Immanuel Kant's Influence On Philosophical Thinking

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To say that Immanuel Kant's work was influential would be an understatement. His Copernican revolution marked a famous turning point for the history of western philosophy. Both the analytic and continental traditions can be said to be a response to Kant's ideas. Still today, Neo-Kantian thinking still has modern-day applicability to ethics, metaphysics and epistemology. However, Kant's work is remembered more for its impact on philosophical thinking, than its modern applicability. In both traditions, Kant's thought was viewed as perniciously flawed due to his distinction between phenomena and noumena (things-in-themselves). This specifically concerns the perniciously problematic ontological status of the noumenal realm, which collapses Kant's philosophical foundations. While this notion is initially troubling, Kant manages to redeem himself with his notion that we can only have knowledge about the phenomenal realm. This key insight, was what paved the way for Edmund Husserl's Phenomenology: the pervasive and ongoing continental school of thought that …show more content…
Plato begins with a basic distinction between intelligible objects of thought and objects of experience.1 Here we see the origin of the distinction between contingent, falsifiable, phenomenal realm, and the knowable, necessary noumenal realm.2 The noumenal realm is the realm of the fixed, static and necessary forms, while the phenomenal realm is constant to flux and contains "mere opinion". To Plato, the noumenal realm is the sole realm of actual knowledge, and somehow causes the phenomenal realm.3 From this, Plato holds that there is a mind-independent reality that we can have a nonsensual access towards. By holding the ontological distinction between mind and experience, and epistemically prioritizing the former, Plato can be seen as the predominant anti-phenomenological

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