PrintImmanuel Kant (1724-1804) was a famous German philosopher who lived in Königsberg in East Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia). He was one of the great thinkers of the European Enlightenment. Among his many ideas was his conception of how all knowledge might be organized. Kant said that there are three ways to organize all knowledge: the topical approach, the chronological approach, and the spatial approach.
- Topical Approach: A topical approach is to know everything about one thing. Thus, political science is a topical approach, as it involves everything about politics. Economics involves everything concerning financial economies, and biology concerns all knowledge about living things.
- Chronological Approach: A chronological approach looks at how things change over time. This is the approach of historians as they examine how the world has changed over time. Historians focus on what has happened in the past.
- Spatial Approach: A spatial approach looks at where things happen and why. This is the fundamental approach of geographers as they try to understand the world in terms of where things happen, why and how they happened there, and the interactions between phenomena in one place relative to phenomena in others.
In reality, few people limit themselves to using only one of these ways of ordering knowledge. Political Scientists may focus on the politics of certain eras or places. Historians may focus on the history of a particular country. And geographers, as we will see, are great synthesists who invariably use the spatial approach in conjunction with topical and chronological approaches. Yet, Kant's three ways of ordering knowledge demonstrates that the spatial approach of the discipline of geography makes geography one of the core scholarly disciplines.