Understanding and experience

We have seen that the tasks of fostering open public discourse and furthering autonomy are central to Kant’s critical philosophy from its initial formulations. The multi-sided interface of epistemology, ethics, and politics we have discerned in Kant’s work provides the framework for a more detailed explication of the first Critique. For the purposes of this project, questions of knowledge and the status of supersensible ideas are approached mainly in relation to an inquiry into religion and its ethical-political significance. Hence my treatment is selective and governed by specific aims. I will minimize many of the technical issues in Kant’s epistemological model as I mainly aim at setting the groundwork for his project of rethinking metaphysics and religion.