PHIL250 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Categorical Imperative, A Priori And A Posteriori, Deontological Ethics

• School: University of Alberta
• Department: Philosophy at St Joseph's College
• Course: PHIL250
• Professor: Charles Rodger

Document Summary

Material philosophy- has to do with things so its ethics and physics (empirical account of philosophy) physics deals with laws of nature, ethics deals with what we ought to do. Kant suggests there must be an a priori part of ethics and physics which is where metaphysics comes in. Metaphysics means literally that which is beyond physics but there is also metaphysics that applies to ethics (theoretical knowledge). This is kant"s essential problem when he opens the critique of pure reason, his first major book. On one hand you have dogmatises, they go out and assert things and present elaborate systems that are beyond possible experience so that can"t be tested. If there is, then there must be something before that, and something before that, and so on. So you end up with this infinite regress. It seems that we don"t have knowledge of these things at all.