An Introduction to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason

Immanuel Kant is an 18th century philosopher, belonging to the era of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment is an intellectual epoch where reason triumphed over faith. Kant is arguably one of the greatest intellectuals of all time, and his Critique of Pure Reason is considered his magnum opus. It was published when he was 57, so he had a whole lifetime to meditate upon the nature of reason. So don’t expect the book to be an easy read. It is precisely for this reason that an introduction to it can be helpful, to understand what his project is about and its broad strokes.

Kant wrote Critique to enquire into the nature of reason, laying the path for that by first examining how we perceive and understand things.

Counterfactual Conditionals: Regrets, the Future and Decision-Making

One might think that philosophy dwells on what is not relevant to life, especially in areas such as logic which can seem so abstract and hence divorced from reality. Arthur Schopenhauer acknowledges this when he writes: “To seek to make practical use of logic would … mean to seek to derive with unspeakable trouble from universal rules what is immediately known to us with the greatest certainty in the particular case. It is just as if a man were to consult mechanics with regard to his movements.”[1] Lest you misunderstand, Schopenhauer does think logic is of great theoretical importance, it just isn’t practically useful. Nonetheless, I want to talk about an application of the concept of counterfactual conditionals to real life, to illuminate what might not really be so obvious.