title: Critique of Pure Reason

text: This division, as the critique notes, comes "closer to the language and the sense of the ancients, among whom the division of cognition into αισθητα και νοητα is very well known." An exposition on a priori intuitions is an analysis of the intentional constitution of sensibility. Since this lies a priori in the mind prior to actual object relation; "The transcendental doctrine of the senses will have to belong to the first part of the science of elements, since the conditions under which alone the objects of human cognition are given precede those under which those objects are thought".


title: Critique of Pure Reason

text: Kant distinguishes between the matter and the form of appearances. The matter is "that in the appearance that corresponds to sensation" (A20/B34). The form is "that which so determines the manifold of appearance that it allows of being ordered in certain relations" (A20/B34). Kant's revolutionary claim is that the form of appearances—which he later identifies as space and time—is a contribution made by the faculty of sensation to cognition, rather than something that exists independently of the mind. This is the thrust of Kant's doctrine of the transcendental ideality of space and time.


title: Critique of Pure Reason

text: Kant's arguments for this conclusion are widely debated among Kant scholars. Some see the argument as based on Kant's conclusions that our representation ("Vorstellung") of space and time is an "a priori" intuition. From here Kant is thought to argue that our representation of space and time as "a priori" intuitions entails that space and time are transcendentally ideal. It is undeniable from Kant's point of view that in Transcendental Philosophy, the difference of things as they appear and things as they are is a major philosophical discovery. Others see the argument as based upon the question of whether synthetic "a priori" judgments are possible. Kant is taken to argue that the only way synthetic "a priori" judgments, such as those made in geometry, are possible is if space is transcendentally ideal.


title: Critique of Pure Reason

text: In Section I (Of Space) of Transcendental Aesthetic in the "Critique of Pure Reason" Kant poses the following questions: What then are time and space? Are they real existences? Or, are they merely relations or determinations of things, such, however, as would equally belong to these things in themselves, though they should never become objects of intuition; or, are they such as belong only to the form of intuition, and consequently to the subjective constitution of the mind, without which these predicates of time and space could not be attached to any object? The answer that space and time are real existences belongs to Newton. The answer that space and time are relations or determinations of things even when they are not being sensed belongs to Leibniz. Both answers maintain that space and time exist independently of the subject's awareness. This is exactly what Kant denies in his answer that space and time belong to the subjective constitution of the mind.


title: Critique of Pure Reason

text: Kant gives two expositions of space and time: "metaphysical" and "transcendental". The metaphysical expositions of space and time are concerned with clarifying how those intuitions are known independently of experience. The transcendental expositions attempt to show how the metaphysical conclusions might be applied to enrich our understanding.


title: Critique of Pure Reason

text: In the transcendental exposition, Kant refers back to his metaphysical exposition in order to show that the sciences would be impossible if space and time were not kinds of pure "a priori" intuitions. He asks the reader to take the proposition, "two straight lines can neither contain any space nor, consequently, form a figure," and then to try to derive this proposition from the concepts of a straight line and the number two. He concludes that it is simply impossible (A47-48/B65). Thus, since this information cannot be obtained from analytic reasoning, it must be obtained through synthetic reasoning, i.e., a synthesis of concepts (in this case two and straightness) with the pure ("a priori") intuition of space.


title: Critique of Pure Reason

text: In this case, however, it was not experience that furnished the third term; otherwise, the necessary and universal character of geometry would be lost. Only space, which is a pure "a priori" form of intuition, can make this synthetic judgment, thus it must then be "a priori". If geometry does not serve this pure "a priori" intuition, it is empirical, and would be an experimental science, but geometry does not proceed by measurements—it proceeds by demonstrations.


title: Critique of Pure Reason

text: Kant rests his demonstration of the priority of space on the example of geometry. He reasons that therefore if something exists, it needs to be intelligible. If someone attacked this argument, he would doubt the universality of geometry (which Kant believes no honest person would do).


title: Critique of Pure Reason

text: The other part of the Transcendental Aesthetic argues that time is a pure "a priori" intuition that renders mathematics possible. Time is not a concept, since otherwise it would merely conform to formal logical analysis (and therefore, to the principle of non-contradiction). However, time makes it possible to deviate from the principle of non-contradiction: indeed, it is possible to say that A and non-A are in the same spatial location if one considers them in different times, and a sufficient alteration between states were to occur (A32/B48). Time and space cannot thus be regarded as existing in themselves. They are "a priori" forms of sensible intuition.


title: Critique of Pure Reason

text: The current interpretation of Kant states that the subject inherently possesses the underlying conditions to perceive spatial and temporal presentations. The Kantian thesis claims that in order for the subject to have any experience at all, then it must be bounded by these forms of presentations ("Vorstellung"). Some scholars have offered this position as an example of psychological nativism, as a rebuke to some aspects of classical empiricism.


title: Critique of Pure Reason

text: Kant's thesis concerning the transcendental ideality of space and time limits appearances to the forms of sensibility—indeed, they form the limits within which these appearances can count as sensible; and it necessarily implies that the thing-in-itself is neither limited by them nor can it take the form of an appearance within us apart from the bounds of sensibility (A48-49/B66). Yet the thing-in-itself is held by Kant to be the cause of that which appears, and this is where an apparent paradox of Kantian critique resides: while we are prohibited from absolute knowledge of the thing-in-itself, we can impute to it a cause beyond ourselves as a source of representations within us. Kant's view of space and time rejects both the space and time of Aristotelian physics and the space and time of Newtonian physics.


title: Critique of Pure Reason

text: In the Transcendental Logic, there is a section (titled The Refutation of Idealism) that is intended to free Kant's doctrine from any vestiges of subjective idealism, which would either doubt or deny the existence of external objects (B274-79). Kant's distinction between the appearance and the thing-in-itself is not intended to imply that nothing knowable exists apart from consciousness, as with subjective idealism. Rather, it declares that knowledge is limited to phenomena as objects of a sensible intuition. In the Fourth Paralogism ("... A Paralogism is a logical fallacy"), Kant further certifies his philosophy as separate from that of subjective idealism by defining his position as a "transcendental idealism" in accord with empirical realism (A366–80), a form of direct realism. "The Paralogisms of Pure Reason" is the only chapter of the "Dialectic" that Kant rewrote for the second edition of the "Critique of Pure Reason". In the first edition, the Fourth Paralogism offers a defence of transcendental idealism, which Kant reconsidered and relocated in the second edition.


title: Critique of Pure Reason

text: Whereas the Transcendental Aesthetic was concerned with the role of the sensibility, the Transcendental Logic is concerned with the role of the understanding, which Kant defines as the faculty of the mind that deals with concepts. Knowledge, Kant argued, contains two components: intuitions, through which an object is given to us in sensibility, and concepts, through which an object is thought in understanding. In the Transcendental Aesthetic, he attempted to show that the "a priori" forms of intuition were space and time, and that these forms were the conditions of all possible intuition. It should therefore be expected that we should find similar "a priori" concepts in the understanding, and that these pure concepts should be the conditions of all possible thought. The Logic is divided into two parts: the Transcendental Analytic and the Transcendental Dialectic. The Analytic Kant calls a "logic of truth"; in it he aims to discover these pure concepts which are the conditions of all thought, and are thus what makes knowledge possible. The Transcendental Dialectic Kant calls a "logic of illusion"; in it he aims to expose the illusions that we create when we attempt to apply reason beyond the limits of experience.


title: Critique of Pure Reason

text: The idea of a transcendental logic is that of a logic that gives an account of the origins of our knowledge as well as its relationship to objects. Kant contrasts this with the idea of a general logic, which abstracts from the conditions under which our knowledge is acquired, and from any relation that knowledge has to objects. According to Helge Svare, "It is important to keep in mind what Kant says here about logic in general, and transcendental logic in particular, being the product of abstraction, so that we are not misled when a few pages later he emphasizes the pure, non-empirical character of the transcendental concepts or the categories."


title: Critique of Pure Reason

text: Kant's investigations in the Transcendental Logic lead him to conclude that the understanding and reason can only legitimately be applied to things as they appear phenomenally to us in experience. What things are in themselves as being noumenal, independent of our cognition, remains limited by what is known through phenomenal experience.


title: Critique of Pure Reason

text: The Transcendental Analytic is divided into an Analytic of Concepts and an Analytic of Principles, as well as a third section concerned with the distinction between phenomena and noumena. In Chapter III (Of the ground of the division of all objects into phenomena and noumena) of the Transcendental Analytic, Kant generalizes the implications of the Analytic in regard to transcendent objects preparing the way for the explanation in the Transcendental Dialectic about thoughts of transcendent objects, Kant's detailed theory of the content ("Inhalt") and origin of our thoughts about specific transcendent objects. The main sections of the Analytic of Concepts are The Metaphysical Deduction and The Transcendental Deduction of the Categories. The main sections of the Analytic of Principles are the Schematism, Axioms of Intuition, Anticipations of Perception, Analogies of Experience, Postulates and follow the same recurring tabular form:


title: Critique of Pure Reason

text: In the Metaphysical Deduction, Kant aims to derive twelve pure concepts of the understanding (which he calls "categories") from the logical forms of judgment. In the following section, he will go on to argue that these categories are conditions of all thought in general. Kant arranges the forms of judgment in a "table of judgments", which he uses to guide the derivation of the "table of categories".


title: Critique of Pure Reason

text: The role of the understanding is to make judgments. In judgment, the understanding employs concepts which apply to the intuitions given to us in sensibility. Judgments can take different logical forms, with each form combining concepts in different ways. Kant claims that if we can identify all of the possible logical forms of judgment, this will serve as a "clue" to the discovery of the most basic and general concepts that are employed in making such judgments, and thus that are employed in all thought.


title: Critique of Pure Reason

text: Logicians prior to Kant had concerned themselves to classify the various possible logical forms of judgment. Kant, with only minor modifications, accepts and adopts their work as correct and complete, and lays out all the logical forms of judgment in a table, reduced under four heads:


title: Critique of Pure Reason

text: This Aristotelian method for classifying judgments is the basis for his own twelve corresponding concepts of the understanding. In deriving these concepts, he reasons roughly as follows. If we are to possess pure concepts of the understanding, they must relate to the logical forms of judgement. However, if these pure concepts are to be applied to intuition, they must have content. But the logical forms of judgement are by themselves abstract and contentless. Therefore, to determine the pure concepts of the understanding we must identify concepts which "both" correspond to the logical forms of judgement, "and" are able to play a role in organising intuition. Kant therefore attempts to extract from each of the logical forms of judgement a concept which relates to intuition. For example, corresponding to the logical form of "hypothetical" judgement ('If "p", then "q"'), there corresponds the category of causality ('If one event, then another'). Kant calls these pure concepts 'categories', echoing the Aristotelian notion of a category as a concept which is not derived from any more general concept. He follows a similar method for the other eleven categories, then represents them in the following table:


title: Critique of Pure Reason

text: These categories, then, are the fundamental, primary, or native concepts of the understanding. These flow from, or constitute the mechanism of understanding and its nature, and are inseparable from its activity. Therefore, for human thought, they are universal and necessary, or "a priori". As categories they are not contingent states or images of sensuous consciousness, and hence not to be thence derived. Similarly, they are not known to us independently of such consciousness or of sensible experience. On the one hand, they are exclusively involved in, and hence come to our knowledge exclusively through, the spontaneous activity of the understanding. This understanding is never active, however, until sensible data are furnished as material for it to act upon, and so it may truly be said that they become known to us "only on the occasion of sensible experience." For Kant, in opposition to Christian Wolff and Thomas Hobbes, the categories exist only in the mind.


title: Critique of Pure Reason

text: These categories are "pure" conceptions of the understanding, in as much as they are independent of all that is contingent in sense. They are not derived from what is called the "matter" of sense, or from particular, variable sensations. However, they are not independent of the universal and necessary form of sense. Again, Kant, in the "Transcendental Logic," is professedly engaged with the search for an answer to the second main question of the Critique, How is pure physical science, or sensible knowledge, possible? Kant, now, has said, and, with reference to the kind of knowledge mentioned in the foregoing question, has said truly, that "thoughts, without the content which perception supplies, are empty." This is not less true of "pure" thoughts, than of any others. The content which the pure conceptions, as categories of pure physical science or sensible knowledge, cannot derive from the matter of sense, they must and do derive from its pure form. And in this relation between the pure conceptions of the understanding and their pure content there is involved, as we shall see, the most intimate community of nature and origin between sense, on its formal side (space and time), and the understanding itself. For Kant, space and time are a priori intuitions. Out of a total of six arguments in favor of space as "a priori" intuition, Kant presents four of them in the Metaphysical Exposition of space: two argue for space "a priori" and two for space as intuition.


title: Critique of Pure Reason

text: In the Transcendental Deduction, Kant aims to show that the categories derived in the Metaphysical Deduction are conditions of all possible experience. He achieves this proof roughly by the following line of thought: all representations must have some common ground if they are to be the source of possible knowledge (because extracting knowledge from experience requires the ability to compare and contrast representations that may occur at different times or in different places). This ground of all experience is the self-consciousness of the experiencing subject, and the constitution of the subject is such that all thought is rule-governed in accordance with the categories. It follows that the categories feature as necessary components in any possible experience.


title: Critique of Pure Reason

text: In order for any concept to have meaning, it must be related to sense perception. The 12 categories, or "a priori" concepts, are related to phenomenal appearances through schemata. Each category has a schema. It is a connection through time between the category, which is an "a priori" concept of the understanding, and a phenomenal "a posteriori" appearance. These schemata are needed to link the pure category to sensed phenomenal appearances because the categories are, as Kant says, heterogeneous with sense intuition. Categories and sensed phenomena, however, do share one characteristic: time. Succession is the form of sense impressions and also of the Category of causality. Therefore, time can be said to be the schema of Categories or pure concepts of the understanding.


title: Critique of Pure Reason

text: In order to answer criticisms of the "Critique of Pure Reason" that Transcendental Idealism denied the reality of external objects, Kant added a section to the second edition (1787) titled "The Refutation of Idealism" that turns the "game" of idealism against itself by arguing that self-consciousness presupposes external objects. Defining self-consciousness as a determination of the self in time, Kant argues that all determinations of time presuppose something permanent in perception and that this permanence cannot be in the self, since it is only through the permanence that one's existence in time can itself be determined. This argument inverted the supposed priority of inner over outer experience that had dominated philosophies of mind and knowledge since René Descartes. In Book II, chapter II, section III of the Transcendental Analytic, right under "The Postulates of Empirical Thought", Kant adds his well-known "Widerlegung des Idealismus" (Refutation of Idealism) where he refutes both Descartes' problematic idealism and Berkeley's dogmatic idealism. According to Kant, in problematic idealism the existence of objects is doubtful or impossible to prove while in dogmatic idealism, the existence of space and therefore of spatial objects is impossible. In contradistinction, Kant holds that external objects may be directly perceived and that such experience is a necessary presupposition of self-consciousness.


title: Critique of Pure Reason

text: As an Appendix to the First Division of Transcendental Logic, Kant intends the "Amphiboly of the Conceptions of Reflection" to be a critique of Leibniz's metaphysics and a prelude to Transcendental Dialectic, the Second Division of Transcendental Logic. Kant introduces a whole set of new ideas called "concepts of reflection": identity/difference, agreement/opposition, inner/outer and matter/form. According to Kant, the categories do have but these concepts have no synthetic function in experience. These special concepts just help to make comparisons between concepts judging them either different or the same, compatible or incompatible. It is this particular action of making a judgement that Kant calls "logical reflection." As Kant states: "Through observation and analysis of appearances we penetrate to nature's inner recesses, and no one can say how far this knowledge may in time extend. But with all this knowledge, and even if the whole of nature were revealed to us, we should still never be able to answer those transcendental questions which go beyond nature. The reason of this is that it is not given to us to observe our own mind with any other intuition than that of inner sense; and that it is yet precisely in the mind that the secret of the source of our sensibility is located. The relation of sensibility to an object and what the transcendental ground of this [objective] unity may be, are matters undoubtedly so deeply concealed that we, who after all know even ourselves only through inner sense and therefore as appearance, can never be justified in treating sensibility as being a suitable instrument of investigation for discovering anything save always still other appearances eager as we yet are to explore their non-sensible cause." (A278/B334)


title: Critique of Pure Reason

text: Following the systematic treatment of a priori knowledge given in the transcendental analytic, the transcendental dialectic seeks to dissect dialectical illusions. Its task is effectively to expose the fraudulence of the non-empirical employment of the understanding. The Transcendental Dialectic shows how pure reason should not be used. According to Kant, the rational faculty is plagued with dialectic illusions as man attempts to know what can never be known.


title: Critique of Pure Reason

text: This longer but less dense section of the Critique is composed of five essential elements, including an Appendix, as follows: (a) Introduction (to Reason and the Transcendental Ideas), (b) Rational Psychology (the nature of the soul), (c) Rational Cosmology (the nature of the world), (d) Rational Theology (God), and (e) Appendix (on the constitutive and regulative uses of reason).


title: Critique of Pure Reason

text: In the introduction, Kant introduces a new faculty, human reason, positing that it is a unifying faculty that unifies the manifold of knowledge gained by the understanding. Another way of thinking of reason is to say that it searches for the 'unconditioned'; Kant had shown in the Second Analogy that every empirical event has a cause, and thus each event is conditioned by something antecedent to it, which itself has its own condition, and so forth. Reason seeks to find an intellectual resting place that may bring the series of empirical conditions to a close, to obtain knowledge of an 'absolute totality' of conditions, thus becoming unconditioned. All in all, Kant ascribes to reason the faculty to understand and at the same time criticize the illusions it is subject to.


title: Critique of Pure Reason

text: One of the ways that pure reason erroneously tries to operate beyond the limits of possible experience is when it thinks that there is an immortal Soul in every person. Its proofs, however, are paralogisms, or the results of false reasoning.


title: Critique of Pure Reason

text: Every one of my thoughts and judgments is based on the presupposition "I think." "I" is the subject and the thoughts are the predicates. Yet I should not confuse the ever-present "logical subject" of my every thought with a permanent, immortal, "real substance" (soul). The logical subject is a mere idea, not a real substance. Unlike Descartes who believes that the soul may be known directly through reason, Kant asserts that no such thing is possible. Descartes declares "cogito ergo sum" but Kant denies that any knowledge of "I" may be possible. "I" is only the background of the field of apperception and as such lacks the experience of direct intuition that would make self-knowledge possible. This implies that the self in itself could never be known. Like Hume, Kant rejects knowledge of the "I" as substance. For Kant, the "I" that is taken to be the soul is purely logical and involves no intuitions. The "I" is the result of the "a priori" consciousness continuum not of direct intuition "a posteriori". It is apperception as the principle of unity in the consciousness continuum that dictates the presence of "I" as a singular logical subject of all the representations of a single consciousness. Although "I" seems to refer to the same "I" all the time, it is not really a permanent feature but only the logical characteristic of a unified consciousness.


title: Critique of Pure Reason

text: The only use or advantage of asserting that the soul is simple is to differentiate it from matter and therefore prove that it is immortal, but the substratum of matter may also be simple. Since we know nothing of this substratum, both matter and soul may be fundamentally simple and therefore not different from each other. Then the soul may decay, as does matter. It makes no difference to say that the soul is simple and therefore immortal. Such a simple nature can never be known through experience. It has no objective validity. According to Descartes, the soul is indivisible. This paralogism mistakes the unity of apperception for the unity of an indivisible substance called the soul. It is a mistake that is the result of the first paralogism. It is impossible that thinking ("Denken") could be composite for if the thought by a single consciousness were to be distributed piecemeal among different consciousnesses, the thought would be lost. According to Kant, the most important part of this proposition is that a multi-faceted presentation requires a single subject. This paralogism misinterprets the metaphysical oneness of the subject by interpreting the unity of apperception as being indivisible and the soul simple as a result. According to Kant, the simplicity of the soul as Descartes believed cannot be inferred from the "I think" as it is assumed to be there in the first place. Therefore, it is a tautology.


title: Critique of Pure Reason

text: In order to have coherent thoughts, I must have an "I" that is not changing and that thinks the changing thoughts. Yet we cannot prove that there is a permanent soul or an undying "I" that constitutes my person. I only know that I am one person during the time that I am conscious. As a subject who observes my own experiences, I attribute a certain identity to myself, but, to another observing subject, I am an object of his experience. He may attribute a different persisting identity to me. In the third paralogism, the "I" is a self-conscious person in a time continuum, which is the same as saying that personal identity is the result of an immaterial soul. The third paralogism mistakes the "I", as unit of apperception being the same all the time, with the everlasting soul. According to Kant, the thought of "I" accompanies every personal thought and it is this that gives the illusion of a permanent I. However, the permanence of "I" in the unity of apperception is not the permanence of substance. For Kant, permanence is a schema, the conceptual means of bringing intuitions under a category. The paralogism confuses the permanence of an object seen from without with the permanence of the "I" in a unity of apperception seen from within. From the oneness of the apperceptive "I" nothing may be deduced. The "I" itself shall always remain unknown. The only ground for knowledge is the intuition, the basis of sense experience.


title: Critique of Pure Reason

text: The soul is not separate from the world. They exist for us only in relation to each other. Whatever we know about the external world is only a direct, immediate, internal experience. The world appears, in the way that it appears, as a mental phenomenon. We cannot know the world as a thing-in-itself, that is, other than as an appearance within us. To think about the world as being totally separate from the soul is to think that a mere phenomenal appearance has independent existence outside of us. If we try to know an object as being other than an appearance, it can only be known as a phenomenal appearance, never otherwise. We cannot know a separate, thinking, non-material soul or a separate, non-thinking, material world because we cannot know things, as to what they may be by themselves, beyond being objects of our senses. The fourth paralogism is passed over lightly or not treated at all by commentators. In the first edition of the "Critique of Pure Reason", the fourth paralogism is addressed to refuting the thesis that there is no certainty of the existence of the external world. In the second edition of the "Critique of Pure Reason", the task at hand becomes the Refutation of Idealism. Sometimes, the fourth paralogism is taken as one of the most awkward of Kant's invented tetrads. Nevertheless, in the fourth paralogism, there is a great deal of philosophizing about the self that goes beyond the mere refutation of idealism. In both editions, Kant is trying to refute the same argument for the non-identity of mind and body. In the first edition, Kant refutes the Cartesian doctrine that there is direct knowledge of inner states only and that knowledge of the external world is exclusively by inference. Kant claims mysticism is one of the characteristics of Platonism, the main source of dogmatic idealism. Kant explains skeptical idealism by developing a syllogism called "The Fourth Paralogism of the Ideality of Outer Relation:"


title: Critique of Pure Reason

text: It is questionable that the fourth paralogism should appear in a chapter on the soul. What Kant implies about Descartes' argument in favor of the immaterial soul is that the argument rests upon a mistake on the nature of objective judgement not on any misconceptions about the soul. The attack is mislocated.


title: Critique of Pure Reason

text: These Paralogisms cannot be proven for speculative reason and therefore can give no certain knowledge about the Soul. However, they can be retained as a guide to human behavior. In this way, they are necessary and sufficient for practical purposes. In order for humans to behave properly, they can suppose that the soul is an imperishable substance, it is indestructibly simple, it stays the same forever, and it is separate from the decaying material world. On the other hand, anti-rationalist critics of Kant's ethics consider it too abstract, alienating, altruistic or detached from human concern to actually be able to guide human behavior. It is then that the "Critique of Pure Reason" offers the best defense, demonstrating that in human concern and behavior, the influence of rationality is preponderant.


title: Critique of Pure Reason

text: Kant presents the four antinomies of reason in the "Critique of Pure Reason" as going beyond the rational intention of reaching a conclusion. For Kant, an antinomy is a pair of faultless arguments in favor of opposite conclusions. Historically, Leibniz and Samuel Clarke (Newton's spokesman) had just recently engaged in a titanic debate of unprecedented repercussions. Kant's formulation of the arguments was affected accordingly.


title: Critique of Pure Reason

text: The Ideas of Rational Cosmology are dialectical. They result in four kinds of opposing assertions, each of which is logically valid. The antinomy, with its resolution, is as follows:


title: Critique of Pure Reason

text: According to Kant, rationalism came to fruition by defending the thesis of each antinomy while empiricism evolved into new developments by working to better the arguments in favor of each antithesis.


title: Critique of Pure Reason

text: Pure reason mistakenly goes beyond its relation to possible experience when it concludes that there is a Being who is the most real thing ("ens realissimum") conceivable. This "ens realissimum" is the philosophical origin of the idea of God. This personified object is postulated by Reason as the subject of all predicates, the sum total of all reality. Kant called this Supreme Being, or God, the Ideal of Pure Reason because it exists as the highest and most complete condition of the possibility of all objects, their original cause and their continual support.


title: Critique of Pure Reason

text: The ontological proof can be traced back to Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109). Anselm presented the proof in chapter II of a short treatise titled "Discourse on the existence of God." It was not Kant but the monk Gaunilo and later the Scholastic Thomas Aquinas who first challenged the success of the proof. Aquinas went on to provide his own proofs for the existence of God in what are known as the Five Ways.


title: Critique of Pure Reason

text: The ontological proof considers the concept of the most real Being ("ens realissimum") and concludes that it is necessary.


title: Critique of Pure Reason

text: The ontological argument states that God exists because he is perfect. If he didn't exist, he would be less than perfect. Existence is assumed to be a predicate or attribute of the subject, God, but Kant asserted that existence is not a predicate. Existence or Being is merely the infinitive of the copula or linking, connecting verb "is" in a declarative sentence. It connects the subject to a predicate. "Existence is evidently not a real predicate ... The small word "is", is not an additional predicate, but only serves to put the predicate "in relation" to the subject." (A599) Also, we cannot accept a mere concept or mental idea as being a real, external thing or object. The Ontological Argument starts with a mere mental concept of a perfect God and tries to end with a real, existing God.


title: Critique of Pure Reason

text: The argument is essentially deductive in nature. Given a certain fact, it proceeds to infer another from it. The method pursued, then, is that of deducing the fact of God's being from the a priori idea of him. If man finds that the idea of God is necessarily involved in his self-consciousness, it is legitimate for him to proceed from this notion to the actual existence of the divine being. In other words, the idea of God necessarily includes existence. It may include it in several ways. One may argue, for instance, according to the method of Descartes, and say that the conception of God could have originated only with the divine being himself, therefore the idea possessed by us is based on the prior existence of God himself. Or we may allege that we have the idea that God is the most necessary of all beings—that is to say, he belongs to the class of realities; consequently it cannot but be a fact that he exists. This is held to be proof "per saltum". A leap takes place from the premise to the conclusion, and all intermediate steps are omitted.


title: Critique of Pure Reason

text: The implication is that premise and conclusion stand over against one another without any obvious, much less necessary, connection. A jump is made from thought to reality. Kant here objects that being or existence is not a mere attribute that may be added onto a subject, thereby increasing its qualitative content. The predicate, being, adds something to the subject that no mere quality can give. It informs us that the idea is not a mere conception, but is also an actually existing reality. Being, as Kant thinks, actually increases the concept itself in such a way as to transform it. You may attach as many attributes as you please to a concept; you do not thereby lift it out of the subjective sphere and render it actual. So you may pile attribute upon attribute on the conception of God, but at the end of the day you are not necessarily one step nearer his actual existence. So that when we say "God exists", we do not simply attach a new attribute to our conception; we do far more than this implies. We pass our bare concept from the sphere of inner subjectivity to that of actuality. This is the great vice of the Ontological argument. The idea of ten dollars is different from the fact only in reality. In the same way the conception of God is different from the fact of his existence only in reality. When, accordingly, the Ontological proof declares that the latter is involved in the former, it puts forward nothing more than a mere statement. No proof is forthcoming precisely where proof is most required. We are not in a position to say that the idea of God includes existence, because it is of the very nature of ideas not to include existence.


title: Critique of Pure Reason

text: Kant explains that, being, not being a predicate, could not characterize a thing. Logically, it is the copula of a judgment. In the proposition, "God is almighty", the copula "is" does not add a new predicate; it only unites a predicate to a subject. To take God with all its predicates and say that "God is" is equivalent to "God exists" or that "There is a God" is to jump to a conclusion as no new predicate is being attached to God. The content of both subject and predicate is one and the same. According to Kant then, existence is not really a predicate. Therefore, there is really no connection between the idea of God and God's appearance or disappearance. No statement about God whatsoever may establish God's existence. Kant makes a distinction between "in intellectus" (in mind) and "in re" (in reality or in fact) so that questions of being are "a priori" and questions of existence are resolved "a posteriori".


title: Critique of Pure Reason

text: The cosmological proof considers the concept of an absolutely necessary Being and concludes that it has the most reality. In this way, the cosmological proof is merely the converse of the ontological proof. Yet the cosmological proof purports to start from sense experience. It says, "If anything exists in the cosmos, then there must be an absolutely necessary Being. " It then claims, on Kant's interpretation, that there is only one concept of an absolutely necessary object. That is the concept of a Supreme Being who has maximum reality. Only such a supremely real being would be necessary and independently existent, but, according to Kant, this is the Ontological Proof again, which was asserted "a priori" without sense experience.


title: Critique of Pure Reason

text: Summarizing the cosmological argument further, it may be stated as follows: "Contingent things exist—at least I exist; and as they are not self-caused, nor capable of explanation as an infinite series, it is requisite to infer that a necessary being, on whom they depend, exists." Seeing that this being exists, he belongs to the realm of reality. Seeing that all things issue from him, he is the most necessary of beings, for only a being who is self-dependent, who possesses all the conditions of reality within himself, could be the origin of contingent things. And such a being is God.


title: Critique of Pure Reason

text: Kant argues that this proof is invalid for three chief reasons. First, it makes use of a category, namely, Cause. And, as has been already pointed out, it is not possible to apply this, or any other, category except to the matter given by sense under the general conditions of space and time. If, then, we employ it in relation to Deity, we try to force its application in a sphere where it is useless, and incapable of affording any information. Once more, we are in the now familiar difficulty of the paralogism of Rational Psychology or of the Antinomies. The category has meaning only when applied to phenomena. Yet God is a noumenon. Second, it mistakes an idea of absolute necessity—an idea that is nothing more than an ideal—for a synthesis of elements in the phenomenal world or world of experience. This necessity is not an object of knowledge, derived from sensation and set in shape by the operation of categories. It cannot be regarded as more than an inference. Yet the cosmological argument treats it as if it were an object of knowledge exactly on the same level as perception of any thing or object in the course of experience. Thirdly, according to Kant, it presupposes the Ontological argument, already proved false. It does this, because it proceeds from the conception of the necessity of a certain being to the fact of his existence. Yet it is possible to take this course only if idea and fact are convertible with one another, and it has just been proved that they are not so convertible.


title: Critique of Pure Reason

text: The physico-theological proof of God's existence is supposed to be based on "a posteriori" sensed experience of nature and not on mere " a priori" abstract concepts. It observes that the objects in the world have been intentionally arranged with great wisdom. The fitness of this arrangement could never have occurred randomly, without purpose. The world must have been caused by an intelligent power. The unity of the relation between all of the parts of the world leads us to infer that there is only one cause of everything. That one cause is a perfect, mighty, wise, and self-sufficient Being. This physico-theology does not, however, prove with certainty the existence of God. For this, we need something absolutely necessary that consequently has all-embracing reality, but this is the Cosmological Proof, which concludes that an all-encompassing real Being has absolutely necessary existence. All three proofs can be reduced to the Ontological Proof, which tried to make an objective reality out of a subjective concept.


title: Critique of Pure Reason

text: In abandoning any attempt to prove the existence of God, Kant declares the three proofs of rational theology known as the ontological, the cosmological and the physico-theological as quite untenable. However, it is important to realize that while Kant intended to refute various purported proofs of the "existence" of God, he also intended to demonstrate the impossibility of proving the "non-existence" of God. Far from advocating for a rejection of religious belief, Kant rather hoped to demonstrate the impossibility of attaining the sort of substantive metaphysical knowledge (either proof or disproof) about God, free will, or the soul that many previous philosophers had pursued.


title: Critique of Pure Reason

text: The second book in the "Critique", and by far the shorter of the two, attempts to lay out the formal conditions of the complete system of pure reason.


title: Critique of Pure Reason

text: In the Transcendental Dialectic, Kant showed how pure reason is improperly used when it is not related to experience. In the Method of Transcendentalism, he explained the proper use of pure reason.


title: Critique of Pure Reason

text: In section I, the discipline of pure reason in the sphere of dogmatism, of chapter I, the discipline of pure reason, of Part II, transcendental discipline of method, of the "Critique of Pure Reason", Kant enters into the most extensive discussion of the relationship between mathematical theory and philosophy.


title: Critique of Pure Reason

text: Discipline is the restraint, through caution and self-examination, that prevents philosophical pure reason from applying itself beyond the limits of possible sensual experience. Philosophy cannot possess dogmatic certainty. Philosophy, unlike mathematics, cannot have definitions, axioms or demonstrations. All philosophical concepts must be ultimately based on "a posteriori", experienced intuition. This is different from algebra and geometry, which use concepts that are derived from "a priori" intuitions, such as symbolic equations and spatial figures. Kant's basic intention in this section of the text is to describe why reason should not go beyond its already well-established limits. In section I, the discipline of pure reason in the sphere of dogmatism, Kant clearly explains why philosophy cannot do what mathematics can do in spite of their similarities. Kant also explains that when reason goes beyond its own limits, it becomes dogmatic. For Kant, the limits of reason lie in the field of experience as, after all, all knowledge depends on experience. According to Kant, a dogmatic statement would be a statement that reason accepts as true even though it goes beyond the bounds of experience.


title: Critique of Pure Reason

text: Restraint should be exercised in the polemical use of pure reason. Kant defined this polemical use as the defense against dogmatic negations. For example, if it is dogmatically affirmed that God exists or that the soul is immortal, a dogmatic negation could be made that God doesn't exist or that the soul is not immortal. Such dogmatic assertions can't be proved. The statements are not based on possible experience. In section II, the discipline of pure reason in polemics, Kant argues strongly against the polemical use of pure reason. The dogmatic use of reason would be the acceptance as true of a statement that goes beyond the bounds of reason while the polemic use of reason would be the defense of such statement against any attack that could be raised against it. For Kant, then, there cannot possibly be any polemic use of pure reason. Kant argues against the polemic use of pure reason and considers it improper on the grounds that opponents cannot engage in a rational dispute based on a question that goes beyond the bounds of experience.


title: Critique of Pure Reason

text: Kant claimed that adversaries should be freely allowed to speak reason. In return, they should be opposed through reason. Dialectical strife leads to an increase of reason's knowledge. Yet there should be no dogmatic polemical use of reason. The critique of pure reason is the tribunal for all of reason's disputes. It determines the rights of reason in general. We should be able to openly express our thoughts and doubts. This leads to improved insight. We should eliminate polemic in the form of opposed dogmatic assertions that cannot be related to possible experience.


title: Critique of Pure Reason

text: According to Kant, the censorship of reason is the examination and possible rebuke of reason. Such censorship leads to doubt and skepticism. After dogmatism produces opposing assertions, skepticism usually occurs. The doubts of skepticism awaken reason from its dogmatism and bring about an examination of reason's rights and limits. It is necessary to take the next step after dogmatism and skepticism. This is the step to criticism. By criticism, the limits of our knowledge are proved from principles, not from mere personal experience.


title: Critique of Pure Reason

text: If criticism of reason teaches us that we can't know anything unrelated to experience, can we have hypotheses, guesses, or opinions about such matters? We can only imagine a thing that would be a possible object of experience. The hypotheses of God or a soul cannot be dogmatically affirmed or denied, but we have a practical interest in their existence. It is therefore up to an opponent to prove that they don't exist. Such hypotheses can be used to expose the pretensions of dogmatism. Kant explicitly praises Hume on his critique of religion for being beyond the field of natural science. However, Kant goes so far and not further in praising Hume basically because of Hume's skepticism. If only Hume would be critical rather than skeptical, Kant would be all-praises. In concluding that there is no polemical use of pure reason, Kant also concludes there is no skeptical use of pure reason. In section II, the discipline of pure reason in polemics, in a special section, skepticism not a permanent state for human reason, Kant mentions Hume but denies the possibility that skepticism could possibly be the final end of reason or could possibly serve its best interests.


title: Critique of Pure Reason

text: Proofs of transcendental propositions about pure reason (God, soul, free will, causality, simplicity) must first prove whether the concept is valid. Reason should be moderated and not asked to perform beyond its power. The three rules of the proofs of pure reason are: (1) consider the legitimacy of your principles, (2) each proposition can have only one proof because it is based on one concept and its general object, and (3) only direct proofs can be used, never indirect proofs (e.g., a proposition is true because its opposite is false). By attempting to directly prove transcendental assertions, it will become clear that pure reason can gain no speculative knowledge and must restrict itself to practical, moral principles. The dogmatic use of reason is called into question by the skeptical use of reason but skepticism does not present a permanent state for human reason. Kant proposes instead a critique of pure reason by means of which the limitations of reason are clearly established and the field of knowledge is circumscribed by experience. According to the rationalists and skeptics, there are analytic judgments "a priori" and synthetic judgments "a posteriori". Analytic judgments "a posteriori" do not really exist. Added to all these rational judgments is Kant's great discovery of the synthetic judgment "a priori".


title: Critique of Pure Reason

text: The canon of pure reason is a discipline for the limitation of pure reason. The analytic part of logic in general is a canon for the understanding and reason in general. However, the Transcendental Analytic is a canon of the pure understanding for only the pure understanding is able to judge synthetically "a priori".


title: Critique of Pure Reason

text: The speculative propositions of God, immortal soul, and free will have no cognitive use but are valuable to our moral interest. In pure philosophy, reason is morally (practically) concerned with what ought to be done if the will is free, if there is a God, and if there is a future world. Yet, in its actual practical employment and use, reason is only concerned with the existence of God and a future life. Basically, the canon of pure reason deals with two questions: Is there a God? Is there a future life? These questions are translated by the canon of pure reason into two criteria: What ought I to do? and What may I hope for? yielding the postulates of God's own existence and a future life, or life in the future.


title: Critique of Pure Reason

text: The greatest advantage of the philosophy of pure reason is negative, the prevention of error. Yet moral reason can provide positive knowledge. There can't be a canon, or system of "a priori" principles, for the correct use of speculative reason. However, there can be a canon for the practical (moral) use of reason.


title: Critique of Pure Reason

text: Reason tells us that there is a God, the supreme good, who arranges a future life in a moral world. If not, moral laws would be idle fantasies. Our happiness in that intelligible world will exactly depend on how we have made ourselves worthy of being happy. The union of speculative and practical reason occurs when we see God's reason and purpose in nature's unity of design or general system of ends. The speculative extension of reason is severely limited in the transcendental dialectics of the "Critique of Pure Reason", which Kant would later fully explore in the "Critique of Practical Reason".


title: Critique of Pure Reason

text: In the transcendental use of reason, there can be neither opinion nor knowledge. Reason results in a strong belief in the unity of design and purpose in nature. This unity requires a wise God who provides a future life for the human soul. Such a strong belief rests on moral certainty, not logical certainty. Even if a person has no moral beliefs, the fear of God and a future life acts as a deterrent to evil acts, because no one can prove the non-existence of God and an afterlife. Does all of this philosophy merely lead to two articles of faith, namely, God and the immortal soul? With regard to these essential interests of human nature, the highest philosophy can achieve no more than the guidance, which belongs to the pure understanding. Some would even go so far as to interpret the Transcendental Analytic of the "Critique of Pure Reason" as a return to the Cartesian epistemological tradition and a search for truth through certainty.


title: Critique of Pure Reason

text: All knowledge from pure reason is architectonic in that it is a systematic unity. The entire system of metaphysic consists of: (1.) Ontology—objects in general; (2.) Rational Physiology—given objects; (3.) Rational cosmology—the whole world; (4.) Rational Theology—God. Metaphysic supports religion and curbs the extravagant use of reason beyond possible experience. The components of metaphysic are criticism, metaphysic of nature, and metaphysic of morals. These constitute philosophy in the genuine sense of the word. It uses science to gain wisdom. Metaphysic investigates reason, which is the foundation of science. Its censorship of reason promotes order and harmony in science and maintains metaphysic's main purpose, which is general happiness. In chapter III, the architectonic of pure reason, Kant defines metaphysics as the critique of pure reason in relation to pure "a priori" knowledge. Morals, analytics and dialectics for Kant constitute metaphysics, which is philosophy and the highest achievement of human reason.


title: Critique of Pure Reason

text: Kant writes that metaphysics began with the study of the belief in God and the nature of a future world, beyond this immediate world as we know it, in our common sense . It was concluded early that good conduct would result in happiness in another world as arranged by God. The object of rational knowledge was investigated by sensualists (Epicurus), and intellectualists (Plato). Sensualists claimed that only the objects of the senses are real. Intellectualists asserted that true objects are known only by the understanding mind. Aristotle and Locke thought that the pure concepts of reason are derived only from experience. Plato and Leibniz contended that they come from reason, not sense experience, which is illusory. Epicurus never speculated beyond the limits of experience. Locke, however, said that the existence of God and the immortality of the soul could be proven. Those who follow the naturalistic method of studying the problems of pure reason use their common, sound, or healthy reason, not scientific speculation. Others, who use the scientific method, are either dogmatists (Wolff]) or skeptics (Hume). In Kant's view, all of the above methods are faulty. The method of criticism remains as the path toward the completely satisfying answers to the metaphysical questions about God and the future life in another world.


title: Critique of Pure Reason

text: Kant distinguishes between two different fundamental "types of representation": intuitions and concepts:


title: Critique of Pure Reason

text: Kant borrowed the term "categories" from Aristotle, but with the concession that Aristotle's own categorizations were faulty. Aristotle's imperfection is apparent from his inclusion of "some modes of pure sensibility ("quando, ubi, situs, "also "prius, simul"), also an empirical concept ("motus"), none of which can belong to this genealogical register of the understanding."


title: Critique of Pure Reason

text: Kant's divisions, however, are guided by his search in the mind for what makes synthetic "a priori" judgments possible.


title: Critique of Pure Reason

text: The "Critique of Pure Reason" was the first of Kant's works to become famous. According to the philosopher Frederick C. Beiser, it helped to discredit rationalist metaphysics of the kind associated with Leibniz and Wolff which had appeared to provide "a priori" knowledge of the existence of God, although Beiser notes that this school of thought was already in decline by the time the "Critique of Pure Reason" was published. In his view, Kant's philosophy became successful in the early 1790s partly because Kant's doctrine of "practical faith" seemed to provide a justification for moral, religious, and political beliefs without an "a priori" knowledge of God. However, the "Critique of Pure Reason" received little attention when it was first published. Kant did not expect reviews from anyone qualified to appraise the work, and initially heard only complaints about its obscurity. The theologian and philosopher Johann Friedrich Schultz wrote that the public saw the work as "a sealed book" consisting in nothing but "hieroglyphics". The first review appeared in the "Zugaben zu den Göttinger gelehrte Anzeigen" in 1782. The review, which denied that there is any distinction between Kant's idealism and that of Berkeley, was anonymous and became notorious. Kant reformulated his views because of it, redefining his transcendental idealism in the "Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics" (1783) and the second edition of the "Critique of Pure Reason". The review was denounced by Kant, but defended by Kant's empiricist critics, and the resulting controversy drew attention to the "Critique of Pure Reason".


title: Critique of Pure Reason

text: Kant believed that the anonymous review was biased and deliberately misunderstood his views. He discussed it in an appendix of the "Prolegomena", accusing its author of failing to understand or even address the main issue addressed in the "Critique of Pure Reason", the possibility of synthetic a priori judgments, and insisting on the distinction between transcendental idealism and the idealism of Berkeley. In a letter to Kant, the philosopher Christian Garve admitted to having written the review, which he disowned due to editorial changes outside his control. Though Garve did not inform Kant of this, the changes were made by J. G. Feder. Following the controversy over Garve's review, there were no more reviews of the "Critique of Pure Reason" in 1782 except for a brief notice. The work received greater attention only in 1784, when Shultz's commentary was published and a review by the philosopher and historian of philosophy Dietrich Tiedemann was published in the "Hessische Beyträge zur Gelehrsamkeit und Kunst". Tiedemann attacked the possibility of the synthetic "a priori" and defended the possibility of metaphysics. He denied the synthetic status of mathematical judgments, maintaining that they can be shown to be analytic if the subject term is analyzed in full detail, and criticized Kant's theory of the "a priori" nature of space, asking how it was possible to distinguish one place from another when the parts of absolute space are identical in themselves. Kant issued a hostile reaction. He maintained that Tiedemann did not understand the problems facing the critical philosophy.


title: Critique of Pure Reason

text: Christian Gottlieb Selle, an empiricist critic of Kant influenced by Locke to whom Kant had sent one of the complimentary copies of the "Critique of Pure Reason", was disappointed by the work, considering it a reversion to rationalism and scholasticism, and began a polemical campaign against Kant, arguing against the possibility of all "a priori" knowledge. His writings received widespread attention and created controversy. Though Kant was unable to write a reply to Selle, he did engage in a public dispute with Feder, after learning of Feder's role in the review published in "Zugaben zu den Göttinger Gelehrten Anzeigen". In 1788, Feder published "Ueber Raum und Causalität: Zur Prüfung der kantischen Philosophie", a polemic against the "Critique of Pure Reason" in which he argued that Kant employed a "dogmatic method" and was still employing the methodology of rationalist metaphysics, and that Kant's transcendental philosophy transcends the limits of possible experience. Feder believed that Kant's fundamental error was his contempt for "empirical philosophy", which explains the faculty of knowledge according to the laws of nature. With Christian Meiners, he edited a journal, the "Philosophische Bibliothek", opposed to Kantianism.


title: Critique of Pure Reason

text: Feder's campaign against Kant was unsuccessful and the "Philosophische Bibliothek" ceased publication after only a few issues. Other critics of Kant continued to argue against the "Critique of Pure Reason", with Gottlob August Tittel, who was influenced by Locke, publishing several polemics against Kant, who, although worried by some of Tittel's criticisms, addressed him only in a footnote in the preface to the "Critique of Practical Reason". Tittel was one of the first to make criticisms of Kant, such as those concerning Kant's table of categories, the categorical imperative, and the problem of applying the categories to experience, that have continued to be influential. The philosopher Adam Weishaupt, founder and leader of the secret society the Illuminati, and an ally of Feder, also published several polemics against Kant, which attracted controversy and generated excitement. Weishaupt charged that Kant's philosophy leads to complete subjectivism and the denial of all reality independent of passing states of consciousness, a view he considered self-refuting. Herman Andreas Pistorius was another empiricist critic of Kant. Kant took Pistorius more seriously than his other critics and believed that he had made some of the most important objections to the "Critique of Pure Reason". Beiser writes that many sections of the "Critique of Practical Reason" are "disguised polemics against Pistorius". Pistorius argued that, if Kant were consistent, his form of idealism would not be an improvement over that of Berkeley, and that Kant's philosophy contains internal contradictions.


title: Critique of Pure Reason

text: Though the followers of Wolff, such as J. G. E. Maass, J. F. Flatt, and J. A. Ulrich, initially ignored the "Critique of Pure Reason", they began to publish polemics against Kant in 1788. The theologian Johann Augustus Eberhard began to publish the "Philosophisches Magazin", which was dedicated to defending Wolff's philosophy. The Wolffian critics argued that Kant's philosophy inevitably ends in skepticism and the impossibility of knowledge, defending the possibility of rational knowledge of the supersensible world as the only way of avoiding solipsism. They maintained that the criterion Kant proposed to distinguish between analytic and synthetic judgments had been known to Leibniz and was useless, since it was too vague to determine which judgments are analytic or synthetic in specific cases. These arguments led to a controversy between the Wolffians and Kant's followers over the originality and adequacy of Kant's criterion. The Wolffian campaign against Kant was ultimately unsuccessful. Beiser argues that the decisive reason for Kant's victory over the Wolffians was the French Revolution, writing that, "The political revolution in France seemed to find its abstract formulation with the philosophical revolution in Germany." Specifically, he concludes that the principle of autonomy, which has an important role in Kant's ethics, appeared to express and justify the egalitarian demands behind the French Revolution.


title: Critique of Pure Reason

text: The "Critique of Pure Reason" has exerted an enduring influence on Western philosophy. The constructive aspect of the work, Kant's attempt to ground the conditions for the possibility of objects in the conditions of experience, helped bring about the development of German idealism. The work also influenced Young Hegelians such as Bruno Bauer, Ludwig Feuerbach and Karl Marx, and also, Friedrich Nietzsche, whose philosophy has been seen as a form of "radical Kantianism" by Howard Caygill. Other interpretations of the "Critique" by philosophers and historians of philosophy have stressed different aspects of the work. The late 19th-century neo-Kantians Hermann Cohen and Heinrich Rickert focused on its philosophical justification of science, Martin Heidegger and Heinz Heimsoeth on aspects of ontology, and Peter Strawson on the limits of reason within the boundaries of sensory experience. Hannah Arendt and Jean-François Lyotard dealt with its work of orientation of a limited understanding in the field of world history. According to Homer W. Smith,


title: Critique of Pure Reason

text: Many titles have been used by different authors in reference or as a tribute to Kant's main "Critique", or his other, less famous books using the same basic concept, "Critique of Practical Reason" and "Critique of Judgment". Since the 18th century, books using "critique" in their title became common. Also, when "reason" is added after an adjective which qualifies this reason, this is usually a reference to Kant's most famous book. A few examples:


title: C major

text: C major (or the key of C) is a major scale based on C, consisting of the pitches C, D, E, F, G, A, and B. C major is one of the most common keys used in music. Its key signature has no flats or sharps. Its relative minor is A minor and its parallel minor is C minor.


title: C major

text: Twenty of Joseph Haydn's 106 symphonies are in C major, making it his second most-used key, second to D major. Of the 134 symphonies mistakenly attributed to Haydn that H. C. Robbins Landon lists in his catalog, 33 are in C major, more than any other key. Before the invention of the valves, Haydn did not write trumpet and timpani parts in his symphonies, except those in C major. Landon writes that it wasn't "until 1774 that Haydn uses trumpets and timpani in a key other than C major... and then only sparingly." Most of Haydn's symphonies in C major are labelled "festive" and are of a primarily celebratory mood. Wilfrid Mellers believed that Mozart's Symphony No. 41, written in 'white' C major, "represented the triumph of light". (See also List of symphonies in C major.)


title: C major

text: Many masses and settings of the "Te Deum" in the Classical era were in C major. Mozart and Haydn wrote most of their masses in C major. Gounod (in a review of Sibelius' Third Symphony) said that "only God composes in C major". Six of his own masses are written in C.


title: C major

text: Of Franz Schubert's two symphonies in the key, the first is nicknamed the "Little C major" and the second the "Great C major".


title: C major

text: Many musicians have pointed out that every musical key conjures up specific feelings. This idea is further explored in a radio program called "The Signature Series". American popular songwriter Bob Dylan claimed the key of C major to "be the key of strength, but also the key of regret". Sibelius's Symphony No. 7 is in C major and that key was of great importance in his previous symphonies.


title: University of Birmingham

text: The University of Birmingham (informally Birmingham University) is a public research university located in Edgbaston, Birmingham, United Kingdom. It received its royal charter in 1900 as a successor to Queen's College, Birmingham (founded in 1825 as the Birmingham School of Medicine and Surgery), and Mason Science College (established in 1875 by Sir Josiah Mason), making it the first English civic or 'red brick' university to receive its own royal charter. The present iteration of the university was modeled after Cornell University. It is a founding member of both the Russell Group of British research universities and the international network of research universities, Universitas 21.


title: University of Birmingham

text: The student population includes undergraduate and postgraduate students in 2019–20, which is the largest in the UK (out of ). The annual income of the university for 2020–21 was £774.1 million of which £168.3 million was from research grants and contracts, with an expenditure of £738.5 million.<ref name="Birmingham Financial Statement 20/21"></ref> In the 2021 Research Excellence Framework, the University of Birmingham ranked equal 13th out of 129 institutions on grade point average, up from equal 31st in the previous REF in 2014.


title: University of Birmingham

text: The university is home to the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, housing works by Van Gogh, Picasso and Monet; the Shakespeare Institute; the Cadbury Research Library, home to the Mingana Collection of Middle Eastern manuscripts; the Lapworth Museum of Geology; and the 100-metre Joseph Chamberlain Memorial Clock Tower, which is a prominent landmark visible from many parts of the city. Academics and alumni of the university include former British Prime Ministers Neville Chamberlain and Stanley Baldwin, the British composer Sir Edward Elgar and eleven Nobel laureates.


title: University of Birmingham

text: The earliest beginnings of the university were originally traced back to the Queen's College, which is linked to William Sands Cox in his aim of creating a medical school along strictly Christian lines, unlike the contemporary London medical schools. Further research revealed the roots of the Birmingham Medical School in the medical education seminars of John Tomlinson, the first surgeon to the Birmingham Workhouse Infirmary, and later to the Birmingham General Hospital. These classes, held in the winter of 1767–68, were the first such lectures ever held in England or Wales. The first clinical teaching was undertaken by medical apprentices at the General Hospital, founded in 1779. The medical school which grew out of the Birmingham Workhouse Infirmary was founded in 1828, but Cox began teaching in December 1825. Queen Victoria granted her patronage to the Clinical Hospital in Birmingham and allowed it to be styled "The Queen's Hospital". It was the first provincial teaching hospital in England. In 1843, the medical college became known as Queen's College.


title: University of Birmingham

text: In 1870, Sir Josiah Mason, the Birmingham industrialist and philanthropist, who made his fortune in making key rings, pens, pen nibs and electroplating, drew up the Foundation Deed for Mason Science College. The college was founded in 1875. It was this institution that would eventually form the nucleus of the University of Birmingham. In 1882, the Departments of Chemistry, Botany and Physiology were transferred to Mason Science College, soon followed by the Departments of Physics and Comparative Anatomy. The transfer of the Medical School to Mason Science College gave considerable impetus to the growing importance of that college and in 1896 a move to incorporate it as a university college was made. As the result of the Mason University College Act 1897 it became incorporated as Mason University College on 1 January 1898, with Joseph Chamberlain becoming the President of its Court of Governors.


title: University of Birmingham

text: It was largely due to Chamberlain's enthusiasm that the university was granted a royal charter by Queen Victoria on 24 March 1900. The Calthorpe family offered twenty-five acres (10 hectares) of land on the Bournbrook side of their estate in July. The Court of Governors received the Birmingham University Act 1900, which put the royal charter into effect on 31 May.


title: University of Birmingham

text: The transfer of Mason University College to the new University of Birmingham, with Chamberlain as its first chancellor and Sir Oliver Lodge as the first principal, was complete. A remnant of Josiah Mason's legacy is the Mermaid from his coat-of-arms, which appears in the sinister chief of the university shield and of his college, the double-headed lion in the dexter.


title: University of Birmingham

text: The commerce faculty was founded by Sir William Ashley in 1901, who from 1902 until 1923 served as first Professor of Commerce and Dean of the Faculty. From 1905 to 1908, Edward Elgar held the position of Peyton Professor of Music at the university. He was succeeded by his friend Granville Bantock.


title: University of Birmingham

text: The university's own heritage archives are accessible for research through the university's Cadbury Research Library which is open to all interested researchers.


title: University of Birmingham

text: During the First World War, the Great Hall in the Aston Webb Building was requisitioned by the War Office to create the 1st Southern General Hospital, a facility for the Royal Army Medical Corps to treat military casualties; it was equipped with 520 beds and treated 125,000 injured servicemen.


title: University of Birmingham

text: In June 1921, the university appointed Linetta de Castelvecchio as Serena Professor of Italian: she was the first woman to hold a chair at the university and one of the first women professors in Great Britain.


title: University of Birmingham

text: In 1939, the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, designed by Robert Atkinson, was opened. In 1956, the first MSc programme in Geotechnical Engineering commenced under the title of "Foundation Engineering", and has been run annually at the university since.


title: University of Birmingham

text: The UK's longest-running MSc programme in Physics and Technology of Nuclear Reactors also started at the university in 1956, the same year that the world's first commercial nuclear power station was opened at Calder Hall in Cumbria.


title: University of Birmingham

text: In 1957, Sir Hugh Casson and Neville Conder were asked by the university to prepare a masterplan on the site of the original 1900 buildings which were incomplete. The university drafted in other architects to amend the masterplan produced by the group. During the 1960s, the university constructed numerous large buildings, expanding the campus. In 1963, the university helped in the establishment of the faculty of medicine at the University of Rhodesia, now the University of Zimbabwe (UZ). UZ is now independent but both institutions maintain relations through student exchange programmes.


title: University of Birmingham

text: Birmingham also supported the creation of Keele University (formerly University College of North Staffordshire) and the University of Warwick under the Vice-Chancellorship of Sir Robert Aitken who acted as 'godfather' to the University of Warwick. The initial plan was to establish a satellite university college in Coventry but Aitken advised an independent initiative to the University Grants Committee.


title: University of Birmingham

text: Malcolm X, the Afro-American human rights activist, addressed the University Debating Society in 1965.


title: University of Birmingham

text: The university has been involved in many scientific breakthroughs and inventions. From 1925 until 1948, Sir Norman Haworth was Professor and Director of the Department of Chemistry. He was appointed Dean of the Faculty of Science and acted as Vice-Principal from 1947 until 1948. His research focused predominantly on carbohydrate chemistry in which he confirmed a number of structures of optically active sugars. By 1928, he had deduced and confirmed the structures of maltose, cellobiose, lactose, gentiobiose, melibiose, gentianose, raffinose, as well as the glucoside ring tautomeric structure of aldose sugars. His research helped to define the basic features of the starch, cellulose, glycogen, inulin and xylan molecules. He also contributed towards solving the problems with bacterial polysaccharides. He was a recipient of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1937.


title: University of Birmingham

text: The cavity magnetron was developed in the Department of Physics by Sir John Randall, Harry Boot and James Sayers. This was vital to the Allied victory in World War II. In 1940, the Frisch–Peierls memorandum, a document which demonstrated that the atomic bomb was more than simply theoretically possible, was written in the Physics Department by Sir Rudolf Peierls and Otto Frisch. The university also hosted early work on gaseous diffusion in the Chemistry department when it was located in the Hills building.


title: University of Birmingham

text: Physicist Sir Mark Oliphant made a proposal for the construction of a proton-synchrotron in 1943, however he made no assertion that the machine would work. In 1945, phase stability was discovered; consequently, the proposal was revived, and construction of a machine that could surpass proton energies of 1 GeV began at the university. However, because of lack of funds, the machine did not start until 1953. The Brookhaven National Laboratory managed to beat them; they started their Cosmotron in 1952, and had it entirely working in 1953, before the University of Birmingham.


title: University of Birmingham

text: In 1947, Sir Peter Medawar was appointed Mason Professor of Zoology at the university. His work involved investigating the phenomenon of tolerance and transplantation immunity. He collaborated with Rupert E. Billingham and they did research on problems of pigmentation and skin grafting in cattle. They used skin grafting to differentiate between monozygotic and dizygotic twins in cattle. Taking the earlier research of R. D. Owen into consideration, they concluded that actively acquired tolerance of homografts could be artificially reproduced. For this research, Medawar was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. He left Birmingham in 1951 and joined the faculty at University College London, where he continued his research on transplantation immunity. He was a recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1960.


title: University of Birmingham

text: In 1999 talks commenced on the possibility of Aston University integrating itself into the University of Birmingham as the University of Birmingham, Aston Campus. This would have resulted in the University of Birmingham expanding to become one of the largest universities in the UK, with a student body of 30,000. Talks were halted in 2001 after Aston University determined the timing to be inopportune. While Aston University management was in favour of the integration, and reception among staff was generally positive, the Aston student union voted two-to-one against the integration. Despite this set back, the Vice Chancellor of the University of Birmingham said the door remained open to recommence talks when Aston University is ready.


title: University of Birmingham

text: The of the first ever televised leaders' debates, hosted by the BBC, was held at the university during the 2010 British general election campaign on 29 April 2010.


title: University of Birmingham

text: On 9 August 2010 the university announced that for the first time it would not enter the UCAS clearing process for 2010 admission, which matches under-subscribed courses to students who did not meet their firm or insurance choices, due to all places being taken. Largely a result of the financial crisis of 2007–2010, Birmingham joined fellow Russell Group universities including Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh and Bristol in not offering any clearing places.


title: University of Birmingham

text: The university acted as a training camp for the Jamaican athletics team prior to the 2012 London Olympics.


title: University of Birmingham

text: A new library was opened for the 2016/17 academic year, and a new sports centre opened in May 2017. The previous Main Library and the old Munrow Sports Centre, including the athletics track, have both since been demolished, with the demolition of the old library being completed in November 2017.


title: University of Birmingham

text: The discipline of cultural studies was founded at the university and between 1964 and 2002 the campus was home to the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, a research centre whose members' work came to be known as the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies. Despite being established by one of the key figures in the field, Richard Hoggart, and being later directed by the theorist Stuart Hall, the department was controversially closed down.


title: University of Birmingham

text: Analysis showed that the university was fourth in a list of British universities that faced the most employment tribunal claims between 2008 and 2011. They were the second most likely to settle these before the hearing date.


title: University of Birmingham

text: In 2011 a parliamentary early day motion was proposed, arguing against the Guild suspending the elected Sabbatical Vice President (Education), who was arrested while taking part in protest activity.


title: University of Birmingham

text: In December 2011 it was announced that the university had obtained a 12-month-long injunction against a group of around 25 students, who occupied a residential building on campus from 23 to 26 November 2011, preventing them from engaging in further "occupational protest action" on the university's grounds without prior permission. It was misreported in the press that this injunction applied to all students, however the court order defines the defendants as:


title: University of Birmingham

text: Persons unknown (including students of the University of Birmingham) entering or remaining upon the buildings known as No. 2 Lodge Pritchatts Road, Birmingham at the University of Birmingham for the purpose of protest action (without the consent of the University of Birmingham).


title: University of Birmingham

text: In 2019, several women said the university refused to investigate allegations of campus rape. One student who complained of rape in university accommodation was told by employees of the university that there were no specific procedures for handling rape complaints. In other cases students were told they would have to prove the alleged rapes occurred on university property. The university has been criticized by legal professionals for not adequately assessing the risk to students by refusing to investigate complaints of criminal conduct.


title: University of Birmingham

text: In June 2022 the University published a report into, and apologised for, its involvement in developing, promoting and administering electric-shock conversion therapy to gay men, during the period 1966-1983.


title: University of Birmingham

text: The main campus of the university occupies a site some south-west of Birmingham city centre, in Edgbaston. It is arranged around Joseph Chamberlain Memorial Clock Tower (affectionately known as 'Old Joe' or 'Big Joe'), a grand campanile which commemorates the university's first chancellor, Joseph Chamberlain. Chamberlain may be considered the founder of Birmingham University, and was largely responsible for the university gaining its Royal Charter in 1900 and for the development of the Edgbaston campus. The university's Great Hall is located in the domed Aston Webb Building, which is named after one of the architects – the other was Ingress Bell. The initial site was given to the university in 1900 by Lord Calthorpe. The grand buildings were an outcome of the £50,000 given by steel magnate and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie to establish a "first class modern scientific college" on the model of Cornell University in the United States. Funding was also provided by Sir Charles Holcroft.


title: University of Birmingham

text: The original domed buildings, built in Accrington red brick, semicircle to form Chancellor's Court. This sits on a drop, so the architects placed their buildings on two tiers with a drop between them. The clock tower stands in the centre of the Court.


title: University of Birmingham

text: The campanile itself draws its inspiration from the Torre del Mangia, a medieval clock tower that forms part of the Town Hall in Siena, Italy. When it was built, it was described as 'the intellectual beacon of the Midlands' by the "Birmingham Post". The clock tower was Birmingham's tallest building from the date of its construction in 1908 until 1969; it is now the third highest in the city. It is one of the top 50 tallest buildings in the UK, and the tallest free-standing clock tower in the world, although there is some confusion about its actual height, with the university listing it both as and tall in different sources.


title: University of Birmingham

text: The campus has a wide diversity in architectural types and architects. "What makes Birmingham so exceptional among the Red Brick universities is the deployment of so many other major Modernist practices: only Oxford and Cambridge boast greater selections". The Guild of Students original section was designed by Birmingham inter-war architect Holland Hobbiss who also designed the King Edward's School opposite. It was described as "Redbrick Tudorish" by Nikolaus Pevsner.


title: University of Birmingham

text: The statue on horseback fronting the entrance to the university and Barber Institute of Fine Arts is a 1722 statue of George I rescued from Dublin in 1937. This was saved by Bodkin, a director of the National Gallery of Ireland and first director of the Barber Institute. The statue was commissioned by the Dublin Corporation from the Flemish sculptor John van Nost.


title: University of Birmingham

text: Final negotiations for part of what is now the Vale were only completed in March 1947. By then, properties which would have their names used for halls of residences such as Wyddrington and Maple Bank were under discussion and more land was obtained from the Calthorpe estate in 1948 and 1949 providing the setting for the Vale. Landscape architect Mary Mitchell designed the layout of the campus and she included mature trees that were retained from the former gardens. Construction on the Vale started in 1962 with the creation of a artificial lake and the building of Ridge, High, Wyddrington and Lake Halls. The first, Ridge Hall, opened for 139 women in January 1964, with its counterpart High Hall admitting its first male residents the following October.


title: University of Birmingham

text: The university underwent a major expansion in the 1960s due to the production of a masterplan by Casson, Conder and Partners. The first of the major buildings to be constructed to a design by the firm was the Refectory and Staff House which was built in 1961 and 1962. The two buildings are connected by a bridge. The next major buildings to be constructed were the Wyddrington and Lake Halls and the Faculty of Commerce and Social Science, all completed in 1965. The Wyddrington and Lake Halls, on Edgbaston Park Road, were designed by H. T. Cadbury-Brown and contained three floors of student dwellings above a single floor of communal facilities.


title: University of Birmingham

text: The Faculty of Commerce and Social Science, now known as the Ashley Building, was designed by Howell, Killick, Partridge and Amis and is a long, curving two-storey block linked to a five-storey whorl. The two-storey block follows the curve of the road, and has load-bearing brick cross walls. It is faced in specially-made concrete blocks. The spiral is faced with faceted pre-cast concrete cladding panels. It was statutorily listed in 1993 and a refurbishment by Berman Guedes Stretton was completed in 2006.


title: University of Birmingham

text: Chamberlain, Powell and Bon were commissioned to design the Physical Education Centre which was built in 1966. The main characteristic of the building is the roof of the changing rooms and small gymnasium which has hyperbolic paraboloid roof light shells and is completely paved in quarry tiles. The roof of the sports hall consists of eight conoidal 2½-inch thick sprayed concrete shells springing from long pre-stressed valley beams. On the south elevation, the roof is supported on raking pre-cast columns and reversed shells form a cantilevered canopy.


title: University of Birmingham

text: Also completed in 1966 was the Mining and Minerals Engineering and Physical Metallurgy Departments, which was designed by Philip Dowson of Arup Associates. This complex consisted of four similar three-storey blocks linked at the corners. The frame is of pre-cast reinforced concrete with columns in groups of four and the whole is planned as a tartan grid, allowing services to be carried vertically and horizontally so that at no point in a room are services more than ten feet away. The building received the 1966 RIBA Architecture Award for the West Midlands. It was statutorily listed in 1993. Taking the full five years from 1962 to 1967, Birmingham erected twelve buildings which each cost in excess of a quarter of a million pounds.


title: University of Birmingham

text: In 1967, Lucas House, a new hall of residence designed by The John Madin Design Group, was completed, providing 150 study bedrooms. It was constructed in the garden of a large house. The Medical School was extended in 1967 to a design by Leonard J. Multon and Partners. The two-storey building was part of a complex which covers the southside of Metchley Fort, a Roman fort. In 1968, the Institute for Education in the Department for Education was opened. This was another Casson, Conder and Partners-designed building. The complex consisted of a group of buildings centred around an eight-storey block, containing study offices, laboratories and teaching rooms. The building has a reinforced concrete frame which is exposed internally and the external walls are of silver-grey rustic bricks. The roofs of the lecture halls, penthouse and Child Study wing are covered in copper.


title: University of Birmingham

text: Arup Associates returned in the 1960s to design the Arts and Commerce Building, better known as Muirhead Tower and houses the Institute of Local Government Studies. This was completed in 1969. A£42 million refurbishment of the 16-storey tower was completed in 2009 and it now houses the Colleges of Social Sciences and the Cadbury Research Library, the new home for the university's Special Collections. The podium was remodeled around the existing Allardyce Nicol studio theatre, providing additional rehearsal spaces and changing and technical facilities. The ground floor lobby now incorporates a Starbucks coffee shop. The name, Muirhead Tower, came from that of the first philosophy professor of the university John Henry Muirhead.


title: University of Birmingham

text: Recently completed is a 450-seat concert hall, called the Bramall Music Building, which completes the redbrick semicircle of the Aston Webb building designed by Glenn Howells Architects with venue design by Acoustic Dimensions. This auditorium, with its associated research, teaching and rehearsal facilities, houses the Department of Music. In August 2011 the university announced that architects Lifschutz Davidson Sandilands and S&P were appointed to develop a new Indoor Sports Centre as part of a £175 million investment in the campus.


title: University of Birmingham

text: In 1978, University station, on the Cross-City Line, was opened to serve the university and its hospital. It is the only university campus in mainland Britain with its own railway station. a new station is being constructed, adjacent to the existing facility. Nearby, the Steampipe Bridge, which was constructed in 2011, transports steam across the Cross-City Railway Line and Worcester & Birmingham Canal from the energy generation plant to the medical school as part of the university's sustainable energy strategy. Its laser-cut exterior is also a public art feature.


title: University of Birmingham

text: Located within the Edgbaston site of the university is the Winterbourne Botanic Garden, a 24,000 square metre (258,000 square foot) Edwardian Arts and Crafts style garden. The large statue in the foreground was a gift to the university by its sculptor Sir Edward Paolozzi – the sculpture is named 'Faraday', and has an excerpt from the poem 'The Dry Salvages' by T. S. Eliot around its base.


title: University of Birmingham

text: The University of Birmingham operates the Lapworth Museum of Geology in the Aston Webb Building in Edgbaston. It is named after Charles Lapworth, a geologist who worked at Mason Science College.


title: University of Birmingham

text: Since November 2007, the university has been holding a farmers' market on the campus. Birmingham is the first university in the country to have an accredited farmers' market.


title: University of Birmingham

text: The considerable extent of the estate meant that by the end of the 1990s it was valued at £536 million.


title: University of Birmingham

text: The university's Selly Oak campus is a short distance to the south of the main campus. It was the home of a federation of nine colleges, known as Selly Oak Colleges, mainly focused on theology, social work, and teacher training. The Federation was for many years associated with the University of Birmingham. A new library, the Orchard Learning Resource Centre, was opened in 2001, shortly before the Federation ceased to exist. The OLRC is now one of Birmingham University's site libraries. Among the Selly Oak Colleges was Westhill College, (later the University of Birmingham, Westhill), which merged with the university's School of Education in 2001. In the following years most of the remaining colleges closed, leaving two colleges which continue today, Woodbrooke College, a study and conference centre for the Society of Friends, and Fircroft College, a small adult education college with residential provision. Woodbrooke College's Centre for Postgraduate Quaker Studies, established in 1998, works with the University of Birmingham to deliver research supervision for the degrees of MA by research and PhD.


title: University of Birmingham

text: The Selly Oak campus is now home to the Department of Drama and Theatre Arts in the newly refurbished Selly Oak Colleges Old Library and George Cadbury Hall 200-seat theatre. The UK daytime television show "Doctors" is filmed on this campus. The University of Birmingham School occupies a brand new, purpose-built building located on the university's Selly Oak campus. The University of Birmingham School is sponsored by the University of Birmingham and managed by an Academy Trust. The University of Birmingham School opened in September 2015.


title: University of Birmingham

text: The Victorian neo-gothic Mason College Building in Birmingham city centre housed Birmingham University's Faculties of Arts and Law for over 50 years after the founding of the university in 1900. The Faculty of Arts building on the Edgbaston campus was not constructed until 1959–61. The Faculties of Arts and Law then moved to the Edgbaston campus. The original Mason College Building was demolished in 1962 as part of the redevelopment within the inner ring road.


title: University of Birmingham

text: The 1843 Gothic Revival building constructed opposite the Town Hall between Paradise Street (the main entrance) and Swallow Street served as Queen's College, one of the founder colleges of the university. In 1904 the building was given a new buff-coloured terracotta and brick front. The medical and scientific departments merged with Mason College in 1900 to form the University of Birmingham and sought new premises in Edgbaston. The theological department of Queen's College did not merge with Mason College, but later moved in 1923 to Somerset Road in Edgbaston, next to the University of Birmingham as the Queen's Foundation, maintaining a relationship with the University of Birmingham until a 2010 review. In the mid 1970s, the original Queen's College building was demolished, with the exception of the grade II listed façade.


title: University of Birmingham

text: Birmingham has departments covering a wide range of subjects. On 1 August 2008, the university's system was restructured into five 'colleges', which are composed of numerous 'schools':


title: University of Birmingham

text: The university is home to a number of research centres and schools, including the Birmingham Business School, the oldest business school in England, the University of Birmingham Medical School, the International Development Department, the Institute of Local Government Studies, the Centre of West African Studies, the Centre for Russian and East European Studies, the Centre of Excellence for Research in Computational Intelligence and Applications and the Shakespeare Institute. An Institute for Research into Superdiversity was established in 2013. Apart from traditional research and PhDs, under the department of Engineering and Physical Sciences, the university offers split-site PhD in Computer Science. The university is also home to the Birmingham Solar Oscillations Network (BiSON) which consists of a network of six remote solar observatories monitoring low-degree solar oscillation modes. It is operated by the High Resolution Optical Spectroscopy group of the School of Physics and Astronomy, funded by the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC).


title: University of Birmingham

text: The International Development Department (IDD) is a multi-disciplinary academic department focused on poverty reduction through developing effective governance systems. The department is one of the leading UK centres for the postgraduate study of international development. The department has been described as being a "highly regarded, long-established specialist unit" with a "global reputation" by "The Independent".


title: University of Birmingham

text: A number of the university's centres, schools and institutes are located away from its two campuses in Edgbaston and Selly Oak:


title: University of Birmingham

text: In the early 1980s, the University of Birmingham constructed an observatory next to the university playing fields, approximately south of the Edgbaston campus. The site was chosen because the night sky was ~100 times darker than the skies above campus. First light was on 8 December 1982, and the Observatory was officially opened by the Astronomer Royal, Francis Graham-Smith, on 13 June 1984. The observatory was upgraded in 2013.


title: University of Birmingham

text: The Observatory is used primarily for undergraduate teaching. It has two main instruments, a 16" Cassegrain (working at f/19) and a 14" Meade LX200R (working at f/6.35). A third telescope is also present and is used exclusively for visual observations.


title: University of Birmingham

text: Members of the public are given chance to visit the Observatory at regular "Astronomy in the City" events during the winter months. These events include a talk on the night sky from a member of the university's student Astronomical Society; a talk on current astrophysics research, such as exoplanets, galaxy clusters or gravitational-wave astronomy, a question-and-answer session, and the chance to observing using telescopes both on campus and at the Observatory.


title: University of Birmingham

text: The original coat of arms was designed in 1900. It features a double headed lion (on the left) and a mermaid holding a mirror and comb (to the right). These symbols owe to the coat of arms of the institution's predecessor, Mason College.


title: University of Birmingham

text: In 2005 the university began rebranding itself. A simplified edition of the shield which had been introduced in the 1980s reverted to a detailed version based on how it appears on the university's original Royal Charter.


title: University of Birmingham

text: Library Services operates six libraries. They are the Barber Fine Art Library, Barnes Library, Main Library, Orchard Learning Resource Centre, Dental Library, and the Shakespeare Institute Library. Library Services also operates the Cadbury Research Library.