Eastern and Western Philosophers

Eastern and Western Philosophers Comparison Paper

The Western philosopher that makes the most compelling case for his ideas is Immanuel Kant, who lived in Germany from 1724 to 1804 A.D.. Kant created a case for the existence of external objects that approached the ideas in a much different fashion than his predecessors in the field of philosophy. Kant began by approaching external objects from the view that they are a stream of unified sensations that is conceptualized by the mind as the experience of external objects, which has come to be known as a transcendental argument. " According to this idea, the fundamental properties or characteristics of objects in the world outside the mind are due to our minds, not to the objects themselves"(Moore-Bruder 2008, page 147) .

Kant's theory is that sense data is processed by the mind in such a way that it allows us to experience external objects in the way that we do, which is why Kant's theory allows us to be sure of many of the things that we are sure of, such as the experience of external objects, because our minds impose the experience upon them. This is also very similar to Plato's theory of Forms, as in Kant's theory, the form of the external object is as conceptualized by the mind in a unified connected consciousness, and for Plato's Forms, they are the origin of external objects through the interaction of the mind.

Kant put forth in his thesis that experienced objects must be of a unified nature, and must conform to spatial and temporal shaping, thus sensory experience of external objects are organized and experienced in space and time, and also conforms to causal affects and other relationships. This is how Kant's theory shows that we will never experience uncaused change. This is done by assuming that the mind imposes causation upon experienced change. An experienced change must be subject to causation.

" Kant’s epistemology limits legitimate metaphysical reasoning to this...