Kant separated how we think from how we act morally
Immanuel Kant's groundbreaking distinction between pure reason, for understanding the world, and practical reason, for moral action, fundamentally reshaped Western philosophy and our view of human autonomy.
Immanuel Kant, an 18th-century German philosopher, famously divided human reason into two distinct parts. Pure reason, explored in his 1781 work, deals with theoretical knowledge and what we can truly know about the world through our senses and understanding. He argued we can only grasp phenomena, the world as it appears to us, not the 'things-in-themselves.'
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