/lit/ - Literature

It's sad that even /lit/ needs to depend on lame memes so much. I thought you were different from /mu/ and /r9k/.

>>11637178
First week on the internet?

>>11637168
Kant is g.o.a.t to be sure. Though at times he can be a bit obscure.

>>11637187
No, first week on /lit/ after a year of browsing other boards to stay intentionally away from here.

>>11637178
Who are you quoting?

>>11637201
What are you quoting?

>>11637208
Where are you quoting?

>>11637211
When are you quoting?

>>11637213
Why are you quoting?

Schopenhauer's realism is comforting.

>>11637178
Jesus christ, you sound like someone with a smelly cunt

>>11637331
Prove me wrong, asshole

>>11637168
Wittgenstein obviously

Is it necessary to read all of Kant?

Kant is the smartest man in history, you need a high iq to understand him.
>Proves objective morality, premptively assblast Stirner and Nietszche while btfoing any other school of moral philosophy
>Proves free will, all determinsts btfo
>Proves the existence of god, Dawkins btfod preemptively
>Destroys all previous schools of metaphysics in seconds
>Succesfully predicts the future of humanity
>Forms an essential correct description of the creation of the solar system using newtonian physics, 100 years before his time
>Describes string theory in the 18th centuary

>>11637373

You don't really believe this, do you anon?

>>11637522
Weird...I'm not seeing an argument here.

>hurr you didn't provide an argument either.

I'm not the guy you replied to. But if you're going to attempt to refute them you must, at the very least, say what you mean.

>>11637552
not them, but who's saying they attempted to refute them in the first place? asking someone if they believe something or not isn't inherently an attempted refutation.

>>11637373
>Proves objective morality
>Proves free will

Where, how?

>>11637613
It's very complex and too hard to explain in a single post. Read all the books on the chart, and then read:
1: The groundwork to the metaphysics of morals
2: Critque of practical reason
3: Critque of judgement

>>11637198
I saw a /lit/ thread in an archive ages ago, someone said: "He isn't just a big guy for you, he's probably the biggest guy since Aristotle"

I laughed my arse off.

>>11637168
because he FUCKED hard.

>>11637335
you never read Kant or you don't understand him. qed.

>>11637669
Sure, thanks. But can you at least try?

>>11637613
understand the concept of justification a priori first and why justification a priori must exist, the rest will be much easier.

>>11637704
This is the thing I have great doubts about. Pure a priori do not seem to exist. Points of justification seem inherently relative and referential, dependent on powers and affects.

>>11637233
Are you quoting?

>>11637566
It's using snarky rhetoric to try to refute them, weak-minded little faggot. You probably are him. Instead of relying on weaselly strategies of argumentation you should take some time to think out your position then disagree with someone in a proper way.

>>11637566
He didn't ask them if they believe it. He asked a loaded question.

"You don't actually-" That's not a question. It contains a position. It implies that one should not believe it. There are proper ways to ask a genuine question. One of the ways to do it would be to say, "Do you believe this? Because" and then listing the reasons you may think it seems disingenuous. The last part is what I was suggesting they do.

>>11637168
Kant says Noumena exist.
Kant says categories apply only to phenomena.
Kant says existence is a category.
Therefore Kant says knowledge of the existence of Noumena is not possible, a contradiction.

“without that presupposition [of things in themselves] I could not enter into the system, but with it I could not stay within it” (Jacobi 1787, 336)."

>>11637613
He doesn't prove free will, he proves that you can't disprove it.

As for objective morality, I think that poster is alluding to his Categorical Imperative.

Immanuel Kant was a black man.

>>11637808


>He doesn't prove free will, he proves that you can't disprove it.
>Categorical Imperative.

Well then, that post is very misleading.

>>11637765
You quoting?

>>11637168
El goblino...

>>11637830

...La luz extinguido.

>>11637830
Come on now, he had a beautiful noumena

>>11637890

This AUTISTIC little man
is taking DAILY walks.
And basically, you're FUCKING LAZY.

>>11637890
what a little cutie

>>11637244
I haven't read much of him yet, but it seems like he plugs the holes in Kant's boat with some Neoplatonism and Vedic philosophy. Sounds fucking cool. Even as I was reading Kant, I kept thinking:
>this sounds Platonic as hell, why is he denouncing Plato so strongly?
and
>dude is srsly ripping off Berkeley

>>11637685
Lol, are you actually so retarded you can't understand the reason for my first post? Holy shit!

Check the catalog, there are at least 2 or 3 other threads that read like "who is the most logically sound philosopher of all time and why is it ______?"

The meme IS NOT KANT, you fucking idiot, but the formulaic thread which consists of zero original content.

>>11638211
Define original content

>>11638223
Define my cunt

>>11637890
He looks like a monkey

>>11637168
Immanuel Kant was 4 feet 11 inches = 149.86 centimeters tall

>>11638197
>Sounds fucking cool
It is, especially if you're trying to go over everything, and I mean Everything.

>Kant
>Newton

Are high-IQ autists the master race?

How long would it take iq127 to read Critique of Pure Reason and understand It?

>>11638861
Just read it with a companion, there's no shame in it.

>>11638861
it's not that simple. even with an iq of 127 it doesn't grant that you'll 100% be able to comprehend the work. and on top of that there are potentially other factors that could hinder you from understanding it. and even if you had a 100% chance of being able to comprehend it, there's no set time of reading based on iq. there's more than likely plenty of 100 iq people who read faster than 120 iq people, and understand what's being read.

>>11638897
I suppose you are correct. From prior experiences, i haven't found any text, however abstruse and obscure, beyond comprehension. But i read fairly slow with them and often have to reread for it to enter into my memory.

>>11638874
Schopenhauer convinced me not to do that

>>11638934
from my experience, that's the case with most people. if you're familiar with similar difficult-to-read philosophical texts, then I'm guessing it'll probably take you about the same rate to read the work as you do others. I say rate, and not time, because (depending on which book you get) it's about 650 pages or so. in any case, I don't assume you'll have any major hindrances with the work besides it simply being a lot to digest. godspeed anon

>>11637819
His real name was AyyyMan U'el Kinte

>>11638975
turn that poop into wine!

>>11638861
Forget it. So called leftist intellectuals act as if they understand philosophers such as Kant but just name drop his concepts and stop there to discuss whatever gay shit they feel. Forget trying to "understand" philosophy. Save your time. That's not to say philosophy is useless or pointless, however.

>>11638861
It is so easy to understand Kant, as long as you have read your way through the early moderns. Without that context, it might as well be impossible. So, however long it would take you to read and understand
>Descartes' "Meditations"
>Locke's "Essay"
>Leibniz's "Monadology"
>Berkeley's "Principles"
>Hume's "Enquiry"
is how long it would take you (plus the time to read CPR) to read and understand CPR. All of them are very short books, except Locke's "Essay." Locke is a great read though, because he's very clear and he covers pretty much every issue. The only thing I dislike about him is that I think he knew the epic fails in his thought and tried cowardly to cover them up. Berkeley calls Locke out on his shit and obliterates him.

>>11639866
I honestly just planned on reading Hume and then the prolegomena. Is that the wrong way to go?

>dude things exist that we can't ever perceive

"no"

>>11639885
Uhhh... so you think humanity evolved every cognitive faculty imaginable to perceive all that there is in reality?

>>11639881
I haven't read the Prolegomena, but I did read the Grundlegung in my Ethics 101 class and thought Kant was a stupid ass. Kant is a systematic philosopher, so you wouldn't be doing him justice by not reading his magnum opus. His ideas are so out there that it takes hundreds of pages to unpack and defend. Kant is a fascinating philosopher, and the few ways in which he is wrong are highly instructive.

Descartes (truly a stupid ass) did us all a favor by breaking tradition from the Greeks and Scholastics. Instead of reading 2000 years' worth of philosophy to understand Kant, we only need to read ~100. Hume (from whom science has still yet to recover) is also easier to understand if you've read Locke, doubly so if you've also read Berkeley.

>>11639925
Perception is reality

>>11639934
Are you a solipsist? Surely you are not so myopic as to think there are not things beyond what is sensually perceivable

>>11639931
I plan on reading Critique of Pure Reason but i have read that it is more accessible if you read the Prolegomena first.

>>11639956
If accessibility is really your concern, then just read the list before getting straight into CPR. I can't overstate how much it will help you understand Kant — his work is a direct response to those exact people who came before.

>>11639992
Okay, i will forgo my laziness and temper my desire to jump right in. I will read those philosophers first.

>>11640031
Great to hear, anon. I hope you can make a thread in a few months once you've finished. Best of luck.

"Logic" is for pseuds

>>11637373
>Proves objective morality, premptively assblast Stirner and Nietszche while btfoing any other school of moral philosophy
true
>Proves free will, all determinsts btfo
false
>>Proves the existence of god, Dawkins btfod preemptively
false
>Destroys all previous schools of metaphysics in seconds
true
>Succesfully predicts the future of humanity
false
>Forms an essential correct description of the creation of the solar system using newtonian physics, 100 years before his time
true
>Describes string theory in the 18th centuary
might as well be false

>>11637798
good post

nice try kiddo

>>11637721
you think that because you didn't think about it well enough. I was like you. on a side note, if
>Points of justification seem inherently relative and referential, dependent on powers and affects
then there obviously is no objective justification.
but why must the justification a priori exist? it's not that much different, than what Nietzsche calles the edge over that we cannot see, the conditio humana. we CANNOT think and reason in any other way as we are bound by our bodies and minds. the fact that we can share our experience points to a faculty that orders our perceptions in a certain way so that we can share them on common ground. those principles that order our perception is what ultimately make up a priori. what I will give you is that MAYBE, ordering principles can adjust if they prove to return unreliable results.
how does objective morals flow from this? I'm not going to follow Kant here because it would take too much. you could say though in a quick manner, that objective morals don't follow, but what does is that we can come up with a catalog of virtues that if followed, provide a good ground for the livings of humans, that they themselves have derrived from the faculty of reason and have justified a priori, as it is not possible for them in any other way.

>>11638229
>>11638211
just leave this place if you hate it so much roastie, it is as it's supposed to be

>>11637798
Noumena do not exist except as representations. What the metaphysical "ground" of noumena are (the soul? the soul's "faculties?" who knows, presumably except God?), and what metaphysical realities noumena "refer" to, if any, have nothing to do with Kant's concern for noumena in the critique.

Also, noumena are thoughts, not intuitions, so noumena are not intuited but thought. Thoughts have merely regulative and not constitutive status, i.e., existence is not predicated of them.

Strictly speaking Kant's critique COULD be correct, at least in this respect. Frederick Beiser makes a good point that Kant's critiques, including Jacobi there for example, can tentatively be split into two groups: those who took the critique seriously "on its own terms" and those who attacked one of its underlying principles. Schulze and Jacobi for example don't take Kant seriously on his own terms, but balk at the initial premises of those terms, namely by repeating the pre-Kantian insistence that the truth criterion of knowledge is its correspondence with external objects. No matter what Kant says, he can't argue with that, because he is indeed a sceptical or critical idealist for whom the truly outside, truly real world is only ever known indirectly. Maimon however takes Kant seriously on his own terms and explodes the architectonic internally, a much more serious critique in a sense because he shows that even if you accept Kant's premises, he still ends up begging the Humean question (i.e., how do our universal ideas apply to particular things? simply becomes, how do our universal categories apply to particular intuitions?). I think Maimon's critique ends up being more interesting and pushes us toward a higher reconciliation.

But I also think that the former group of critics hit on a very important point for all Kant criticism: What is the relationship, for Kant, between the representing faculty as a FORMAL condition of representations, and as a CONSTITUTIVE or really existing "thing" that "causes" representations? Is Kant claiming to predicate both existence and a causal status of the representative faculty, the ground of predication, which he also says can't be represented? That's what most of these critics thought he was doing, but he insisted he was being merely formalist. But then the question becomes: What is the ontological status of the architectonic revealed by the deduction? Is it just a heuristic description of representation "as it appears," a phenomenology that observes and describes but doesn't aver any metaphysical existence? If that's the case, why this phenomenology and no other?

>>11637700
Do you honestly think he will?

>>11637613
Like the other posts said, Kant quite doesn't prove free will, but he does indicate that human freedom cannot be intuited (basically, visualised) OR logically conceived by our discursive minds. So Kant is in a big sense the philosopher most friendly to the concept of human agency and radical free will, actually an unusually rare thing. He doesn't try to reconcile the conceptions and thought experiments in which we try to imagine free will with a model of free will (e.g., as in some kind of compatibilism), but flatly states: the reason we can't come up with a satisfactory model in this way is simply because our minds are built to intuit and conceptualise determinate entities, determinate relations, etc. Our minds are built to look at the world and see it as a causal unity, completely conditioned, with an original, unconditioned term at the "top" or at the origin.

By doing this, Kant is trying to put a stop to hundreds of years of very confused or pessimistic discussions of free will, especially in Leibniz and his followers, and in Spinoza. Leibniz essentially says that our conceptualisation of reality is incomplete or imperfect, but that if we HAD perfect and complete knowledge (as God does), we'd see the necessity and interconnection in everything, and contingency would drop away. For example we'd ultimately be able to see how all concepts (as "monads," and also including individual persons) contain really all their apparent particularity and contingency as a necessary aspect, for finite observers, of their universal wholeness. Even our perception space and time is only the imperfect, effectively blurred conception of what is really a necessary unity. The apparent contingency of the universe is actually all accounted for by a preordained harmony between monads established by God.

The problem with this is that Leibniz and Leibnizians have argued away contingency, rather than explaining it. They then have to do weird mental gymnastics to make room for freedom, because why would freedom need to exist if you have a perfect harmony of monads whose concepts are self-sufficient, non-contingent wholes? Spinoza does a similar by thing by creating a perfectly logical (so it was said, anyway) deduction of reality from a depersonalised and mechanically unfolding God. Where do freedom, contingency, and individuality fit into that? They don't, is the simple answer. Seen under the right aspect, nature is one giant mechanism unfolding, determinate from its first move to its last. Only our finitude allows us to see ourselves as contingent in an everyday sense, but the eye of God or of the careful philosopher can see the harmony of necessity in everything. Leibnizians and Spinozists both obsessed over the all-reducing power of the principle of sufficient reason and the principle of non-contradiction, from either or both of which all of nature could be reduced to an original state from which all else followed contingently.

>>11641585
People tried for years to overcome these things with all sorts of compatibilisms, occasionalisms, often very vulgar and unappealing theories that didn't do much to shore up the implicit atheism and anti-humanism of the other philosophies, which had the prestige of rational necessity about them. So Kant responds to all these by saying: your mistake is not in your reasoning, which is indeed impeccable. Leibniz and Spinoza are indeed good at logic, and logic is indeed a mechanical thing that sees and describes the world as a completely contingent, completely determinate thing; all concepts, all entities as seen by our mind, must be completely determinate, self-sufficient wholes, as in Leibniz's plurality of unitary monads and Spinoza's unitary pantheism. Any human being with a functional mind will "assent" to the completely determinate chain of reasoning, or at least most of it, of either of these thinkers. But that doesn't mean that either of these thinkers is describing "reality." Rather, what they are describing is reality AS SEEN by their mind, which is designed to do this operation, but which has no claim to be seeing God or the soul in their true aspect.

Whenever the human mind sees something in nature, it tries to unify it into an unconditioned whole, tries to "go back up" the causal chain and find the necessary and sufficient reason for any phenomenon intuited. This is the greatness of Newton and of science in general, which Kant wants to argue is innate to us and is actually the glory of our consciousness. But when this way of seeing is applied to humans, it naturally does the same thing. Freedom, being an act that is both contingent (as a response to circumstances in a determinate whole, i.e., it is en-worlded), and non-contingent (i.e., radically free and self-causing), literally cannot even be visualised or expressed logically. Yet we can refer to it and we can experience ourselves as freely acting subjective beings.

>>11641585
>>11641586
Long story short: Just because we cannot observe something or express it sensibly in logical terms doesn't mean it's not there. It may just as easily be a limitation of our capacity for observation and expression. We can't see or prove God, but we have reason to believe in him. This is definitely convoluted and not really satisfying, and one of the main criticisms of Kant by most religiously oriented philosophers was "you have only given us cause to believe AS IF God exists, not THAT God exists, which is pointless." But it's as far as Kant is willing to go, at least in his writings.

Also, Kant's successors futz all this up by re-immanentizing freedom to be something compatibilist or illusory again. They don't like the idea of God or freedom being beyond the veil of thought and intuition, "real" but forever dubitable, so they extend the conceptual to be synonymous with the metaphysical as such, that is to encompass nature itself, and demote free human agency to something like "universal Spirit expressing its rational self-creating autonomy by means of many particular vessels." That's either compatibilism again, or it's just indifferent to freedom and relegates it to an aspect again. They call that "spontaneity" or they call "self-creation" freedom, even if "self-creation" unfolds completely determinately or sometimes randomly and only through emergent complexity or holism.

So in many ways, Kant is one of the few philosophers to respect freedom and individuality not to try to explain them within the conceptual, i.e., to explain them away. He brings right to the fore the fact that we literally cannot cognise freedom. Any attempt to dodge this problem is just a sneaky trick that attempts to obscure the inevitable determinacy by hiding it among complex tangles of causality with plenty of mutually interdependent causes. He's also good for responding to the aforementioned idealists who confuse freedom for "autonomy." (Is a monad autonomous, if it's completely determinate?) Fundamentally, we CANNOT cognise a free act, in the sense that people mean when they think of free will. So, for people interested in a real metaphysics of freedom, or in a mysticism of freedom, Kant is a good starting point. He can prevent you from falling into a lot of dead ends.

>>11641585
>>11641586
>>11641590
rare based post, fuck compatablism

>>11641590
Great write-up, thank you.

>>11641494

Thanks for the effortpost anon, it's much appreciated. Do you have a specific title of Beiser you could recommend if I wanted to dive deeper into this? I'm not the guy you're responding to, and I am by no means a Kant scholar, but I've had a very similar thought myself, merely one concerning causality and the phenomenon/noumenon relation, as I see that as having more serious implications for his moral philosophy.

>>11637373
HAHAHAHAHAHA
Kant was wrong about everything.

>>11637826
(You)

>>11638229
Mojave

>search "Immanuel Kant" on Google Images
>half of the results are portraits of Friedrich Jacobi

why

>>11641402
>>11641459
>>11641494
>>11641585
>>11641586
>>11641590
absolutely great read, thank you.

>>11642686
Kant was unironically an ugly bastard.

>>11642765
And that detracts from his philosophy how?

Sartre was no Adonis either

>>11642582

>>11642729
i just told that whore what she needed to hear but thanks

>>11642803
I never said it did.

>>11642793
based stacy

>>11637168
Frege, Husserl, Heidegger, W.V.O. Quine

>>11641585
>>11641586
*blocks your path*

hilary putnam