ABSTRACT
Kant began his career as what people would now call a “natural scientist” – the name in his day would have been “natural philosopher”. Kant became a philosopher in our sense of the word only when he began to reflect critically on the metaphysical and epistemological foundations of these natural sciences and their relation to the dominant Wolffian philosophy of the time. Kant sees himself as distinguished from his modern predecessors in holding that people have two distinct cognitive faculties – sensibility and understanding – that must work together to provide any genuine cognition. Kant also holds that practical reason commits people to certain kinds of assent regarding matters that transcend the capacities of theoretical reason. The uniqueness of humanity among animal species has the consequence for Kant that it makes the empirical study of human beings different from that of other animals, and the rest of nature.
