原作者：
来源Immanuel Kant: ‘What are the necessary preconditions for having any experience at all?’
译者sophie.L
Probably the greatest and most influential philosopher since Aristotle, Kant spent almost the whole of his life exclusively in his birthplace, K?nigsberg. Popular myth has it that the K?nigsberg professor, an inveterate bachelor, was so regular in his daily constitutional that housewives would set their clocks by the time at which he passed their windows. Undoubtedly apocryphal, the story nevertheless highlights the fact that Kant was a very unadventurous fellow, with little interest in music or the arts but with a passion for mathematics, logic and science. Kant claimed in his work to have discovered and laid out universal principles of thought applicable to the whole of mankind and for all time. Kant’s influence stems largely from the first two of his three Critiques – the mammoth and cryptic Critique of Pure Reason (1781), in which he sets out to discover and justify the principles underlying objective judgements about reality; and the shorter, more lucid Critique of Practical Reason (1788), in which he attempts to give a rational justification for ethical judgements. The Critique of Judgement (1790), principally concerned with the ideas of beauty and purpose, has received considerably less attention. In the first of his Critiques, Kant was concerned to justify metaphysics as a legitimate subject of inquiry. In Kant’s eyes, it had been brought into disrepute by the impasse between the rationalists (see Leibniz) and the empiricists (see Hume). The former claimed that metaphysical judgements - the fundamental principles upon which all knowledge is based - are known and justified purely by the intellect. The empiricists on the other hand, claimed that the human mind is like a blank sheet or tabula rasa waiting to be written upon by the world of experience. Kant’s genius was finding a way to synthesize these two opposing views. His fundamental insight sprang from posing the question, ‘what are the necessary preconditions for having any experience at all?’ He argued that in order for human beings to interpret the world the human mind had to impose certain structures on the flux of incoming sense-data. Kant attempted to define these in terms of twelve fundamental judgements he called the Categories (substance, cause/effect, reciprocity, necessity, possibility, existence, totality, unity, plurality, limitation, reality and negation) which could only be applied within a spatial and temporal framework. Thus Kant claimed both the Categories and space and time, which he called ‘forms of intuition’, were imposed on phenomenal experience by the human mind in order to make sense of it. This idea Kant proudly called his ‘Copernican revolution’. Like Copernicus, who had turned the traditional idea of the sun orbiting the earth on its head, Kant had solved the problem of how the mind acquires knowledge from experience by arguing that the mind imposes principles upon experience to generate knowledge. This idea was later to have great influence on the phenomenologists and gestalt psychologists of the twentieth century. Just as Kant had laid down laws of thought in his first Critique, so in his second he claimed to have discovered a universal moral law which he called ‘the categorical imperative’. He gave several formulations of this law, the first of which was ‘act by that maxim which you can at the same time will as a universal law’. In essence, this categorical imperative is an expression of the oft-heard moral remonstration: ‘what if everybody did that?’ Kant realised that taking this seriously entailed that some moral rules could not be rationally broken. Suppose an agent is about to break a promise but stops first to consider Kant’s imperative: ‘could I will that promise breaking become a universal law?’ According to Kant the answer is no, for it is only against the background of some people keeping promises that the practice of promising makes any sense. Thus one cannot rationally assert that everyone should break their promises and hence, argued Kant, we have a duty as rational creatures to keep them. Kant thought this kind of reasoning could be applied to many of our most cherished moral imperatives and would entail the obedience of any rational creature. Versions of Kant’s theory of moral duty, often called deontological theories, have been widely upheld and defended by philosophers up to and including the present day.
康德也许是继亚里斯多德之后最伟大和最具影响力的哲学家，他终生独自生活在他的出生地哥尼斯堡（Königsberg）。一个流传很广的故事这样说道，康德这位哥尼斯堡的教授，一位常年独身的单身汉，保持着十分规律的保健散步的习惯，以至于附近的主妇们都根据他经过他们家窗户的时间去对表。毫无疑问这个故事的真伪是值得怀疑的，但是它强调了这样一个事实，即康德是一个性格十分平和的人，对音乐或艺术没什么兴趣，但是对数学、逻辑和科学却保有极大的热情。康德在他的作品中宣称，他已经发现并向人们展示了思维的普遍原则，这一原则在任何时候都适用于人类全体。
康德的影响力主要来自于他的三大批判中的前两个--卷帙浩繁而又带有神秘色彩的《纯粹理性批判》（Critique of Pure Reason 1781），其中他着手发现并证明了处于对现实进行客观判断之下的原则；而1788年发表的更加简短而易懂的《实践理性批判》（Critique of Practical Reason）中，他试图给道德判断一个理性的证明。1790年发表的《判断力批判》（The Critique of Judgement）主要涉及美和意志的理念，但是仅获得人们的较少关注。
在康德的第一大批判中，他致力于证明形而上学是进行真理探索的合理的主体。在康德看来，形而上学因为理性主义者（见莱布尼兹）和经验主义者（见休谟）之间的僵局而损害了名誉。理性主义者宣称，形而上学的判断--所有知识建立在该基本原则之上--纯粹通过人的思维获得并加以证明。另一方面，经验主义者宣称，人的意识像一张白纸或白板，等待着经验世界的书写。
康德的天才之处在于，他发现了一条综合这两种对立观点的途径。他最初的洞见来自于提出了这样一个问题：“什么是获得任何经验的必要先决条件？”他认为，为了使人们可以理解这个世界，人的意识必须给从外界获得且不断变化的感觉资料加上某种结构。康德试图用他称之为范畴的12个基本判断的术语（实在性、原因与结果、交互作用、必然性、可能性、存在性、全体性、单一性、复多性、限制性、实体和否定性）去对感觉资料做出规定，这些范畴仅适用于一套空间和时间的体系当中。因此康德断言，范畴以及时间和空间（他称为直觉形式）通过人的意识加在现象性经验之上，以便理解这些经验。康德对自己的这套理论非常满意，并称它为“哥白尼式的革命”。像哥白尼的学说将太阳绕地运行的观念完全颠倒过来一样，康德通过宣称人的意识在经验之上附加原则而产生知识的主张，解决了人的意识如何从经验中获得知识的问题。这种观点后来对20世纪出现的现象学和格式塔心理学产生了巨大的影响。
正如康德在他的第一本批判中提出思维律那样，于是在第二部批判里，他宣称发现了他称之为“定言命令”（the categorical imperative也译作“绝对律令”）的一个普遍的道德律。对于该定律，他给出了几条简短陈述，第一条是“要只按照你同时能够愿意它成为一个普遍法则的那个准则去行动”。本质上讲，这个定言命令就是我们所熟知的一种道德规劝的表现：“如果人人都那样做结果会怎样？”康德意识到这一点，并认为有些道德规则在理性上是无法被推翻的。假设有一个代理人正打算违约，那么他只要想想康德的定言律令“我是否希望违约的行为成为一个普遍法则？”就会停下了。根据康德的看法，答案是不希望，因为只有以守约的人为背景来思考，许诺的行为才是有意义的。因此一个人不能在理性上坚持认为每个人都应当毁约，因此正如康德所言，我们应当像理性生物那样遵守约定。
康德认为这种推理应当被应用在很多我们所最珍视的道德命令上，并且认为任何理性生物都必须服从这些命令。直到今天，康德关于道德责任的理论的版本（通常被称为义务论）仍然受到了哲学家们的广泛支持和拥护。
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