/lit/ - Literature

>>18758361

That's a solid start. When you get more in the weeds, I think you'll find the Analytic of Principles to resolve many of your questions (while raising a few others, of course). That's where Kant focuses extensively on the difference between logical possibility versus physical possibility (or, slightly more technically, the difference between what can be thought, conceived, versus what can be real, actual). The latter class of does not conflict with the former class, but instead the latter class adds content (from sensibility) to the formal logical structure articulated by the former class.

This is what Kant calls Schematism, and it is extremely important.

Consider B190-191, which I will punctuate slightly differently *by adding asterisks,* compared to the original Guyer-Wood translation of Kant's many parenthetical remarks:

"Whatever the content of our cognition may be, and however it may be related to the object, the general *though to be sure only negative condition* of all of our judgments whatsoever is that they do not contradict themselves; otherwise these judgments in themselves (even without regard to the object) are nothing. But even if there is no contradiction within our judgment, it can nevertheless combine concepts in a way not entailed by the object, or even without any ground being given to us *either a priori or a posteriori* that would justify such a judgment, and thus, for all that a judgment may be free of any internal contradiction, it can still be either false or groundless.

Now the proposition that no predicate pertains to a thing that contradicts it is called the principle of contradiction, and is a general though merely negative criterion of all truth, but on that account it also belongs merely to logic, since it holds of cognitions merely as cognitions in general, without regard to their content, and says that contradiction entirely annihilates and cancels them... For that no cognition can be opposed to [the principle of contradiction] without annihilating itself certainly makes this principle into a CONDITIO SINE QUA NON, but not into a determining ground of the truth of our cognition."

So the principle of contradiction is a necessary condition for a human mind's experience of nature, but not a sufficient condition. The experience of nature must add spatiotemporal data, sensory content, to the merely logical forms of thinking.

But systematic rationality demands that the human mind asks the question "what explains the origin of sensory data within my subjective forms of space and time?"