The Compromise of Kant

Every so often--most often in a longer period of time than a shorter one--you encounter a figure who has the capacity to bring together certain parties who are bickering and, at the very least, give them both a sound walloping on their flaws. At best, they can render some kind of reconciliation, but that can be a rare thing indeed when physical war isn't involved.
In the "war" between rationalist and empiricist empistemological camps, one such figure is Immanuel Kant. A rather innovative character with quite an interesting name, Kant formulated his own compromise between some of the concepts of rationalism and empiricism, synthesizing a theory that tied together a number of ideas from both areas. In doing so, he took the risk of being forever labeled as a troublemaker in the land of the debating philosophers for making his own postulations out of two "opposing" sets, but as you may have gathered, his name isn't mud to this day. Let's take a look at some reasonings of this bold figure.

His first issue was to decide that age-old fight between the concept of the "blank slate" mind proposed by the empiricists and the innate ideas imbued into the self by the rationalists. It seemed odd to Kant that newborns would have absolutely nothing in their minds at birth--what would they do with all that sense data that they hadn't had to deal with before? A blank slate holds no logic--how would an empty receptacle process anything? Yet innate ideas also were preposterous to Kant. I imagine it seemed highly illogical that people would somehow know everything, but not know that they knew it. And if that was the case, why on Earth would anyone ever misunderstand anything? If you already knew it, wouldn't it resonate improperly with that correct memory deep in your psyche? And so he proposed the new concept of "innate structures" to help fuse these two ideas into something workable. Kant's innate structures were putatively present in the mind even at birth, and enabled a processing framework for the immense amount of sense data confronting the young human mind at birth (and indeed, throughout life). While the little one didn't "know" any given thing, it knew what to do with the data it received, enabling it to make sense of the senses (please pardon the bad pun).

Kant is discussed only briefly in this chapter following this important synthesis. Yet a "famous dictum" of his that proves rather interesting is included: "Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind." In saying this, he addressed the major thought-experience battle regarding the reasoning of ideas to understand reality. He was saying that rationalists, believing ultimate truths to be found in ideas, would never get anywhere by thinking grand thoughts that had nothing to do with the reality they were living in. Regardless of what one thinks about it, reality, illusion or not, is here to be observed (among other things),
Yet empiricists got a nice drubbing as well--he lashed them for only believing what they see and have experienced, but not really thinking through and about things to gain insight. Empiricists needed to stop and think about their memories to learn what they were seeking; merely observing wouldn't get them anywhere.

Kant's philosophies (at least as listed in this chapter) resonate nicely with what I personally believe. It will be interesting to see how they match up with the remainder of mine as the quarter unfolds and we learn more about him.