Kant, Immanuel (1724–1804)

Kant's Philosophy of Time and Space

Essentially, Kant tried to resolve the debate between British empiricists and Continental rationalists. He was deeply affected by the works of David Hume, which he read for 11 years, and he accepted that true knowledge began with the senses, a position held by the empiricists; however, he departed from Hume in arguing that the mind is predisposed to a rational organization of sense data. Thus, he maintained that humans never experience things in and of themselves (noumena) but only perceive sense impressions of them (phenomena); we can know nothing about noumena and lots about phenomena. Since we only know a small part of the world at large, the domain of noumena must always greatly exceed that of phenomena.

In a sense, Kant was one of the first philosophers to problematize the matter of perception. He held the view that the world has no preexisting given order (thus breaking from Aristotle) but is instead constructed by the rational mind—a position that aligned him with rationalists such as Descartes. Thus, instead of the mind revolving around the world, Kant viewed the world as revolving around the mind. Most important for geographers, he asserted that both time and space are categories created by the mind to make sense of nature: Time and space are not phenomena themselves but only ways to organize observable phenomena and impose order, logic, and meaning on the senses. In his most famous work The Critique of Pure Reason, published in 1781, Kant argued that reason and rationality are functions of a detached, disembodied observer, akin to Descartes's cogito. In this reading, nature is an external reality, mind is an internal reality, and knowledge is the means of overcoming this dichotomy.

Kant's epistemology differentiated between metaphysics on the one hand and the theoretical and empirical sciences on the other. He defined metaphysics as the analysis of a priori knowledge, including ethics and theology. Although Kant was personally religious, his emphasis on rationality was an important step in the secularization of science. The theoretical (or what he called “exact”) sciences included disciplines such as physics and chemistry, which deploy deductive logic to decipher the universal laws of nature independent of time and space. The empirical (or what he called [Page 1648]“rough”) sciences, in contrast, were concerned with finding patterns and order in the welter of observable phenomena embedded in time and space; whereas deductive sciences were concerned with similarities among observations, the empirical ones were focused on finding the differences among them. The empirical sciences were essentially those concerned with time and place—that is, history and geography, respectively, which Kant put on a par in terms of their significance (i.e., the geographic location is as important as the historical context). The widespread privileging of time over space occurred much later, during the rise of 19th-century neo-Kantian historicism. Essentially, Kant argued that history and geography were concerned with understanding unique events. He further asserted that all causality was inherently a function of phenomena being located close in time and proximate in space, a primitive sort of Tobler's First Law, which asserts that everything is related to everything else but near things are more related than distant things.

...