Geller? Is that you?
DAD?
This guy really inspires me. Not just with his thought provoking writings and philosophy, but the fact he was able to never be limited by his own name.
this!
It is not pronounced like the word "can't". It sounds more like the word cunt. So it would be Kah-nt.
punchline43 .
+kailuafrog Wrong. It IS pronounced like "cunt". Source: I speak German.
Tom Waits The only reason why I've watched the video wass to check whether the narrator would dare to pronounce the name correctly.
Kant: lived modestly
Also Kant: criticised by friends for attending too many parties
that's because he drank their wine and ate their food
anyone who follow kant or altruism is a slave.
@@jarrodyuki7081 pop off Jarrod
@@jarrodyuki7081 Everyone is a slave to something... There are no truly free people on this planet
@@vladimird5280 And that is why Islam says you should only be a slave to your creator. That is where ultimate freedom lies.
My favourite Kant quote: Time and space are the framework within which the mind is constrained in order to construct its experience of reality.
✌
I keep saying that, but the bar staff still throw me out at midnight.
@@stoobydootoo4098 👀🤣
What does that meannn
@@vorutouzamaki2635 What do you meannn by 'meannn?
Sir Barrington Womble MBE sorry I had to understand it, as in what does that mean but I understand it now.
"so that everyone left in a good mood. he died in 1804." with no pause whatsoever.
Right?!
lol
tssk he sucks.
anyone who follow kant or altruism is a slave.
Lmao
I've been trying to understand his work. But sorry, i just Kant
lol
WRONG. Philosophy is WAY more than that. The fact that you put out that perspective worded that way reflects on your own philosphy actually. I think you mean to major in philosophy is a waste which I've heard many times over. And while it is hard to find a job based on it these days, it does in fact empower you to know law, religion, politics, and life itself way better. Philosphy is often centered on questioning things and not just blindly following like many religions tell us to do. And I can bet you are a follower of a religion aren't you? Also I'm guessing you are repeatedly told that health or STEM stuff pays way more. Although often true, somebody has to make laws pertaining to both. Where do you think it stems from???
what a baseless set of assumptions you have made.
A little more Hume-ility might be in order?
Kant touch this
This video only introduced Kant's ethical ideas. It would be nice to have another video on Kantian metaphysics and epistemology- especially his solution to Hume's problem
yeah, to say that all of Kant is ethics is wrong
he didn't even touch the Critique of Pure Reason which is his most important work
I agree. Kant's writings nearly all motivated by the tar pit Hume landed us in.
Regarding Kant's "solution" to Hume's problem, here's a little dialogue for fun that summarizes how far Kant took us and what was still left in need of explanation:
Kant: Causality is rescued contra Hume because causality is a necessary condition for the possibility of having any experiences in the first place.
Sceptic: Where does it come from?
Kant: It's something our mind does when synthesizing our ideas, which it does a priori. Hence, synthetic a priori knowledge.
Sceptic: How does the mind do this synthesizing?
Kant: Well, by a faculty.
Sceptic: "A faculty"?? That seems a little hand-wavey. How do we know this faculty exists? And assuming that it does and that concepts like causality are simply "something our mind does," wouldn't this mean that we only have "knowledge" of how things appear to our mind and not of how things actually are in the world?
*Kant has left the chat*
@@nietzschesghost8529 This is a false representation of the epistemological framework exuded by Kant. Kant did have some perceptual dissonance, for which Schopenhauer would later resurrect. But, your prognostications and analogies don't precisely portray the logical propositions which followed the theory. For example, you appear present induction as inscrutable because one may not necessarily be conscious of the genesis of all action, but this would be superfluous, as this conundrum continges on another subject. Nonetheless, the action resides within-subject as will and as you state it does so a priori, but you then begin to identify a noumena which you represent as a valid antithesis to the epistemological framework, but necessarily has already been accounted for and is conceived as 'Noumena'. In your final sect of an analogous dialogue, you practically strawman the entirety of the epistemological theory and utilize solipsism. You just identify that our knowledge is contingent on our own perception to which we condition the object to have a purpose. The world as object is a void and non-contextual, although I do respect your commitment to potentially discovering some dissonance in the Kantian framework, you appear to have very little involvement with it theoretically, I can tell by the final skeptic statement. How things actually are, as the purpose is completely conditioned by us as subjects and believe me, you can find some valid criticisms of Transcendental Idealism, Object-Oriented Ontology being one of them.
@@jackwebb7946 Having gone through grad school and read philosophy articles that were dense given their technicality, I can recognize the difference between "This writing is dense because it is technical" and "This writing is dense because this person thinks being obscure is a necessary characteristic of philosophy" (which it is not). I'm glad to read your comment if you rewrite it with clarity in mind. But unless I have to sift through your ideas to use as a source in a paper, I'm not going to dissect your bloated comment because A) it's not worth the time and B) I'm not even sure that _you_ know what you're talking about, so I shouldn't expend my energy on something that's possibly not coherent in the first place.
Secondly, my comment was written to be just as funny as it was a serious jab at Kant. Nevertheless, the criticisms I mounted against Kant were precisely the sort of things that the German Idealists were wrestling with when dealing with Kant's philosophy. So whatever else you want to say about my silly little post, it's not un-involved theoretically speaking. It's the launching point for German Idealism.
This came out right after my essay in Immanuel Kant was due...
+WeiYinChan Go real 'in' mate.
+WeiYinChan Ahh, A Levels. The good ole days.
+WeiYinChan Too bad, I'm sure it would look great in your bibliography section.
HarryIsTheGamingGeek nope... university
WeiYinChan Oops. My mistake.
If the truth shall kill them, let them die.
- Immanuel Kant
@Carollus Edward nope its from kant!!!
@Carollus Edward if you believe in altruism or kant then youll always be a slave to society. you have to make exceptions for yourself and do evil thing to succeed. look at every president or oligarch in history cheating lying and stealing is the best way to survive in society. authority has three fundamental forces observation judgmental and jurisdiction power you only to negate one of those three to bypass authority. also authority is split into two categories inhibitive and coercive authority. there are ways to push back against or negate each one.
@@jarrodyuki7081 If the absolute conditions for you to succeed are doing evil, then you should not succeed.
@@jarrodyuki7081 I feel sorry for you
Pakailah bahasa indonesia dg benar
I just watched the Schopenhauer before this and I love that they’re both just like “surround yourself with art”
But this guy’s ideas are very abstract and not practical. Religion is the only thing that can really stop a man from committing bad things such as stealing and killing as opposed to reason and thinking. Rationality will get out of the window when a man is hungry and has to bring food to his hungry kids at home. The only thing that can stop him by giving him hope that he’ll find something without having to steal is religion. His idea didn’t even came close to finding a replacement to religion because there isn’t any.
@@Muxammadamiin actually, he seems to have started with the wrong premise about religion. The purpose of religion (at least the Christian religion) is not to make one good, but to make one understand that we fail in our attempt to be good and have redemption for that failure in the perfect sacrifice of Christ. The response to that understanding is to glorify God.
Great. One of the first philosophical quotes that ever resonated with me came from Kant:
'Two things awe me most: the starry sky above me and the moral law within me.'
I love it. I might disagree with morality being elevated to such a cosmic level in principle, but I love it still. So inspiring.
Because we are normal people who don't have extreme power, anyone have extreme power would have moral law within them? sdalin? hitler? chairman mao?
This is my second thought a few months after i digested kant's quote.
Oo
Why? It seems to me that morality is by far the most important concept, period. Without morality, there would be no evaluation function for anything; there would be no point in anything, whether it be choices we make or even the universe existing. Who cares if the universe exists or not if there's no value that can be assigned to it?
And how do you get value without a moral basis for the evaluation function?
Thus, morality is the root of all meaning, the only thing that matters.
@@YSFmemoriesit depends how you define morality. If you’re saying all rightness and wrongness (including conventionally amoral correctness and incorrectness) are morality then sure. If you mean morality in a thou shalt not kill sense, then I don’t think there is any fundamental metaphysical truth to that, it’s just a psychological consensus.
@@KennyVibes465 no, for example, 1+1=2 or 1+1=3. One is correct and one is incorrect, but neither is meaningful without a greater moral context. Who cares if someone makes an incorrect statement if it doesn't matter?
Thou shall not kill by itself may possibly be a mistaken statement to take as objective morality. But there has to be something, or else literally nothing matters.
"..... anything but good looking..." Just wow 😂😂
Hahahahahahaha I love how it was just said so casually too
We like the deceive ourselves about our actual level of attractiveness. But when it's brought up in another context see how we bristle. We carry a lot of ugliness and imperfection (by our own biological standards) both outwardly and inwardly.
imagine people calling you ugly more than 200 years after u died😭😭 this is why i hate people
As harsh as it may sound, it tends to be an accurate description of "unappealing" and "undesirable for propagation." This apt description tends to frustrate anybody who falls in the same category. In spite of how much they oppose its unfairness.
Hahahha burn lol
There's nothing I don't love a bout this video. Whoever is in charge of the animations deserves an standing ovation of the whole you tube quorum.
“Kant get behind this “ - Neiztsche
all of kants books need to be burned and his grave destroyed.
@@jarrodyuki7081 Säuberung
First episodes of Immanuel Kant Series (please upvote):
- ua-cam.com/video/Inv84W0GOZA/v-deo.html
- ua-cam.com/video/x_etgTmp-wc/v-deo.html
Any feedback/comments would be appreciated!😁
Genghis Khan, but Immanuel Kant.
My wife told me that philosophy is a waste of time. So I said to her: _"Read Kant"_
Now she's my ex for some unknown reason.
Yes, we Khan!
@@samwayes u've just worked so hard, guy!
Lol
I am lot
Ah, the philosophy series, the primary reason why i subscribed.
+Will Ferrous EXACTLY ^^^^^^^
Ah casual total straw man of anarchism do one on Bakunin or Gerrard Winstanley and you'll see what I mean.
Romando what was your end goal in making that statement? To come off as a enlightened and intelligent? You just sound like your run-of-the mill try hard pseudo-intellectual.
dustin hudson, maybe he is just showing his interest in it, and philosophy teaches us not to necessarily always take things at face value unless there is close to or beyond reasonable doubt. Oh and you should take the a before enlightened and put it before run in your comment.
The fact that this comment has 2nd most likes. First one being a joke. Shows a lot about people who watch these. The first most liked also tells something! Thanks for the comment!
I´m really glad we covered this in school. This entire series should be in the curiculum of everybody.
rich and talented people have the god given right to avoid the accountability of the masses period. the categorical imperative is blasphemy on all levels.
@@jarrodyuki7081 you missed the point.
@@jarrodyuki7081 whoa whoa whoa hol' on there what now
Person of wisdom of his era. He must have been agnostic. He inspired many people after him , that is in itself the greatest achievement of any human's life. Long live Kant's philosophy.
Which is dumb
@@cazwalt9013 Which part of the sentence was dumb? You can't start a sentence with "Which" and not explain what you're critiquing, brother.
He wasn't agnostic. This video is tremendously wrong, seemingly because of extreme bias.
@@cazwalt9013 Which is dumber
@@rodrigorivers2469then wtf was he?
Love these summaries. Kant's Critiques are such a great foundation for studying any modern philosopher.
I thought Kant's greatest contribution was in epistemology (Critique of Pure Reason), which engendered the analytic/continental split in modern and contemporary philosophy. Why didn't you even mention this aspect of his philosophy?
+clement mogo I think the school of life focuses on topics that can be directly applied to your own life. And ethics is more suited for that then epistemology.
Yes god damn it! I agree. We want epistemology! :)
+clement mogo The Critique of Pure Reason is not a work of epistemology. There is a bit of epistemology in it, but Kant would correct you by saying that the Critique is a work of meta-metaphysics, in other words, a "prolegomena [introductory theory] to any future metaphysics," explaining how metaphysics is to be done and how to critique it.
+clement mogo No way, he was completely wrong on that. The commonly used analytic-synthetic dichotomy doesn't hold up to close scrutiny. Although intuitively powerful, it's based on an incomplete view of concepts. This has been argued persuasively in the essay I'll link below. The short version is this: dividing all knowledge into two classes -- the analytic and synthetic -- is to detach the meaning of concepts from things that exist in reality. Either you define concepts with reference to things or relationships that exist (true), or you don't (false). If you define concepts in a way that references reality, all concepts are "analytic" and true -- if a concept refers to reality then any definition of it by reference to its attributes is a tautology. To be sure my explanation is incomplete and so I give you the source material:
"Analytic-synthetic dichotomy" by Dr. Leanord Peikoff.
www.proctors.com.au/mrhomepage.nsf/985f14ab922be306482577d5003a2040/4864f5fe3809763a4825789c000dc50a/$FILE/The%20Analytic%20Synthetic%20Dichotomy.pdf
Kant did not have a so-called analytic-synthetic dichotomy. Peikoff's criticism is better aimed at A. J. Ayer in Language, Truth and Logic, whom he references in the document you cited. Also, Peikoff only says that Kant gave the dichotomy its present name. That is somewhat accurate. But notice that he did not say that Kant created it, and as he said it existed before Kant named it. One would think that naming an evil would be praiseworthy. Instead, Peikoff shoots the messenger. Kant was not a promulgator of a dichotomy that he did not believe in.
No, the categorical imperative isn't the "golden rule": "do unto others as you would have them do unto you", as this is way to subjective for Kant to accept it as the foundation of ethics. It requires you to ask what the underlying principle, the maxim, of your action is and points out that you should only commit that action if you could wish that this underlying maxim became law for everyone within the society, so everyone alwas acts on it.
Yeeeees! Someone said it! Thank you!
*****
No I am stating that the golden rule can only be the same as the golden rule if all people in fact do desire the same.
If you are for instance a masochist you might want to be hit by someone. The golden rule would now tell you to hit that person. But of cause that is a ridicolous claim to make, it is obviously wrong to just hit people.
If you use trhe golden rule now you would have the maxim "it is OK to hit people". You would now have to imagine a world where it is OK to hit people is a general law. That is undesierable therefore hitting is wrong.
You could of cause also use the purpose-dignity-interpretation of Kant's theory and just conclude that just randomly hitting someone else is against the selfpurpose of that person and therefore infringes on their dignity which is a much easier waay to get to the conclusion that hitting is wrong.
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Yes but you took it out of context and said it was what kant said from which point on any obviously became irrelevant.
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It is not stupid in it's entirety since it can be useful. But it is most defenitely not what Kant said.
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I think you implied it but if you didn't. My bad.
Slow, basic, amusing, informative, and straight to the point. LOVE IT
The movement of Kant's eye is epic
The school of life videos may be as short as 5 minutes, but truly, i pause 20 -30 times to contemplate and ponder upon, and so it is like a journey that atleast eats an hour, and presents a sense or a language to the world and to the fellow fellows.
Wow I never realized that I've been living with Kant's philosophy my whole life without even knowing it
Which means that it is NOT 'Kant's' as such - BUT YOURS!
Same goes for me; with age comes wisdom.
I find myself fighting myself in Kant's laws. But Kant really makes me think about what I'm honestly doing. Awesome Philosopher!!
I think you may have misinterpreted the categorical imperative here. From my understanding, it is morally wrong to do things that when applied to the entire world isn't logical. For example, it is wrong to lie because if everyone in the world were to lie, there would be no grounds for expecting someone to be telling the truth, therefore, making it impossible to lie. A lie implies that the person being lied to expects you are telling the truth, but if no one was ever expected of telling the truth, a lie wouldn't be logically possible. I may have explained it poorly, but it's difficult to explain regardless
Bennett thats the first part of it. Kant distinguishes between two kinds of duty. The universal law of a morally bad decision can either be contradictive or not desirable. The opposite of the action that would lead to this universal law is either an absolute duty or an incomplete duty (it's sort of hard to translate this). But you are right, they didnt really explain what the CI is saying.
Hey Bennet, like this ua-cam.com/video/ffqhH2ooIYs/v-deo.html
Kind of like what America is looking like right about now.
if the lier has enough evidence that confirms his lies and enough ways to hide contrary evidence, yes, he could convince someone to believe it even if they are skeptical at first.
It is not practicable, and if you take for example, egoism; if everyone would be egoistic, there would be no humanity existing, because the extremest form of egoism is destructive, and since a living beeing has the natural instinct to stay alive and unfold himself, destroying themselves, which happens by egoistic behavior, is against their nature and therefore objectively wrong. That's what I think, and I just right now discovered, that Kant had the same idea.
So a couple issues with this video.
First, no talk about Kant's ethics is even possible without talking about his metaphysics and epistemology. Without that, his ethics is nonsensical.
Second, the categorical imperative is not the golden rule. In fact, he specifically states that it's importantly different than the golden rule in a footnote as to try to make sure people don't make this common mistake. The fact that Kant specifically went out of his way to emphasize this point (which, considering how dry, dense, complex, and free of examples his works are, says a lot), it's very important to not see the CI in this way.
Third, Kant's goal with his entire philosophy was to diliniate the limits of theoretical reason (facts and judgments) and the realms of practical reason (ethics). In addition, the goal was to explain how religion provides access beyond what reason can offer us. That's why the books are called "critique of pure reason", "critique of practical reason", and "critique of judgment". Critique here means, examining the limits of, pure reason refers to theoretical knowledge (cognition and empirical sense data), and judgment refers to our subjective aesthetic tastes and teleological tastes. So the Critiques are examining the limits of our theoretical knowledge, and our aesthetic judgments of beauty. Once the limits of these domains of reason are understood (the phenomenal world), the concept of god is all that remains to explain the remaining aspects that cannot be explained by these domains. (the noumena)
So the purpose of his philosophy wasn't just to find out where religion went wrong; it was to explain where god's role, and the role of revelation in how the world works.
Thanks for putting this together. I felt the same way. I think this is a lingering issue with these video series, which is manufacturing a sentimental lesson in the end in the name of creating 'easy to swallow' philosophy pills. There is no way you can do this without looking stupid in the eyes of people who are genuinely interested in philosophy.
But it'll definitely work for high school students who are desperately looking for a catchy sentence to copy for their homework the night before the deadline. What do you expect from Alain de botton anyways.... At least I don't. Fake philosopher of the 21st century.
good to point that out. but this channel isn't for folks who read, it's for folks who wish they read.
Hey, I appreciate the clarification. I was sitting here thinking, "that's not the golden rule really."
I've watched this video (and others) about twice a year since it was uploaded and I learn something new every time I return.
You should read that Kant's article which named; "what is enlightment?"
I was blown away when i learnt that it was released at 1784.
Best essay ever!
Critique of pure reason was not mentioned in this video.... I just don't know what to say or think...
Knowledge for the sake of knowledge is good. But this channel is focused on practical knowledge and much of Kant's "philosophy" is in a way useless, something which is justified about his abstract and complex way of writting about simple and every day things...
@@Soytu19 What is practical knowledge in your humble world view?
I guess Immanuel Kan't have reason.
@@Soytu19 I hope you were being ironic. Kant's philosophy is not useless in any way, as it solved many problems and to be honest a lot of science seriously requires the underlying foundation nowdays which relativists and dialectics argumented (but without proof) away: the principles a priori.
@@Soytu19 Name 1 Kantian idea that did not directly solve a problem, further a subject of study, or go on to spawn/influence an entirely new school.
I studied Kant in the 1970's. He is still an imperative force in my daily actions. Why be moral? Ask that of yourself.
This is most brilliantly done. Summarizes some of Kant's crucial ideas beautifully. Thank you!
'When the flower blooms, the bees come uninvited' - Ramakrishna
Wow thanks
4:14 - 4:16 I can't tell you how many times I've had to correct people on this. Kant did NOT say "never treat others merely as means to an end." That proscription would make life in society very difficult, as no employer could ever hire an employee and would have to do all the work. So The School of Life will really need to reconsider its interpretation of Kant's words.
Kant's idea is to treat others ALSO as ends in themselves, and not merely as means to an end.
The animation itself is so philosophical
all of kants books need to be burned deontologists need to burn in hell.
I studied philosophy in Uni and to me among all the contemporary philosophers, Kant's work is the hardest to comprehend somehow..
Is not just you, I can assure you!
His work is difficult.
His work is very dry.
@@melanie851I've never read primary source Kant, but if he can turn an elegant Bible passage into that trainwreck of a sentence shown here, I'm not surprised
Had an intro Philosophy professor in undergrad explain Kant so well it literally gave me my 3rd out of body experience in Fuggin class, because l lost myself so much. He finished the lecture and snapped me back like a Genuine Yogi, and l was stupified. The mind is crazy strong and reality, well, reality ain't. 😊
Your description of the first aspect of the Categorical Imperative is wrong (although it is unfortunately an inaccuracy that many people don't realise is an inaccuracy). If the categorical imperative is simply stating 'do unto others as you would like others to do unto you' it is essentially a Utilitarian statement; it is similar to saying 'do x otherwise y' or 'be kind to others otherwise they may not be kind to you' which is a very consequentialist thing to say. Kantian ethics is the major competitor of consequentialist ethical philosophy, and that is because Kant is not saying 'do unto others as you wish others to do onto you' because if he were saying so, there would be no tension between deontology and consequentialism.
Rather the first aspect of the categorical imperative that you quote in this section, regarding only being able to hold a maxim that can be made universal, is about steering away from contradiction. Here is probably the best example: let us say you wish to steal something. Your maxim will then be 'it is ok to steal'. Now if that maxim were made universal, everyone would be allowed to steal whenever they like. Arguably stealing could be happening all of the time. But stealing presupposes the concept of 'property' - you can't steal something if we don't hold a concept of property. But if the maxim you are holding were made universal, and people started to steal all of the time, then it seems that property doesn't actually seem to exist anymore and therefore neither does stealing. As such, you can't make the maxim 'it is ok to steal' a universal, because if it were we would have entirely negated the concept of stealing in the first place and created a contradiction, and therefore you cannot hold the maxim 'it is ok to steal.'
Under Kant's ethics, if a maxim passes this test of contradiction and universality, it can go on to be tested under his other aspects of the categorical imperative. If it does not, it is not something a moral agent should be doing. Of course, Kant's categorical imperative is still under scrutiny for exactly what he meant by it, but the above explanation is generally considered the best one at this point.
Also the most remarkable aspect of Kant's 'What is Enlightenment?' which you mention at the beginning of the video, is that Kant conceives of the enlightenment as a process, a process of 'exiting from' to achieve maturity. This is a very similar idea of Enlightenment that Foucault holds many decades later, and indeed he based his on Kant.
I'm 8 years late, but thanks for your explanation!
If you ever read Kant in its original form, you know just what a damn genius he was! It is nearly impossible to comprehend what he is writing... It takes hundreds or rereads just to kinda get an idea what he ment.
So increadibly dense! Thats true, marvellous work.
+Max Hillebrand The only writings which are comprehend able by Kant are his political writings.
Kant is not that hard to comprehend, its just that his work is boring and dry. You have to take him super literally and then you will understand him
There are two major factual errors in this video worth pointing out so that viewers are not misled. 1. Kant explicitly denies that the categorical imperative is at all similar to the golden rule. This occurs in a footnote to the Groundwork Of The Metaphysics of Morals at 4: 430 where he warns against this assimilation and calls the golden rule "trite". 2. The Critique of the Power of Judgement was not published in 1793, as the video claims, but in 1790.
👍
This class is kicking my ass, thank you so much for explaining in 3 mins what my proof took 3 hours to explain.
This video only explains his moral philosophy, not his Transcendental Idealism.
note to self: make videos like this with animation. take cool sayings from Kant and other philosophers and resay them for the public in a modern, understandable way.
Simply equating the categorical imperative with the golden rule is too... simplistic. ;)
+Doc Eon wasn´t it even upgrade of the golder rule? I remember the example of speeding ticket. Policeman shoulnd´t under golden rule give speeding tickets, since he don´t want to get them. Under categorical imperative on the other hand he does, because he needs them in society.
+Elador1000 Well, exactly. The religious versions of the rule appeal to our emotions, specifically our fear of bad things happening to ourselves. Kant considered this a poor basis for morality, and instead appealed to our reason.
That was very educational, I've been greatly enlightened and am eternally in debt for the service you have paid to me and the knowledge you have bestowed upon me. Thank you for the good work you do day in and day out. -Mcaulay Culkin
THIS GUY IS GREAT. I FEEL LIKE I'M GETTING A CLASS TAUGHT BY C3PO FROM STAR WARS. I KEEP EXPECTING HIM TO SAY, "COME ALONG R2!"
Tricorn Tom someday soon
I wish this video had been around when I was studying this in college. Better late than never!
How can one explain the immense philosophy of Immanuel Kant in 8 minutes? No matter how good you are at summarising, it just can't be done
The School of Life, please do a video on Carl Sagan. He's one of the very few people in this world I admire. I know he was a scientist, not a philosopher. But I feel much of his philosophy would greatly benefit mankind in today's irrational world.
+The School of Life please do a detail video on assassin founder hassen in saah he is like a lost legend
+The School of Life If I can, I'd like to suggest Alan Watts be added to that.
+The School of Life just don't do one on that black science guy
+Sarwat Shaheen
Well this is oddly representative of our era's devaluation of philosophy at science's profit. Ask not why, but merely how.
+John sierra fuck you
"These violent delights have violent ends" now I understand what it really means.
A video on Kant? Wow... I kant believe it.
+As You Were Reading My Very Long Username I Stole Your Sandwich You're being a real kant posting a pun like that.
+As You Were Reading My Very Long Username I Stole Your Sandwich Where did my sandwich go..?
I Kant stop this feeling anymore! whoa! whoa! whooooaa!
+As You Were Reading My Very Long Username I Stole Your Sandwich You just kant stop yourself, kan you?
You kant believe it? You are a kant.
All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.
I love school of life stories of these great critical thinkers. Brilliant 🤩👍👍👍
I really enjoy your videos even though I just discovered them recently. It's a far shot but I have difficulty finding good educational material about Art History and I was wondering if you might find it worth doing a series about different Artists and why then influenced our contemporary culture so much. You guys are the best, keep up the good work.
I had understood the categorical imperative differently. One of the things I love about Kant's moral theory is that moral duties can be derived purely from logic:
If we expect everyone to behave morally, then it should be possible for everyone to behave morally. So, if you imagine a world where everyone behaves a certain way and arrive at a paradox, it is immoral.
For example, if murder is defined as killing an innocent person NOT in self defense, and everyone practiced murder on a regular basis, there would be no innocents. We would all be killing in self-defense, thus, no one would be a murderer. (So, if everyone is a murderer, no one is a murderer. That's a paradox, so murder is immoral.)
Also, in order to behave morally, one must have control over their actions (we wouldn't say that an object passively being acted on is being "moral") so if everyone was treated as a means- and was not allowed to act autonomously, morality would not exist. So, it's immoral to treat someone as a means.
I like that part of Kant too, although he said you can’t lie under any circumstance whatsoever. However, would it be OK to save someone, according to the first formulation of the Categorical Imperative, by lying? It seems to be contradictory if you should save someone but you can’t lie under any circumstance.
I'm a bit confused. If murdering became normal, then wouldn't that make it moral instead?
What is generally missing from this synopsis as well as in Modern Philosophical theory is the conclusion that all philosophers, even Kant, derive there theoretical conclusions by barrowing from others and developing it from their own social interactions. As an example, the International Prototype of Kilogram is that object by which sets the standard of weight in mass throughout the world. It can be redefined as Plank's constant but anyone under the IPK system would not know by what to identify it as unless it had a relationship to the IPK. The true Paradox of mankind is summed up by the desires of man. All humanity lives life as though we are void of consequences after death yet not one human truly wants to die. Why is this? What relationship is death to morality? Unless there is a law that transcends life and death we will never choose others benefitting over our own selfish existence. Yet GOD built within all humanity a morality derived from the conscience that leads us to understand the total depravity of mankind and the need for the Ubermansch, a Savior for all mankind.
@@monk1808 for Kant, the actions are inmoral or moral objectively; so, for him, if you lied you would do an inmoral action. But if you don't save this person, it would be more inmoral.
@@nicolasa.sarracinoabalos9245 Which part of his ethical theory critiques passivity though?
Amazing and extremely important nowadays.
We live in a secularist western society where radicalism atheism is becoming so strong and disrespectful towards religion believers, that categorical imperative is an extremely powerful concept justified merely by reasons about why you should respect other's regardless of their beliefs.
That was never Kants goal or way of thinking. He stated that we will never get to know the thing itself. We can only state how we look to the thing itself but we will never get it fully. Also the categorical imperative is not the golden rule infact it is about derivating ethics by reason and by analysing the goal of an action and not the action itself
I've read that, in addition to all this, Kant was an exceptional classroom teacher, a "spellbinding" lecturer. He was a great philosopher with a lifelong passion for the sciences and for geography; he loved his daily walk. I read that in the end his mind began to fail him. I wondered at this, since he kept it in such great shape! It is kind of uncanny to look on the map and see where Konigsberg is today, and what it is called....
i took a class in college where every time they said kant we would start laughing lol
5th grade intensifies
no need to mispronounce his name because you're scared it sounds like you're swearing
+Will Molloy The A in Kant is pronounced like the A in the British pronunciation of the word "can't", but shorter. I hope that helps.
Source: German is my native language.
Oh so Alain was saying it right in the video? I thought he was. Cheers
Will Molloy Well, almost. It still doesn't sound quite right, but in the end it shouldn't matter too much anyways, lol.
Oh okay I see, thank you :)
Ah casual total straw man of anarchism do one on Bakunin or Gerrard Winstanley and you'll see what I mean.
Wow, a Philosopher on Secularism, Freedom, and Art. Thank you school of life.
I shall be reading into him. ^_^
+Mustafa Kulle *Good Luck*, and I mean that your going to need.
PS: I've been attempting to read his wonderful works, I'm getting by and he isn't as intellectually taxing as Hegel though. But you'll get it down :-)
+Nathan Wellington Hegel and Kant are two great philosopher to read in a row, and for both, i needed my philosophy class to understand entirely hehe. I guess it is well described somewhere on the web
You need to check out Stefan Molyneux if you like secular Philosophers
+Ian Moone Although Molyneux is exactly the type of libertarian Kant argues against. Not to mention he's a sexist climate science denier who thinks mental illness and psychiatry are government plots.
+rugbyguy59 He's pretty fucking cool, though. I don't personally know about most of the things you mentioned, but his stand on climate change is not denial. He is only convinced that government-funded science perverts the scientific method with faulty incentives to misrepresent data. As of Climate Change being a field that receives lots of large government money - Moleneux official stand is "sceptical of implied significance of findings".
5:30 “what ever they happen to fancy”...... *plunges flower into friends ass*
If I can’t sodomize someone with a bouquet, then I’m not interested.
Kant's a priori comprehensive judgment is a concept that has put an end to the modern epistemological debate. I think we should be grateful that we can comfortably learn such a meticulously and logically structured concept while studying philosophy. Kant's categorical order is sometimes treated as if it were really natural in modern times. How can we not respect a philosopher who has influenced our lives this much? 10913
i have my final in science ethics and philospohy tomorrow and i've learnt more from youtube than the lectures
To summarize: "Be excellent to each other!"
please do one of these on John Stuart Mill
Mads Hagen Ida was a perfect movie! Loved it! Deals excellently with the torned youth between boundaries of morality
Are you just working through the song?
ua-cam.com/video/PtgKkifJ0Pw/v-deo.html
Dear SOL,why didn't you explain his transcendental idealism? I think you should have done the video earlier because Kant had influenced many thinkers like Schopenhauer (who was a Kantian)and Nietzsche( someone heavily influenced by Schopenhauer and one who was deeply critical of Kantian morality and metaphysics) If this vid had been done earlier, the ideas from Kant could have been linked up with the other philosophers and help foster a deeper understanding.
But still a very enjoyable vid. Good job SOL :)))
+da jackofalltraits they seem to stick to whats more mediately applicable to us, a sister channel would be really great for that though...
Thank you so much for this. Watching your vlogs are better then buying a book. Short and sweet, packed with the vital facts. Much obliged
so much better than in school, this is much more accessible. I still find reading philosophy books pretty daunting, but this is a great intro
The very first time I heard of Immanuel Kant was from Ricky Gervais on the old XFM radio shows. He was winding Karl Pilkington up by saying Kant as a swear word because he could get away with it in a cockney accent. :D
لماذا ترجمة عربية لهذا الفيديو لم تكتمل ؟! نرجو ان يكتملها احد
What he said.
@@Onikagefx who can translate this video to arabic
Onikagefx that’s brilliant. Made me laugh out loud after a tricky day. Thanks😊
Your arabic is horrible BTW !
@@TheOpenedHell because he is not an Arab dude
Kant had opinions on everything, and said plenty on ethics and aesthetics. But this isn't why he's important! He _shook the entire world of philosophy_ by asserting that: We can never really know "things-in-themselves" (the world's true nature). We can only know the _appearance_ of the world ('phenomena'), as represented in our minds through our in-built intuition of time, space, causality, etc. etc. I like the School of Life - nice format and pleasantly presented. But honestly, if this is to be your only Kant video, you need to start again from square one, and do a little more in-depth research & study.
I studied Physics in order to better understand modern philosophy, as well I scanned the works of Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel and other thinkers in hope to learn more about God's existence. However, being themselves only humans, they could not give much knowledge.
At last I met the Bible. The effect was like turning on a powerful lamp in a dark room.
Great fun. Who would think. Respect a man who doesn't need to travel. Thank-you for this lively story.
Wild. I was thinking about morality this morning, and I basically said the categorical imperative as my conclusion. I said we should ask ourselves "would it be beneficial to society if this behavior was universally practiced" to see if something is moral. I had never heard of this before... I guess I'm a Kantian.
Where does morality come from and does one's own desire to live morally in union or against social benefit, prevent the ultimate cost of life, being death? Is morality of 'social benefit' a social construct or an ultimate truism that transcends culture and language?
@@DANIELRODRIGUEZ-yr3et I would argue that it is an ultimate truism that transcends culture and language as a Christian. But I also realize that's a difficult question to flesh out and most people's view of morality is philosophically vapid.
@@natebozeman4510 There are examples of people behaving this way across many spectrums of religious thought but humanity as a whole has never seen a society that behaved this way. The 'Golden Rule' has been attributed to many philosophers, pre-dating Jesus, but none of them have defined what this means. A Christian philosopher criticizes Christendom by using a Christian world view, constructed by a Christian morality and his posterity sees this as Modernity? What nonsense to think that man, devoid of omnipotence, could conclude anything other than that which he knows. So where does the God complex come from? In order for man to understand, he must be taught. And to be taught, he must have a teacher. The understanding of Order is not found but revealed. Revealed by what or whom? It always returns to the Genesis of all things.
@@DANIELRODRIGUEZ-yr3et agree 100%
"If there is No God, everything is permitted", Dostoevsky
Bloody hell, I'm tired of people comparing the categorical imperative to the golden rule. They are not the same. The golden rule is a selfish, utilitarian way of thinking about things. If I am nice to my neighbor and he is nice in return, do I care if my neighbor is rude to his milkman? The golden rule says no. The categorical imperative hints at a transcendental morality that, when obeyed by everyone in society, will rid society of its flaws. It is a much grander idea than the golden rule. Again, "act only unto that maxim whereby, at the same time, you will that it be universal law" means that you should only act on actions that (when diffused onto the rest of humanity) will not produce any logical conflicts or paradoxes. Kant was all about reason, whereas the golden rule is a phrase used to keep kids in check. This ideal formula means that you can literally rid society of its murderers, thieves, cheaters, etc.
I see. So whereas the Golden Rule is more primitive, in that it only focuses on minimizing one's own suffering, using others as means to reflect your good actions back on to oneself. Whereas, the Categorical Imperative is more general, in that it focuses on minimizing group suffering and takes focus away from actions being done back onto one's self, and puts focus towards one's actions being replicated in society. Your comment is pretty useful.
@@noahhysi8622 in the wording of your comment, you've brought up another angle to distinguish the CI from the Golden Rule. If you do actions only so that others may do them unto you, you are not acting per the categorical imperative. Your action is motivated by a return. Also, you are using people as means only. If you acted per the categorical imperative, particularly the second formulation, then you would not care if the other person respects you or not. You do your duty without regard for the return.
@@2905sid Yes, I realized that part of the distinguishing mid-comment, but I didn't know if my thoughts were shared.
I absolutely adore the works of Immanuel Kant 🖤
Thank you!
He was a racist fool and really ugly balloon head
Kant believe I'm seeing this today. This is gold!
I only just came across Kant 3 days ago and already added him to my heroes list.
This reminds me of Clark Kent/Superman from the DC comics and his relationship with the American Way: a guy who is fighting for people's liberty by understanding his local ideals in the spiritual senses as in how to do good and live a better life instead of abusing them for votes and political domination.
Immanuel Kant must have been a very nice guy too.
Not really, he more or less invented scientific racism and created a racial hierarchy with whites at the top and Native Americans at last. He was pretty influential in laying the foundations for racism to propagate for the next few centuries.
I've never heard of this Kant before, sounds like a smart Kant though.
This just screams Chidi Anagonye wherever and however you look it at (For those who don’t know he’s an ethics and philosophy teacher from the tv show “The Good Place”)
YES! best series EVER!
i remember learning about him in college in philosophy class but i needed a refresher
Wonderful presentation! Thank you!
The Four Categories by Kant : Quantity, Quality, Relation and Condition(is it just possible or inevitable?)
Inevitable. Human's sense has to use it always in order to sense something. space and time are also conditions for sensing anything and that's why we will never get to the thing itself, according to my understanding of the Critique of pure reasob
Your videos are always well produced with rich philosophical content. I wish I could show all your videos to my secondary students however the occasional pin-up and the like are needlessly bawdy. It's a matter of taste for some, but I know my students (and their parents) do not see through to the content. Thank you for your hard work in making these resources. I wish to use more in the future.
Sapere Aude
i really like your videos and i want to thank you.
but in this video you made a big mistake about the categorical imperative.
the categorical imperative has nothing to do with "do unto others as you would have them do unto you".
you don't imagine the consequences of your action, you don't imagine any consequences.
whether your action is "good" or "bad" dosen't depend on the possible consequences, but on your intention, your maxim.
if your intention (it is probably the wrong word for it, but i'm from germany and don't know a better one) is good then you acted in a morally way. it's a big difference.
if you're acting in accordance with the golden rule you thing about what YOU want to be treated like; it's egocentric and depends on your personal preferences.
when kant wrote the categorical imperative, he wanted to build an instructions, that applies for everyone in the same way.
if everyone would act in accordance with the CI, there would be only peace and love (idealized),
while acting in accordance with the GR, there still would be problems, because everyone does what's best in his own opinion (if you like getting hit, then go on and hit other people).
i hope you see what i mean and noticed the difference.
greetings.
I only came here because I'm currently reading Sophie's world and Kant's perception to human's free will by following moral law was so hard to comprehend.
The death of dogma is the birth of morality.
🕊️
Philosopher Immanuel Kant
mans introduced Kant as a moral philosopher and didn't mention epistemology or metaphysics...
Why did you not talk about Kant's Transcendental Idealism? (Noumena and phenomena, synthetic and analytic propositions, his ideas on space and time etc.)
My philosophy professor said this this past Thursday in a British accent: "I can't stand Kant." he said after his lecture on Kant.
Google's crazy man, I googled a bunch of stuff about Perpetual Peace for my college class and all of a sudden I have 3 kant videos in my recommended on UA-cam
In my book, one of the all-time greats
It seems that you only need some glue and a few hours , to finally understand "Critique of Pure Reason" by Kant. I haven't tried it myself yet, but here is how it goes:
There is this very original thing called " Kant für die Hand", made by the author Hanno Depner. He had prepared a 3D model of all the important ideas presented in that book! You put the carton pieces together, among which you have drawers like Einheit, Allheit, Vielheit for example, you build one idea upon another, and at the end, you have the whole thing in front of you! You can look at it from several perspectives and experiment with it as much as you want. It is a bit hard to describe, but you can watch the video of the process of making that model, it is just 2 minutes. So search on youtube for this:
"Kant für die Hand, Hanno Depner". They say it is a great idea, because Kant thought that our thinking has an architectural structure; so indeed everything you have to deal with in life has to be in its place in your mind and one of the most important missions of philosophy is to help you for this. So he probably would have liked this architectural modal of his book!
When you don't understand something, asking help from an expert is usually a very bad idea, since they make stuff even more complicated for you. But there is this German gentleman I like, Marcus Willaschek, simply because when he talks I understand what he says! He is a Kant expert. He says that not everything Kant wrote is difficult and if you wanted to read something more accessible and fun, his essay " Conjectural Beginning of Human History" would be a good idea to begin with. That's where Kant tells us the story of Genesis in the way he understands it and also says:
“Conjectures cannot make too high a claim on one’s assent. They cannot announce themselves as serious business, but at best only as a permissible exercise of the imagination guided by reason, undertaken for the sake of relaxation and mental health”
By the way, I very much liked the idea of Kant, of having some rules around a conversation with people. Usually when we meet with our beloved friends who are equally distracted and confused folks as ourselves, our conversations don't go deep enough into what really matters to all of us. We rather anxiously jump from one subject to the other without even noticing it. Alain de Botton talks about this in a very thought provoking podcast. Just search for: A point of view, The Art of Conversation BBC 4.
Thank you very much for this wonderful lesson!
Lua Veli Joseph m Boyle July 30, 1942--September 24,1916. Natural law theory
“anything but good looking” 😭😭 how u gonna do my mans kant dirty like that?
This video assumes that everybody has the same moral standards and the same definition of good.
What if, for instance, you believe that a purely physical sexual affair does not demean your love for your partner, but don't know if your partner agrees. Kant says that it's okay for you to cheat on them since you wouldn't mind if that became 'universal law'. But you might be hurting your partner, which shouldn't be 'good'.
What about vegetarians who believe that killing animals is cruel, and people who think capital punishment is/isn't morally acceptable? We all have different ideas of what is good for the world, and we might be acting against the notions of good of others and hurt them in the process, while acting within our own conscience.
Excelente video. La verdad ayuda a comprender mejor a este gran pensador.
This is a very good abstract of Kant the Philosopher for those of us who hear names like - Kant, Hume, Hegel occasionally in our lives, but have no idea who/what they did to warrant such fame and adulation.
You might also want to know those 3 names were very influential in developing pseudo scientific theories of racial hierarchy and white supremacy
This is a pretty good video, but Kant actually goes out of his way to differentiate Categorical Imperative from the golden rule in The Metaphysics of Morals.