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Kant’s three fundamental questions — How would you answer them?
In the “Critique of Pure Reason,” Immanuel Kant writes that “all the interests of my reason,” theoretical as well as practical, boil down to just three questions: “What can I know?” “What ought I do?” and “What can I hope for?” In these three questions, Kant delineated the whole scope of philosophical thought. (h/t to Tom Whyman for reminding me of this)
I don’t fancy myself a Kant, and in fact, I never warmed up to that particular philosopher, as brilliant and influential as he undoubtedly was. But when I encounter something like the above I can’t help but looking at it as a challenge to clarify and sharpen my own thoughts. So here we go.
I. What can I know?
These days, a lot. Being lucky enough to be alive during the first part of the 21st century, I have access to technology that rapidly puts at my fingertips a vast reservoir of knowledge and insights accumulated across human cultures of the past several millennia.
My primary sources are science and philosophy. Science provides me with the best factual understanding of the world that is available to humankind, and philosophy gives me the thinking tools I need to make sense of what science puts at my disposal, both in terms of fitting scientific knowledge into the fabric of human life and in terms of applying…
