This is about epistemology — how we humans describe reality using words.
In 30 Philosophers, I explore the evolution of this idea — from the unknowable Dao, to Hume’s logic, to Kant’s filtered reality, and beyond. In Chapter 18, I introduce the Idea of Ideas — because that’s the point in the evolution where we needed a common set of words to explain the rest of the story.
It’s a modern update of Kant’s core insight:
That human experience shapes what we know.
And that not all ideas are created equal.
Kant drew a line between the world we experience and the world we can’t.
But he didn’t yet have falsifiability — Popper’s principle asserts a claim must be testable to count as knowledge.
My framework picks up there.
- Empirical ideas describe reality directly — confirmed by observation or measurement.
- Rational ideas describe reality indirectly — they’re logical, structured, and testable. They’re not guesses. They’re true ideas that just happen to be framed in terms of patterns, principles, or math.
- Irrational ideas do neither — they’re untested, untestable, or disproven. That includes astrology, flat Earth, and speculative stories like the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.
To illustrate, take algebra. It’s a rational tool — but statements using it fall into all three categories:
- “2 + 2 = 4” — That can be empirical when used to count apples. It directly describes a real-world observation.
- “x² + y² = r²” — That’s rational, describing the logic of a circle in space — abstract, structured, and testable.
- “x + x = 5 when x = 2” — That’s irrational, a disproven claim. It’s mathematically false.
So — is the split in the Idea of Ideas the same as Kant’s?
No, but it is structurally inspired by Kant, just not equivalent. Kant gave us the filter with a focus on how we experience a reality we can never fully know. The Idea of Ideas categorizes ideas into empirical, rational, and irrational — a structure meant to clarify how knowledge, fiction, and history relate to reality.