Chapter 1: What was the intellectual climate before Immanuel Kant?
In the Middle Ages, theology was the queen of the sciences and philosophy was regarded as her handmaiden, and there was a certain intellectual credibility to the truth claims of Christianity. But since the Kantian critique of the traditional arguments for the existence of God, for example, philosophy has been liberated from theology and the impact of theology and the church
has declined dramatically in the last 200 years. how we think matters, as we'll discover this week, ideas have consequences. That's why a study of philosophical thought helps us to trace how the Western world and society came to embrace the ideas of the present day. And today on Renewing Your Mind, R.C.
Sproul introduces us to one of the most influential and controversial Enlightenment thinkers, Immanuel Kant. Throughout his ministry, Dr. Sproul sought to help Christians know what they believe and why they believe it. And a study in philosophy shines a light on ways our own thinking may have been influenced by the world rather than the Word.
You can own his entire overview of philosophy on a special edition DVD, along with the companion book and a digital study guide when you give a donation at renewingyourmind.org. So who was Immanuel Kant, and why has his influence been so significant? Here's Dr. Sproul.
Chapter 2: How did Kant's critique change the relationship between philosophy and theology?
When historians and cultural analysts look at our contemporary civilization, they frequently use words to describe the situation that are prefaced by the word post. We hear this generation called the postmodern era. or the post-Christian era, or perhaps even more frequently, the post-Kantian era.
The reason for that description is that all theoretical thought since Immanuel Kant has to be understood in light of the groundwork that he achieved in the eighteenth century.
And I think there's a link between post-Kantianism and what we call the post-Christian era because Immanuel Kant, more than any other individual, gave the most devastating critique of classical theism that's ever been launched. And that created a crisis in apologetics, in the rational defense of historic Christianity, and the like.
Now, I've mentioned a tendency for cycles to take place in the history of theoretical thought when tension occurs between two dominant schools of thought. Then immediately after that comes a period of skepticism, and that period of skepticism tends to prevail until somebody comes along and produces a new synthesis that will reconstruct the ground basis for theoretical thought.
We saw that in the tension that arose between the thinking of Parmenides and Heraclitus, which was then resolved by Plato, and then we saw another tension between Plato and Aristotle, which really didn't get resolved until the Christian synthesis of Augustine and so on. Well now, in the 17th and 18th century, we saw this
terrific tension between the schools of rationalism and empiricism ending in the radical skepticism of David Hume. And what follows out of this in the eighteenth century are two really different movements, although they're closely related. One was the origination of the so-called Enlightenment, which we'll treat at another time. but mainly we're concerned today with the impact of Immanuel Kant.
Now, to simplify things, we can say that the whole history of philosophy prior to Kant can be divided between two general schools of thought, rationalism on the one hand and empiricism on the other.
So again, I'm painting with a broad brush here and working a little bit loosely at this point, but if we were to go through history and look at these strands of thought, under rationalism we might put Parmenides. and Plato and Plotinus and Augustine and so on, dropping down then to Descartes and Leibniz and Spinoza and Pascal.
On the empiricism side, we would include such people as Heraclitus and then Aristotle and then Aquinas. and bacon, and then into loch, and so on, so that we could, as I said, if we're loose enough, put every major thinker, and some would go into the rational side, into one or the other of these two camps.
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Chapter 3: Who was Immanuel Kant and what made him influential?
I said, we can define it in terms of some kind of motion of consecutive moments or consequential moments or sequential moments. And I said, but I can't conceive of time except by the relationship of motion to something physical. How do we tell time?
We have clocks, a physical object, and we have numbers on the face of the clock, and then we have these different hands moving, like the second hand. And I'll often have people stand in front of a clock, and I'll say, it's now 12 o'clock noon, and you see the second hand at the 12, and I said, look down now at the 6. and the second hand is moving towards that second hand.
Here's the 12, and here's the 6, and here's the second hand, and it is moving in this direction. And I'll say, look at the 6, and you're looking at the future. but it hasn't arrived yet, sort of like what goes on in the countdown at Times Square on New Year's Eve when people give the final 10-second countdown.
Chapter 4: What is the significance of the post-Kantian era?
The six here remains future, and this hand sweeps down across the dial, and you'll have this sense of anticipation as we get closer and closer and closer to that future moment that is the six, and then as it comes down here, It goes right past it, and I said, there it goes. It's gone. That which a moment ago was future is now past.
And we talk about living in the present, but the present seems to be hanging there, suspended between the past and the future because we can't freeze it. It won't stand still. It keeps moving. And so, how other ways do we measure time? You have water clocks, sundials, sand clocks where the sand is sifting through this hourglass.
Every way that we have to tell time in our normal experience is by watching some kind of movement between at least two objects. So for us to have a sense of time, we have to have matter and we have to have motion. And that always raises the philosophical question, what time was it the day before creation?
Remember, Augustine was asked the question, what was God doing before He created the universe? And his reply was, He was creating hell for curious souls. But I mean, people like to speculate about the timelessness of God and the timelessness before time. Was there time before there was a world and motion? It's an interesting question.
Again, we don't perceive it, nor do we perceive space purely, because to have a perception of pure space would be to perceive nothing. and nothing is imperceptible. And this was part of the question that Hume was struggling with, if you recall, when he was asking the question, how can I have a distinct impression of a distinct sensation?
Why, when I'm standing before an audience, don't I just experience an inchoate, undifferentiated blob of sensations bombarding my eyes and my ears? How is it that I can distinguish the difference between music, and noise. There has to be some kind of discrimination, some ability to sort things out and to perceive these sensations in an orderly way.
Now, is that because there really is order out there and I'm perceiving an orderly universe, or is it all chaos, all cacophony, But as I experience this chaos and all this noise, the noise of the sensation comes into the categories of my brain, am I creating order out of disorder as a human being?
Well, how is it that I can have a discrete sensation of something in space and time when I have no direct sensation of space and time? Well, Kant said, well, you have to have space and time in order to be able to have a perception, and so he spoke of space and time as what he called pure intuitions.
So now we have the rational categories, the empirical sensations, and intuition working in this epistemology. And once we get all through this meat grinder, what comes out the end is knowledge. So, do we know that this knowledge absolutely corresponds to reality? No, we don't. Now Kant says instead of defining truth as that which corresponds to reality, Kant declared that truth is a judgment.
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