/lit/ - Literature

>>8543336

> Kant thinks that an "i" is not a possible object of perception, but a feature of the transcendental unity of apperception.

Right, but my question isn't so much about their differing conceptions of the "I think" as it is about their methodology for drawing conclusions about the "I think." Kant seemed to think that his methodology was more reliable - but why should we trust transcendental reflection any more than Cartesian introspection?

> The comparison with descartes is misleading

How? I guess this is bound up with the above question.

> The Categories, being pure concepts of the understanding, make judgment possible. They themselves are just empty, formal constructions, a bit like logical operations (though take that metaphor loosely)

Right - but my question isn't about the nature of pure forms of thought; it's rather about other intelligences having those same forms of understanding and/or reason. Kant seems to assume that all intelligences could enter into a rational/moral community with human intelligences - but this seems to assume that all intelligences share some basic forms. My question is about minds whose innate forms might be totally different from any forms of human understanding and reason; Kant seems to discard the possibility of such minds, but I don't see how he could.

> In a footnote in the third critique, Kant claims that the reason his tables always have three entries under each heading isa corrolary of there being three combinations of analytic/sybthetic and a priori/a posteriori

Interesting! I've forgotten that. But my issue is more with the method of discovery of those forms of logical judgement which Kant seems to accept as given *and* as complete; he criticies Aristotle for searching for the fategories without any exhaustive method - yet it seems that that Kant does the same thing in accepting the forms of judgement provided by the western logical tradition, simply taking for granted that such logical forms of judgement were complete (even though, I believe, they were discovered piecemeal and unmethodically (by what Kant's standards would be) over the centuries).

>>7300511

My pleasure - I'm happy to come across anyone who's genuinely interested.

> don't Space and Time presuppose all thought?

Not technically. In Kant's system, thought is only one part of the human mind, but it's not the part of the mind that space and time belong to; space and time instead belong to the part of the human mind called "sensibility." Sensibility is the mental faculty that receives raw sense data and imposes spatiotemporal order on it; in other words, space and time are the way in which raw sense data like colors, sounds, temperatures, textures, flavors, etc. - which would otherwise be in an incoherent jumble - gets ordered. Sensibility also gives these spatiotemporally ordered sensations (AKA appearances) to the understanding, and the understanding thinks about them (which involves a higher level of ordering, via the understanding's categories). Thus, space and time presuppose sensibility, and since sensibility is just one faculty of the human mind, space and time presuppose the mind; but since thinking is accomplished by a mental faculty that's different from sensibility, space and time don't presuppose thought.

What complicates (in an interesting way) this taxonomy of the mind is that Kant claims that we can only recognize these separate faculties once our mind has been active for a while; we reflect upon the way in which our mind works, and we isolate the respective roles played by sensibility, understanding, reason, and judgment. So if our mind had never been activated by sensations, we'd never have conscious experience, and we'd never be aware of space and time. But this is only to say that our *awareness* of space and time is dependent on our thought - but sensibility (and thus space and time, its forms) itself does not depend on our thought. This is basically Aristotle's distinction, forwarded in his Metaphysics, between the order of existence and the order of knowledge.

>>7300961

I'm 25, went to Fordham University, double- majored in theology and philosophy, and about two years after taking a semseter-long course on Kant (that centered around his first critique) taught by Michael Baur, I spent about six months reading Kant's major works, supplementing with some scholarly commentaries.

>>7270194

Often, but I'm finding that Schopenhauer can also blend his own kind of idealism with his exposition of Kant's, but their respective visions of the human mind's relation to the physical world is different in crucial ways. Sometimes Schopenhauer acknowledges these differences clearly - other times less so.

For example, in the quote you provided, the phrase "in my head" could have a figurative meaning in Kant's philosophy (Kant sometimes writes in such a way), but at bottom the physical head and nervous system aren't the "location" of mental processes - the non-physical, ideal mental faculties are rather the "location." Yet for Schopenhauer, the physical head and nervous system are the objective correlate of those mental faculties, and the mental faculties are the subjective correlate of the physical head and nervous system; they mutually imply one another in his system in a way that they do not in Kant's - even though Schopenhauer would claim that Kant *should have* argued that they recicprocally imply each other. I like Schopenhauer a lot, but I'm inclined to defer to Kant.

>>7144000

> why do you like Kant.

Because his worldview is transformative and challenging; it's bizarre and fun to think about, even drug-like, and despite the accomplishment of understanding its depths, there is seemingly always more intricacy to unravel, more nuance to enrich the already ornate edifice.

> your text illustrates well that Kant to refute empiricism very poorly

Could you explain?

> Why does kant dislike empiricism ?

His system has very important empiricist elements, but he rejects empiricism as an ultimate foundation for experience because:

1). He didn't think that it could account for knowledge that we self-evidently, undeniably have, such as knowledge of arithmetic and geometry, and knowledge of basic laws of nature - the violation of either being inconceivable to the human mind, he claimed - nor could it account for the innate moral feelings we have, like consciousness of obligation and guilt.

2) He felt that only his own system, rather than systems of the past (including empiricist ones) could reconcile the eventual and unavoidable contradictions that human reason gets lost in when it fails to distinguish empirical reality from transcendental ideality.