• His approach to knowledge combined elements from both rationalism and empiricism; He said all of our knowledge of the outside world comes to us via our senses but the mind also contributes to our knowledge of reality. The mind processes the data

• We do not know reality as it is in itself

• Made a distinction between phenomena and noumena

• Rejected all metaphysical knowledge (Kant bifurcated knowledge and put God in the upper story)

• Rejected all metaphysical arguments for the existence of God, including the ontological, cosmological, and teleological arguments

• Made a distinction between analytic and synthetic propositions

• Applied the “categorical imperative”—“Act only on the maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law” (moral oughtness)

• The notions of God, freedom, and immortality were regulative principles; though indemonstrable they gave coherence to ethical thought and behavior

• Grounded theology in morality instead of morality in theology

• Christianity was a way of teaching ethics for the philosophically unsophisticated

• Jesus was an enlightened moral teacher

• Said Hume awakened him from his dogmatic slumbers

• Held that enlightenment is man’s emergence from immaturity, man may think for himself without relying on some authority such as the Bible, church, or state