The human mind is divided into three faculties according to Kant: Between the faculty of cognition and the desiring faculty there is our faculty of feeling pleasure and displeasure. What this is all about is a central, though maybe also the most difficult question of anthropology for Kant. And he describes three kinds of pleasure, for between the animalistic sense pleasure in the pleasant and the spiritual intellectual pleasure in the good, he describes a specific aesthetical pleasure in the beautiful and sublime. To examine this pleasure is his goal in the Critique of the Power of Judgment.

In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant asks the question what pure, i. e. free from any experience, reason can do. He shows: It is not constitutive for our cognition. That means: It cannot bring forth its own cognitions or open for us a new realm of cognition. When it tries to grasp the supersensual, when in pure metaphysics it asks about the immortality of the soul, about freedom, about God, then it becomes dialectical, i. e. it only creates illusions. Only the intellect is constitutive for our cognition, not for the cognition of the supersensual, but for the cognition of the sensual, for its elementary concepts, the twelve categories, are conditions of the possibility of experience, all of nature must function according to them. Reason and its ideas aren't useless or chimerical because of that however, they according to Kant have a regulative function: They serve as a touchstone for that which is and also as an example for the creation of something new. The principles of reason may not tell us, how the world of experience is made up, but they guide is in finding it out and grasping that world.

Part of 18th century metaphysics was the field of rational theology. Unlike in revelation theology, here ones doesn't start from a revelation like the Bible, rather one tries to understand God through mere reason, including trying to prove him through it. Kant however shows in the Critique of Pure Reason that human reason in this field, as in others, is dialectical: It creates illusory proofs by which it persuades itself, which however don't hold up under critical scrutiny. Knt concludes: The thought of a most real being of beings may be a necessary ideal of our reason, but it cannot be proven that this thing has any reality outside of our thinking.

According to Kant it is the most remarkable phenomenon of human reason, that in rational cosmology, that field of metaphysics which is dealing

Metaphysics, the science of the supersensual, has rational psychology as one of its fields according to Kant, a science which tries to understand our sole through mere reason. But in this field reason is dialectical, which means that it creates a certain illusion of truth: It brings forth four paralogisms, vier wrong arguments, according to which our soul is an immortal spirit. No matter however how much these arguments are grounded in the very nature of our reason and how true they seem to be, they still are false and the dissolving of this dialectic is a core concern of the Critique of Pure Reason.

Human reason is dialectical according to Kant, i. e. by its very nature it gets tangled up in contradictions and illusionary proofs in a certain field - that is, when it transcends the sensual world and tries to do metaphysics, so when it seeks cognitions of the soul, the world as a whole or God. This dialectic of reason was what first awoke Kant and made him realize the errors of previous metaphysics. To explain and also lift it is his main goal in the Critique of Pure Reason, the rest is in a way just its preparation.

The highest of the three human thinking faculties is reason, according to Kant. With its desire for complete unity and conclusion in thinking, it is what characterizes man und makes him rise above everyday concerns to scientific thinking. With it is also reason, with its ideas, which elevates us fully above the sensual world and lets us strive for the supersensual. Whether this desire can be fulfilled and the ideas of reason can have reality, that is the central question which Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason examines.

The proper philosophy is metaphysics to Kant, and it in turn deals mainly with the three ideas of reason of God, freedom and immortality of the soul according to him. If any cognition was possible of these three objects, it could only happen by synthetic judgments a priori, that is

The power of judgment is the second of the three faculties of thinking examined by Kant. It has a central function, because it connects the intellect and reason, thinking and sensuality, the general and the particular with each other. It is also specifically their own judgment,

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In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant presents a table of the categories of our intellect, according to which all thinking is happening. These categories have an important function in Kant’s epistemology. But their significance goes far beyond that: As elementary concepts of our thinking they form the basis of all possible thoughts. Therefore they are also the key to the architectonic of Kant’s system: Again and again Kant distinguishes his concepts according to these twelve categories, sometimes explicitly, sometimes without telling the reader. For that reason the inner composition of Kant’s system cannot possibly be understood without the table of categories. How Kant gets to these twelve categories specifically and also how he always thinks in these categories, is the topic of this lecture.

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