The Relevance of Kant’s Transcendental Idealism to Advaita Vedanta, Part III

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The Critique of Pure Reason is a long and intricate text. Most of what I discussed in Parts I and II is material covered just in the Introduction! In this final installment of our Kant series, we’ll briefly discuss the first formal section of the CPR, the Transcendental Aesthetic, where Kant elucidates his radical view of space and time. Also, from a later section of the critique, we will examine Kant’s notion of the transcendental synthetic unity of apperception, and I will argue that he is essentially talking about Atman in Western philosophical terms. Continue reading

The Relevance of Kant’s Transcendental Idealism to Advaita Vedanta, Part II

266px-Immanuel_Kant_(portrait)In Part I of this three-part series, I introduced Kant’s work and summarized his views on a priori and a posteriori knowledge. In this second part, we’ll review analytic versus synthetic judgments, clarify the meaning of transcendental idealism as it applies to Kant’s work in general, and also analyze tat tvam asi in terms of Kant’s philosophy.

Analytic and Synthetic Judgments

Kant’s investigation of the faculties of reason led him to explore the nature of judgments. He made clear the crucial difference between analytic and synthetic judgments. Kant’s jargon can become admittedly arcane, but analytic and synthetic are not hard to understand. Continue reading