1 Liberal Humanism and the European Critical Tradition

The birth of the modern European critical tradition can be traced back to the Enlightenment and in particular the philosopher Immanuel Kant’s (1724-1804) critique of reason. Kant’s revision of the liberal humanist tradition replaced metaphysics (speculation about external reality) with critique. For Kant, critique consisted of tracing the origins of experience back to the faculties of the mind. Stated simply, before Kant, science described the world passively, but after Kant, science was seen to write onto the world what human categories imposed upon it. For Kantians, science no longer extracted knowledge from the proverbial thing-in-itself (which remains fundamentally unknowable): rather science produced knowledge of the phenomena of the world. Kant’s analysis of the human mind attempted to understand cognitive faculties in order to determine the proper usages and limits of reason; hence his critique of pure reason was boundary setting. His work built a structured architecture of the mind in order to address three important questions: What can I know? How can we act morally? What can I hope for? Broadly speaking, Kant divided the mind into three components or faculties. First, the faculty of sensibility organizes the raw and chaotic manifold of sens