{"id":39926,"date":"2011-04-22T00:37:00","date_gmt":"2011-04-22T08:37:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/?p=11134"},"modified":"2011-04-22T00:37:00","modified_gmt":"2011-04-22T08:37:00","slug":"a-problem-of-knowledge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/2011\/04\/22\/a-problem-of-knowledge\/","title":{"rendered":"A problem of knowledge"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"imgcapleft\"><a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/files\/2011\/04\/200px-Immanuel_Kant_painted_portrait.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-11135\" title=\"200px-Immanuel_Kant_(painted_portrait)\" src=\"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/files\/2011\/04\/200px-Immanuel_Kant_painted_portrait.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"128\" height=\"162\" \/><\/a><br \/>\n<em>A boring man<\/em><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Immanuel_Kant\">Immanuel Kant<\/a> is famous. You&#8217;ve probably heard of him. And you know some of his ideas, such as the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Categorical_imperative\">categorical imperative<\/a>, or have at some point started the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/exec\/obidos\/ASIN\/0521657296\/geneexpressio-20\">Critique of Pure Reason<\/a> (if you&#8217;re like me, you never finish it). But what do you know about his biography?  I may not be able to complete a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/exec\/obidos\/ASIN\/0521657296\/geneexpressio-20\">Critique of Pure Reason<\/a>, but  I did read Manfred Kuehn&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/exec\/obidos\/ASIN\/0521524067\/geneexpressio-20\">Kant: A Biography<\/a> in the winter of 2002. From that I learned one surprising fact: <strong>Immanuel Kant in his personal beliefs was <em>not<\/em> an orthodox Christian, if he had religious sentiment at all.<\/strong> This surprised me because I had read elsewhere in passing that Kant was a Pietistic Lutheran. Ultimately whether Kant was religious or not was not a major issue for me, but I did update my personal factual database.<\/p>\n<p>Fast forward six years to 2008. I was at a party kicking back with some philosophers (as in, people completing their doctorates), and it came up that one of them was doing their dissertation on some of Kant&#8217;s ideas. This individual happened to &#8230;<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~r\/GeneExpressionBlog\/~4\/NOynvc9zUBI\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\"\/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A boring man<br \/>\nImmanuel Kant is famous. You&#8217;ve probably heard of him. And you know some of his ideas, such as the categorical imperative, or have at some point started the Critique of Pure Reason (if you&#8217;re like me, you never finish it). But&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1275,152],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-39926","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-immanuel-kant","category-philosophy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39926","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39926"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39926\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40074,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39926\/revisions\/40074"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39926"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39926"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39926"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}