“Critique of Pure Reason” by I. Kant: Sources of Historical Influence and Features of Discourse

The article presents the experience of methodological and cultural-historical reconstruction of one of the main works of I. Kant “Critique of Pure Reason”. The author outlines the problems associated with difficulties in understanding this work: what is the general idea of “Critique of Pure Reason”, how to understand reason, different sources of knowledge, things in themselves, and finally, a combination of rational and sacred arguments. The author shows that Kant relies on the pictures of reality of Aristotle and Nicholas of Cusa, rethinking them, and also analyzes the works of Galileo, which made it possible to make a conviction in the priority of a priori ideas. A hypothesis is formulated about how Kant understood the mind: culturally, following the Enlightenment. The main strategies of thought are outlined, with the help of which Kant creates “Critique of Pure Reason”, while his ideas are compared with the views of Aristotle and Nicholas of Cusa. These include: rethinking transcendental ideas (not similarities and mathematics like those of Nicholas of Cusa), but thinking through the conditions of conceivability, reflection of the foundations of knowledge (this is the critique of reason); the introduction of schematisms of thinking, as explaining the connection between a priori ideas and intuitions; a special interpretation of mind and reason, allowing them to include rules, categories and ideas; projection of the rethought ways of thinking of philosophers onto the mind (for example, Kant transfers to the mind the ability to build a system of scientific knowledge, which he borrowed from E.B. de Condillac); elucidation of the conditions of conceivability, they allowed Kant to find the mind as a whole and to find out the condition of contemplation and action of the mind (according to Kant, these are “self-consciousness” or the idea of the “synthetic unity of apperception”).