/lit/ - Literature

My friends and acquaintances are all trapped indoors, which means they’ve been more open to reading, so I’ve been making small book clubs near-daily. By myself I’m reading Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition(1/3 in. it’s tickling my wizard larp fancy), the magic mountain(also 1/3 in. I like how domestically/casually philosophical Mann is, with Castorp’s time thoughts and Settembrini’s ramblings), and Relativity: the special and general theory (near the end of the special theory. This book makes me so happy. It’s such a pleasure to read and think through.)
With family/friends/profs I’m reading: capitalist realism again (halfway. Always fun. Noticing a lot of things I didn’t pick up on in light of...) psychopolitics(halfway through. It feels like a slightly more modern, slightly more abstract capitalist realism and I’m surprised he’s gone this long without mentioning Mark Fisher.), and prolegomena to any future metaphysics (just finished the Second Part. Far more difficult than I anticipated, though proportionally more rewarding. Not even a tenth as fun as Einstein.)
I feel like im thriving during this quarantine, but my real studies have completely slipped away from me.

What axioms are you talking about?
The categorical imperative?
To understand it you need to understand pure reason. Pure reason is the ability to deduce things a priori without any experience. A priori means necessary truths. A truth is a posteriori if it depends on empirical observation. An important thing to undrrstand is that there exist pure a priori and a priori mixed with a posteriori observation. A cheese is cheese, which is a priori but to know this you need to have observed a cheese. Then there is the pure a priori like, a object of experience is itself and so on.
Then there is the synthetic a priori, things that can be known about the world without observation. Theese truths are necessary, whence the a priori part, and they tells us something about the world, hence the synthetic part. What does this have to do with morality?
According to Kant, the categorical imperative is a synthetic a priori concept, meaning that we can know what's necessarily right or wrong.
How can we then know this?
There exist individual subjective maxims that individual operate by, a good analogy would be to say that this is our idea of how reality is, while practical laws are how reality really is. Practical laws are objective moral maxims. Becuase we know a priori that contradictions are impossible, we can then know that there exist no contradictionary practical laws. Practical reason then is our ability to comprehend this practical laws. To further understand we need to explore imperatives. There exist three types, categorical, hypothetical and some third other I don't remember. A hypothetical imperative is require a posteriori concepts, like happiness and so on. If you want x do y. A good example of hypothetical imperatives are virtue ethics and utillitarianism.
But then there is categorical imperatives, which are purely a priori. Becuase we have a priori ideas of morality, the regulation of behavior utilising reason to do so, we can then see that reason is required for morality, it's tautological. This reason is practical reason, which is pure reason applied to the a priori concepts of morality. Theese concepts are action and motivation and so on. To discover theese ultimate moral truths, we need to discard all empirical observations and only use the a priori concepts of morality. As morality is the regulation of behavior according to abstract principles we can then deduce the a priori concepts of morality:
1: A moral agent, a being capable of free will and reason.
2: Moral maxims, abstract principles generated by practical reason.
Becuase theese categorical imperatives are a priori, they need to stay true for every moral agent everywhere and for all time. Becuase autonomy is the a priori requirement for morality, and as categorical imperatives are universal by virtue if being a priori, whe can then know that any action that violates the autonomy of other subjects violates the categorical imperative, and thus isn't moral. TO BE KANTINUED

My own flavour of kantianism.