Although credit-wise, I am only taking 12 credits, four courses, one workshop and I am auditing an elective course. But this term, we must write our internship report and start working on our thesis.
Over the summer, I have decided that I want to go into computer orientated careers such as web design/programming so I am auditing the Computer Graphics course and decided to focus my thesis around the e-commerce consumer behavior field.
Today I wanted to share with you about a philosopher in the 18th Century called Immanuel Kant. One of my courses this term is about International Relations and Geopolitics and its really interesting for me because I love history and I've always wanted to learn philosophy. So far we covered Realism and Liberalism and I'm doing a presentation on one of the most influential liberalist thinker, Kant.
I volunteered to present Immanuel Kant thinking it'll be easy because he's the main liberal thinker so there'll be plenty to talk about, but when I did some research I realised that there is SO much to talk about his works that it is really difficult to give a short presentation on such an in depth character. So here is my quick overview on his life and ideology.
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was born and lived his whole life close to the capital of East Prussia, Konigsberg. He was born during the Age of Enlightenment, in which during the 18th century, intellectuals tried to reform society through reason, advance knowledge through science and opposed the abuse of power by the state and the church.
Kant's contributions were mainly made in four key areas of study: Metaphysics, Epistemology, Ethics and Aesthetics.
- Metaphysics is "the branch of philosophy that deals with the first principles of things, including abstract concepts such as being, knowing, substance, cause, identity, time, and space" (Google Dictionary)
- In which Kant focused on answering the question 'What can we know?'
- Epistemology means "The theory of knowledge, esp. with regard to its methods, validity, and scope."
- He said that knowledge has constraints because of how our minds are limited to the judgements we make through observations and experiences.
- Regarding to ethics, his most famous quote about an ideology called Categorical Imperative explains his views: “Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”
- He also made a detailed study of judgement and thus arrived at a conclusion that aesthetics, beauty is only our perception. that the object is not beautiful but we reason it to be beautiful
Interesting no?
