/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.11853446]

Objectivism is the truth

[Anonymous No.11853469]

>>11853446
remarkable

[Anonymous No.11853488]

>>11853469
I have come to hate Rand even more than I already did. Kant was one of the nicest, most selfless, most rational men of all time. All he ever wanted to do was to search for a truth that all people would be able to accept.

[Anonymous No.11853553]

I agree with a decent amount of Kant's philosophy, but I really don't agree with his notion of a perpetual peace being plausible. Strong peace would result in a highly negative impact on technological and cultural progress.

[Anonymous No.11853567]

>>11853488
seems like a nicer person than rand anyways

picking fights with kant is dorky

[Anonymous No.11853584]

>>11853446
Objectively you can't prove that

[not OP btw No.11853731]

>>11853488
>>11853567
If Rand was right about the gravity of his corruption of the west, and she was, you cannot attack the man's idea hard enough. Kant gave irrationalism teeth. Fuck him. I think part of mainstream academia's problem with Rand is that they fear coming to terms with the fact they were so badly, horrifically wrong about Kant.

[Anonymous No.11853750]

>not blobjectivism
>there's more than one concrete particular blobject (the universe)

[Anonymous No.11853829]

>>11853488
He was pure evil

[Anonymous No.11853838]

>>11853731
>Kant gave irrationalism teeth. Fuck him.
>t. brainlet who literally knows nothing about philosophy
your real enemy should be Hume, the man who literally denied causation.

[Anonymous No.11853862]

>>11853838

> literally denied causation.

No - he denied that belief in causation can be justified by reason.

He instead proposes another mental faculty that is equally, if not more, persuasive than reason: habit.

[Anonymous No.11853911]

>>11853862
>He instead proposes another mental faculty that is equally, if not more, persuasive than reason: habit.

based dave

[Anonymous No.11853921]

I'm suspicious that Rand chose to argue against Kant so that she would appear to amateurs to be at his level of brilliance and influence.

I won't assert this strongly, because I haven't read her, but based on the concepts and tone that I've read her supporters take against Kant, it doesn't suggest that she left them with a deep grasp of his system.

[Anonymous No.11853976]

>>11853921
my guess would be that she had no idea who he was beyond being a convenient strawman to dunk on

[Anonymous No.11854001]

>>11853553
Progress is a sign of instability and discontent with that which one already has. There would be no need for progress in a society which had had all of its needs fulfilled.
>>11853731
Kant sought for the use of reason and absolute objectivity independent of the flaws of human perception to know the truth. He believed that we never "know" the thing-in-itself because we only ever judge it in accord with our preconceptions of things, and the internal classifications for things which we have come to accept. Only the conscious self is capable of knowing itself. He would have rejected any kind of anti-intellectualism, mysticism, or post-modern acceptance of individual truths.
Transcendental philosophy rejects religion and dogmatic ideologies based on sophistic platitudes precisely because they lack both empirical evidence and a logical basis in a priori knowledge.
The reason why Rand rejected Kant is because she never took her time to try to understand him, just like she never looked seriously into Marxism.

[Anonymous No.11854016]

>>11853731
>Kant gave irrationalism teeth
Why? is it. because they don't have to believe in the nouminal?

[Anonymous No.11854134]

>>11853862
You are way off here, nice spacing btw. Hume didn't really give a shit about what you could prove through reason, he was an empiricist. It was the face that causation cannot be found in the real world (i.e. there is no impression of causation) that means belief is irrational; you could come up with all sorts of constructs justifying causation through pure reason. You are right he sets reason aside though, which Kant could never do, which is exactly why I said he was the person who gave irrationalism it's teeth.

[Anonymous No.11854152]

>>11853731
>>11853829
BEHEAD THOSE WHO INSULT KANT!!!!

[Anonymous No.11854236]

>The philosophy of Kant is a systematic rationalization of every major psychological vice. The metaphysical inferiority of this world (as a “phenomenal” world of mere “appearances”), is a rationalization for the hatred of reality. The notion that reason is unable to perceive reality and deals only with “appearances,” is a rationalization for the hatred of reason; it is also a rationalization for a profound kind of epistemological egalitarianism which reduces reason to equality with the futile puttering of “idealistic” dreamers. The metaphysical superiority of the “noumenal” world, is a rationalization for the supremacy of emotions, which are thus given the power to know the unknowable by ineffable means.
>The complaint that man can perceive things only through his own consciousness, not through any other kinds of consciousnesses, is a rationalization for the most profound type of second-handedness ever confessed in print: it is the whine of a man tortured by perpetual concern with what others think and by inability to decide which others he should conform to. The wish to perceive “things in themselves” unprocessed by any consciousness, is a rationalization for the wish to escape the effort and responsibility of cognition—by means of the automatic omniscience a whim-worshiper ascribes to his emotions. The moral imperative of the duty to sacrifice oneself to duty, a sacrifice without beneficiaries, is a gross rationalization for the image (and soul) of an austere, ascetic monk who winks at you with an obscenely sadistic pleasure—the pleasure of breaking man’s spirit, ambition, success, self-esteem, and enjoyment of life on earth. Et cetera. These are just some of the highlights.

Was she right?

[Anonymous No.11854241]

>>11854134

> You are way off here

Nah.

> nice spacing btw

Shucks.

> Hume didn't really give a shit about what you could prove through reason, he was an empiricist

He gave a rotund shit about what reason could prove, actually - he contrasted the sureness of demonstrative reasoning (such as geometry, algebra, and arithmetic) to the uncertainty of sense experience. His very empiricism depended on this contrast.

> It was the face that causation cannot be found in the real world (i.e. there is no impression of causation) that means belief is irrational; you could come up with all sorts of constructs justifying causation through pure reason.

This doesn't oppose anything I wrote.

> You are right he sets reason aside though,

Without dismissing its proper domains of applicability. He supplements rationality.

> which Kant could never do, which is exactly why I said he was the person who gave irrationalism it's teeth.

You need to substantiate this inference; Kant's commitment to rationality is responsible for irrationalism?

[Anonymous No.11854244]

I heard he took it up the ass!

[Anonymous No.11854245]

>>11854236
Vindicated by time and history since passed.

[Anonymous No.11854264]

>>11854236

93% ad hominem attempt to discredit Kant's arguments with presumptions about his motives and psychological state.

7% misrepresentations of Kant's system and what he meant by "reason" and "know" and "duty."

[Anonymous No.11854274]

>>11853731
>>11853829
What is this “Kant was evil” meme

I can’t even think of what you would twist and misinterpret to come to things conclusion

[Anonymous No.11854280]

>>11854274
Moral imperative justifies Hitler and Stalin's actions.

[Anonymous No.11854307]

>>11854280

> Young Adolf reads the dust jacket of Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals.

"Yeah this is obviously totalitarian. I think I want to commit genocide suddenly."

> Three weeks later...

[Anonymous No.11854308]

>>11854264
It's not an ad hominem, she elsewhere argues directly against Kant's philosophy. It's just her explaining why she thinks Kant is evil.

[Anonymous No.11854312]

>>11854241
>Kant's commitment to rationality is responsible for irrationalism?
Did you even read the comment you originially replied to? The "he" was the subject of that sentence, by the way. Hume calls sense experience "perfectly known", by the way.
>The essence and composition of external bodies are so obscure, that we must necessarily, in our reasonings, or rather conjectures concerning them, involve ourselves in contradictions and absurdities. But as the perceptions of the mind are perfectly known, and I have us'd all imaginable caution in forming conclusions concerning them, I have always hop'd to keep clear of those contradictions, which have attended every other system

[Anonymous No.11854320]

>>11853862
>>11853911
samefag redditfag

[Anonymous No.11854321]

>Kant's commitment to rationality is responsible for irrationalism?

road to hell is paved with good intentions

[Anonymous No.11854322]

>>11854308

Too bad the actual arguments weren't posted, then.

Care to detail them?

[Anonymous No.11854355]

>>11854322
>The entire apparatus of Kant’s system, like a hippopotamus engaged in belly-dancing, goes through its gyrations while resting on a single point: that man’s knowledge is not valid because his consciousness possesses identity....
>This is a negation, not only of man’s consciousness, but of any consciousness, of consciousness as such, whether man’s, insect’s or God’s. (If one supposed the existence of God, the negation would still apply: either God perceives through no means whatever, in which case he possesses no identity—or he perceives by some divine means and no others, in which case his perception is not valid.) As Berkeley negated existence by claiming that “to be, is to be perceived,” so Kant negates consciousness by implying that to be perceived, is not to be....

>In a deontological [duty-centered] theory, all personal desires are banished from the realm of morality; a personal desire has no moral significance, be it a desire to create or a desire to kill. For example, if a man is not supporting his life from duty, such a morality makes no distinction between supporting it by honest labor or by robbery. If a manwantsto be honest, he deserves no moral credit; as Kant would put it, such honesty is “praiseworthy,” but without “moral import.” Only a vicious represser, who feels a profound desire to lie, cheat and steal, but forces himself to act honestly for the sake of “duty,” would receive a recognition of moral worth from Kant and his ilk.
>This is the sort of theory that gives morality a bad name.

[Anonymous No.11854372]

>>11854312

>Did you even read the comment you originially replied to?

A few times, to make sure I wasn't making presumptions.

> The "he" was the subject of that sentence, by the way.

Yeah, I got that the second "he" of that sentence was referring to Kant, and the first "he" referred to Hume. What's the significance of this?

>Hume calls sense experience "perfectly known", by the way.

That's a very misleading way to describe this section of Hume, which is only tangentially relevant to what we've been discussing.

Hume is saying that careful introspection can produce a consistent account of the mind's workings, whereas such consistency is far more difficult in an account of the workings of the external world. This, again, doesn't oppose anything I've written.

The whole passage makes this clear: https://davidhume.org/texts/t/2/2/6

[Anonymous No.11854402]

>>11854372
do you not know the difference between subject and predicate? I'm phone posting at work so I can't get into a quote war with you for a few hours, but Hume absolutely thought sense experience is perfectly knowns because impressions (not ideas) are the basis of all knowledge. if sense perception wasn't perfect we would have no idea how to corrolate ideas to the real world (this is also something Hegel would run with later)

[Anonymous No.11854427]

>>11853488
Nigga what

[Anonymous No.11854446]

>>11854236
The critcism is valid. I won't pretend to know Kant's motivations and biases, but intentionally or not he championed dubious metaphysical distinctions -- which are indeed used to perpetuate and fortify an epistemological egalitarianism.

I doubt he was so epistemologically skeptical as the people who use his arguments today to justify dualism and subjectivism, but he definitely had some transcendental notions (pure intuition, universal ethics, etc.) which were incongruent with the rest of his thinking. It is these shoe-horned notions that he seems most loved for these days (at least by anti-empiricists).

[Anonymous No.11854488]

>>11854321

Lay out the logical/historical connection then, brick by brick, so it can be substantiated rather than merely asserted.

>>11854355

> man’s knowledge is not valid because his consciousness possesses identity

For Kant, human knowledge is valid for the physical universe, because human consciousness has the particular characteristics (identity) it happens to have; it senses spatiotemporally, it thinks logically, it rationalizes syllogistically, etc.

> Kant negates consciousness by implying that to be perceived, is not to be

Rand insists that being-in-itself is the only legitimate type of being. This is an illegitimate demand, because we cannot dismiss the fact that we are individual, subjective minds, and I cannot escape my mind's functions (my mind's "identity") - in order to access something-as-it-is-when-it's-not-being-known-in-my-mind.

[Anonymous No.11854499]

/lit/. The only place you can put your philosophy degree to use.

[Anonymous No.11854510]

>>11854355

> In a deontological [duty-centered] theory, all personal desires are banished from the realm of morality

Nope. Personal desires are necessary for the complete fulfillment of human life, and are allowed to result from moral action. But you can't make moral laws based on personal desires, because such desires can widely vary from person to person, whereas laws need to apply to everyone equally. So personal desires ought not overcome moral duty (if they ever happen to conflict), but they're not inherently conflicting.

> a personal desire has no moral significance, be it a desire to create or a desire to kill

Rand, again, conflates Kant's arguments about happiness with his arguments about morality; satisfying desires yields happiness, while satisfying duty yields moral righteousness, the *worthiness* to be happy. They are distinct (the first arises from the faculty of sensibility, the other from the faculty of reason) but should operate in harmony. He argues that if everyone prioritizes happiness, following their individual desires above all, then everyone's multifarious goals will conflict, yielding net unhappiness; but if everyone prioritizes the moral law, it will yield greater happiness than any other system.

> For example, if a man is not supporting his life from duty, such a morality makes no distinction between supporting it by honest labor or by robbery.

Actually it distinguishes that other people will be made less happy by robbery than by honest labor, and that is not insignificant.

> If a manwantsto be honest, he deserves no moral credit; as Kant would put it, such honesty is “praiseworthy,” but without “moral import.”

Rand phrases this too vaguely. Why does the man desire to be honest? So he can bask in the pride of his reputation for honesty? That has no moral worth for Kant (though it's important that the rights of other people won't be infringed by being misled, as they would have been by a liar, and in this way an immoral truth-teller is better than an immoral liar). Or does he desire to be honest so that everyone (himself included) can pursue their actions with utmost freedom of self-determination? Then his honesty has moral worth. And if this latter desire is what settles his decision, then its moral value is not compromised by the accessory expectation that his honesty will bring him a good reputation; he can morally take pleasure in this reputation in such a case.

> Only a vicious represser, who feels a profound desire to lie, cheat and steal, but forces himself to act honestly for the sake of “duty,” would receive a recognition of moral worth from Kant and his ilk.

No and no - this is a beginner's misunderstanding. Kant says that such a person provides a very clear example of the difference between prioritizing human pleasure and prioritizing the moral law, but he does not say that the only way to be moral is to lack all philanthropy.

I do appreciate the more substantive arguments, though.

[Anonymous No.11854565]

What the fuck is Rand's beef with Kant?

[king stannis baratheon first o(...) !9fB.6ikQAA No.11854567]

objecvism perverts PHUSIS...A = A iff there is a being for which Being is an issue to let this A "BE" A and acquire identity...she fails to not ethe centrality of the mind to the concept of the ethical and falls into the CARTESO-SPINOZAN trap...her rejection of KUNT, THE GOBLIN-MASTER OF KONIGSBERG, is a consequence of KUNT's failure to overcome the CARTESO-SPINOZAN attitude...his obsession with number leads him to misunderstand TIME..in truth, the form of TIME has less to do with ARITHMETIC than does the form of SPACE--THE TRUE ESSENCE OF THE FORM OF TIME IS

[Anonymous No.11854571]

>>11854567
6.66.../10

[Anonymous No.11854579]

>>11854001
>There would be no need for progress in a society which had had all of its needs fulfilled.
Yeah this, in an ideal world everyone would WANT to be conservative because that would mean nothing would need to be changed.

[Anonymous No.11854593]

>>11854402

>do you not know the difference between subject and predicate?

I do.

> Hume absolutely thought sense experience is perfectly knowns because impressions (not ideas) are the basis of all knowledge.

There can be knowledge of impressions, yes - I never contested this - but there can also be fallacious inferences from impressions, as I think we'd agree. Impressions of sense and relations of ideas are separate, but complementary (when all works right), bases of knowledge.

> if sense perception wasn't perfect we would have no idea how to corrolate ideas to the real world

I think this is an ambiguous way to phrase it, because Hume agrees with the classical skeptics that sense impressions alone can present illusions, like those perspective and refraction, when not corrected by reason.

You seem to keep bringing up what you think are objections to what I've written.

[Anonymous No.11854604]

>>11853731
>part of mainstream academia's problem with Rand is that they fear coming to terms with the fact they were so badly, horrifically wrong about Kant.
I think you've got it. It's not because she's shit, and lacks any intellectual rigor, and writes dreadful novels. The reason no university in the entire world teaches Rand is because they can't handle the truth

[Anonymous No.11854610]

>>11853446
I think shes means Hegel...

[Anonymous No.11854615]

>>11854499
You can write random quotes on your customers' Starbucks cups.

[Anonymous No.11854620]

>>11854604
>I think you've got it. It's not because she's shit, and lacks any intellectual rigor
And who says, this? The Leftist infested Academia with Tranny Doctors?
She is one of the most influential right-wing thinkers in United States corporate/republican thought.
That's why she is ignored in Academia, she is so repugnant and vile to them.
It's not about truth, it's about progressives being very fucking prejudiced to any other kind of thought than neo-marxist/liberal.

note: I don't care about her.

[Anonymous No.11854625]

>>11854620
>She is one of the most influential right-wing thinkers in United States corporate/republican thought.
You realize that neither the Republican party nor the American business community are interested in the pursuit of the truth, right? Both work with sets of facts to accomplish their goals, but that's about it. Someone can be well respected by powerful people and still be an idiot who contributes nothing useful to the life of the mind.

[Anonymous No.11854637]

>>11854620

> Academics never teach or publish about thinkers they intellectually disagree with and/or personally dislike.

[Anonymous No.11854640]

>>11854593
>I never contested this
You literally did, you called it "misleading"
>sense impressions alone can present illusions
Yes, Hume wasn't retarded. The point is that impressions lead to ideas; sense perception is the very basis of reason, we only gain reason through experience, sense experience. You are retreating too quickly for me to even try to debate your points at this point.
>’Tis certain that the mind wou’d never have dream’d of distinguishing a figure from the body figur’d, as being in reality neither distinguishable, nor different, nor separable; did it not observe, that even in this simplicity there might be contain’d many different resemblances and relations.

[Anonymous No.11854641]

>>11854637
Applies for European and American Academia. And if they do it's condescending review of what a dumb fuck rural retard right wing faggot the thinker was and how he was secretly tranny with one testicle.

[Anonymous No.11854642]

>>11854641
You're going to think that I'm insulting you when I say that you don't know what you're talking about because you've never been to college, but I'm not trying to insult you. You don't know what you're talking about because you've never been to college.

[Anonymous No.11854644]

>>11854642
Great, what I needed, progressive master telling me what a low breed stupid faggot I am. No bias there, no sirree.

[Anonymous No.11854660]

Randfags are niggers

[Anonymous No.11854674]

Statistical probabilities being what they are don’t you find it a little unusual that there should be so littlevariation, in all of these supposedly-independent Academic studies taking placein Humean ought space, as produced glorious variety of supposedly-independent universities?

They all move to same direction in same pace, they disagree on nothing divisive, they come to same conclusions on everything divisive..

Just makes me think. Don't listen to me, I don't have formal education, I'm just low IQ mutt who needs to be locked up for being xenophobic racist.

[Anonymous No.11854676]

>>11854644
What universities do you people go to? I went to a very left wing Canadian university as a straight white male and had no issues at all. The professor that taught me Ethics was a traditional Catholic.

[Anonymous No.11854679]

>>11854676
I'm low IQ mutt I will get into school, ignore me. I shart in the mart, like all rural retards

[Anonymous No.11854684]

>>11854679
>I will get into school
Look the rural retard can't even spell!

[Anonymous No.11854744]

>>11853488
t. Kant

[Anonymous No.11854819]

>>11854620
I agree with you. Rand is the most important thinker of the 20th century and it's only due to a vast conspiracy involving thousands of academics across hundreds of universities that she's not more widely taught.

[Anonymous No.11854837]

>>11854819
She is important in context I specified.
I think it's more of an selection issue that all of Academia can be summed up as left-leaning parasite, not really a "conspiracy theory" in the sense that "Jews did it".

[Anonymous No.11854850]

>>11854837
>all of Academia can be summed up as left-leaning parasite
Exactly my point. This spreads across hundreds of institutions. Nobody in the history of thought has ever criticised Kant before, not a single person, and nobody has ever made the case for capitalism, so these leftists have to suppress Rand or they would never find work again

[Anonymous No.11854859]

>>11854850
The only capitalist analysis in the universities of my country specific is from marxian, socialist, democrat-socialist vein.

If you even suggest something like, *GASPS*, Friedman (let alone Rothbard) you will be ostracized as nazi.

[Anonymous No.11854868]

>>11854859
That's good because monetarists and Austrians are both retarded and only status seekers put stock in their proclamations.

[Anonymous No.11854872]

>>11854868
wtf i now love socialism

[Anonymous No.11854876]

>>11854236
>There are actually people who believe this retard
The entire Kantian project is the very result of the epistemological product of appearances, which is not to suppose a general basis of superiority or inferiority, but the general basis of human reason from a categorical perspective. To assume "appearances" as an object of criticism is to ignore the basis for how Kant's thought originated, and likewise combines it into Berkeley's subjective idealism for no apparent reason.
The noumenal, also, is called by Kant as a negative concept: an understanding posed entirely of experience, with any positive indication of noumena being ultimately vague in actuality (Kant was not willing to pursue the positive sense of noumena, because of the unlikelihood of any necessity to its possible existence).
The thing-in-itself is not recognized as the prominent characteristic separated from the cognition, but instead is the recognition of an outside relation of objectivity, in conjunction to the activity of human existence.

[Anonymous No.11854953]

>>11854859
These days, if you don't think reactionaries and kulaks should be rounded up and shot, you can't get a job at a university, not even as a janitor. Like if you don't swear on a copy of Das Kapital that your mission is to dismantle white supremacist capitalist imperialist patriarchical hegemony you won't be employed by any university in the world, such is the iron grip these mooching leftists have on our institutions of higher education

[Anonymous No.11854964]

>>11854640

> you called it "misleading"

I called it misleading for you (>>11854312) to cite that section of his writings as a relevant source on this issue, because there he's talking about the knowability of a kind of introspection, not the knowability of all kinds of sense experience full stop (which your words, in their ambiguity, could have included for all I knew). Since you yourself recognize that

>Hume wasn't retarded

you could have summarized his views in a way that acknowledged his accounts of sensory illusions and experiential fallacies, if you cared to show you knew what you were talking about. You do seem to understand Hume pretty well, when you take the time to summarize more specifically, so don't get annoyed at others when you write like a novice.

> The point is that impressions lead to ideas; sense perception is the very basis of reason, we only gain reason through experience, sense experience.

If that was your point, it was not obviously summarized by what you previously wrote about it; maybe in your mind it was clear, but the rest of us don't already know your meaning.

Yes, impressions are the basis to which we apply our reasoning, but I'm unaware of any place where Hume says that reason is derived from sense experience, if this is what you're claiming. This was the original point - whether Hume gave a shit about reason, and I believe he does. He is not so absolute in his empiricism as to deny that the human mind associates ideas in innate ways - ways that are not taught by experience, and that allow for demonstrative sciences as opposed to merely habituated causal expectations.

> You are retreating too quickly for me to even try to debate your points at this point.

No, I had remained in the same place, drawing attention to how your posts were predominantly vague or missing the point or both. That final excerpt is related to the issue of deriving ideas from sense impressions and applying rationality to their associations, and if all of your posts had been equally clear and relevant then I don't think we'd be arguing.

[Anonymous No.11855180]

Ayn does what Immanuel can't.

[Anonymous No.11855667]

>>11855180
Kant never got married, and neither did Rand.

[Anonymous No.11855917]

>>11853584

Objectively overlooked post.

[Anonymous No.11855953]

>>11853446
>kant
>objectivism
pick one

>>11853469
most pseud shit ive ever read written by the ultimate pseud and pseud-bait

[Anonymous No.11856135]

>>11854620
>It's not about truth, it's about progressives being very fucking prejudiced to any other kind of thought than neo-marxist/liberal.
i unironically believe this

[Anonymous No.11856343]

some one the worst arguing I've ever come across

[Anonymous No.11856353]

>the sheer amount of Jewish shills in this thread

[Anonymous No.11856362]

>Blessed is the lion which becomes man when consumed by man; and cursed is the man whom the lion consumes, and the lion becomes man.

[Anonymous No.11856370]

>>11854565

Probably daddy issues. He was almost as autistic and hideous as she was.

[Anonymous No.11856549]

>>11854565

Would Kant think strangling her is against the Imperative?

[Anonymous No.11856783]

Unironic OC. Again.

[Anonymous No.11856941]

>>11856783

Use very carefully.

[Anonymous No.11856947]

>>11856783
>>11856941

I shouldn't even be posting this one.

[Anonymous No.11857003]

>>11854446

> he championed dubious metaphysical distinctions

What makes them dubious, in your judgement?

> which are indeed used to perpetuate and fortify an epistemological egalitarianism.
>people who use his arguments today to justify dualism and subjectivism

Through misapplication maybe?

> he definitely had some transcendental notions (pure intuition, universal ethics, etc.) which were incongruent with the rest of his thinking.

How are those incongruent? They were foundational to his system.

[Anonymous No.11857158]

>>11856783
>>11856941
>>11856947

RIP

[Anonymous No.11858286]

>>11854510
Deontology first must establish that there is a source alternative to biases and consequences from which rules are derived -- and it hasn't. The impetus for a society with equally applied laws is desire (for peace, happiness, eudaimonia, etc.) which is then reasoned upon.

>>11857003
If sense impression is suspect, then there is no grounds for certainty on our nature or whether or not we are continuous with and observing aspects of an objective reality. Pure intuition is an attempt to skirt this problem, but since everything is delivered to us via sense impression -- including intuition, awareness and sense of self -- it is not a solution and is at odds with his skepticism.

It is the assumption of special knowledge which can precede experience that leads to distinctions like is/ought and a priori. Since no one has properly demonstrated the source of such knowledge, these distinctions remain dubious (at least in a hard-boundary sense).

Given the technical uncertainty of sense impression, the best we can do is to favour knowledge that is demonstrable and predictive. The problem of induction only prescribes that we remain open to new information, it is not prohibitive of empirical (especially with no other apparent source of knowledge).

[Anonymous No.11858310]

>>11858286
>Pure intuition is an attempt to skirt this problem, but since everything is delivered to us via sense impression -- including intuition, awareness and sense of self -- it is not a solution and is at odds with his skepticism.
Does Kant affirm that intuition is delivered to us through sense impression, or is this just your understanding of the concept?

[Anonymous No.11858429]

>>11853446
The original butthead

[Anonymous No.11858444]

>>11858310
Kant does not demonstrate how a type of intuition is discrete from or containing of sensation. Would a person born blind and immobile truly have the same intuition of space as we do? Furthermore, if sensation is contained by pure intuition and we do not perceive it, then pure intuition is noumenal and we can't speculate about its nature with certainty.

[Anonymous No.11858459]

>>11858444
>Kant does not demonstrate how a type of intuition is discrete from or containing of sensation
Textual evidence?
>Would a person born blind and immobile truly have the same intuition of space as we do?
I don't know, what does Kant have to say about this?
>Furthermore,
Whoa, whoa, whoa! What about blind people's intuitions of space?

[Anonymous No.11858510]

>>11858459
The 'futhermore' point doesn't rely upon resolution of the previous query. Feel free to address it if you can.

I'm not going to spoonfeed you or play the authority game. If you are familiar with Kant's work then employ his arguments to the contrary; if you aren't, then make your own arguments.

[Anonymous No.11858517]

>>11853731
>jews accusing other people of corrupting the west
o i am laffin

[Anonymous No.11858544]

>>11858286

> Deontology first must...

First let's remember that I was refuting the particular arguments that Rand was quoted as making. If you want to bring up other issues with deontology, then fine - but these are different from what was previously objected.

> Deontology first must establish that there is a source alternative to biases and consequences from which rules are derived -- and it hasn't.

Kant argues that deontological ethics is grounded on the human ability to set its own goals - with autonomy, with spontaneity, with dignity, with freedom. This is the source, apart from the biases and consequentialism of desire, that determines the moral law.

If you object to this rationale, then fine - give your counterargument(s). But if you're claiming that a basis hasn't been offered, then your'e wrong.

> The impetus for a society with equally applied laws is desire

Kant agrees with this; the capacity to set goals is a capacity of desire - and the right way to set goals is to do it rationally.

> (for peace, happiness, eudaimonia, etc.) which is then reasoned upon.

Okay, but you need arguments to support this. If particular conceptions of "peace, happiness, and flourishing" are given priority, and reason is used as a mere instrument of their delivery, then you need to argue that these conceptions would be agreed upon by everybody; but the multitude of people have very different conceptions of what their peace, happiness, and flourishing involves (what you imagine to be your fantasy life can be very different from what your neighbors imagine their fantasy lives to be). So it's better to make rational law the priority, so that everyone is afforded the same rights to maximally actualize whatever they individually imagine their fantasy life to be, in compatibility with their neighbor's fantasies. It's not that "gratifications ought to be rationally excused," but instead "reasons ought to be gratified."

THAT is the principle you need to refute.

[Anonymous No.11858552]

>>11858510
>The 'futhermore' point doesn't rely upon resolution of the previous query. Feel free to address it if you can.
How about you address it? You could support your argument that way.
>spoonfeed
Ah yes, providing textual evidence from Kant's vast body of work that would support your very specific claim would be "spoonfeeding" me.
>If you are familiar with Kant's work then employ his arguments to the contrary
If you're so familiar with Kant then you should be able to provide a little bit of textual evidence to support your own arguments. You're not familiar with Kant and I can tell because you think that his concept of intuition is only related to the perception of space. His concept of intuition includes the forms of both time and space. To demonstrate its invalidity, you ought to address both categories. Furthermore, the roots of these forms are (according to Kant) not sensation and thought but arithmetic and geometry, respectively. But you should know this.

[Anonymous No.11858579]

>>11853469
Something something jews children of satan

[Anonymous No.11858659]

>>11858286

>If sense impression is suspect, then there is no grounds for certainty on our nature or whether or not we are continuous with and observing aspects of an objective reality.

Only if you agree that the faculty of sensation is the final decider of truth. If, however, you agree that the faculty of reason is the final decider of truth, then you can allow reason to reflect upon sensation, correcting any errors it might make.

> Pure intuition is an attempt to skirt this problem,

How? It's only the recognition that all sensations occur within determinate forms (specifically, space and/or time). Is this controversial? Do any sensations non-spatiotemporally?

> everything is delivered to us via sense impression -- including intuition, awareness and sense of self

Awareness and sense of self also require the categories of the understanding, for Kant. It would be impossible for mere sense impression to deliver these cognitions.

Also, sense impressions are the human kind of intuition; intuitions are not the human kind of sense impressions. This is an important distinction, because for Kant it is logically possible that other kinds of minds intuit non-sensibly.

> It is the assumption of special knowledge which can precede experience

No, no. There isn't any knowledge that precedes experience. Knowledge begins with experience - and it is only after we have been experiencing for a while that we can rationally reflect upon this experience, to philosophically recognize the preconditions that such experience required all along. It is only from experience that we can learn the difference between is/ought and a priori/a posteriori. This is what Kant argues.

> Since no one has properly demonstrated the source of such knowledge, these distinctions remain dubious (at least in a hard-boundary sense).

Kant recognizes that we can't demonstrate everything, including the original sources of the human mind's faculties. At best, we can trace our mental functions to original, inexplicable powers (like sensibility, understanding, and reason) and rest content with this farthest-possible investigation of transcendental psychology.

So if Kant's system is dubious for that reason, then so is every philosophy ever; or can anyone explain everything about everything?

> Given the technical uncertainty of sense impression, the best we can do is to favour knowledge that is demonstrable and predictive. The problem of induction only prescribes that we remain open to new information, it is not prohibitive of empirical (especially with no other apparent source of knowledge).

I don't think this part conflicts with Kant's project.

[Anonymous No.11858700]

>>11858552
You still haven't made a counter-argument.

>>11858544
Your refutation included:
>But you can't make moral laws based on personal desires
Yet this is exactly what we do, we base moral laws upon prevailing biases.

Doesn't free will have to be demonstrated first? What is 'freedom', freedom from what? How does dignity precede desire? A basis may have been offered, but it was not demonstrated.

I don't argue that such conceptions are agreed upon in exactitude by everybody, because they aren't. Universal ethics is a spook, morality is about working with the overlap of our interests. There is no metaphysical superiority of the society's interests over the murderer's, the issue is the consequences of those opposing biases. Rational law is a tool for enforcing normative bias... Yes, our biases can be informed by rationality in a feedback loop, but bias is the source point.

[Anonymous No.11858712]

>>11858444

> Kant does not demonstrate how a type of intuition is discrete from or containing of sensation.

Have you read any version of Kant's Transcendental Aesthetic?

> Would a person born blind and immobile truly have the same intuition of space as we do?

If that person's mind could receive no sensory data in spatial form, then that person wouldn't be conscious of spatial dimensions - and this wouldn't challenge Kant's system in the least. This is why is why he is careful to say that although cognition undeniably BEGINS WITH experience, it does not therefore DERIVE FROM experience. An individual could have a priori faculties that are never given the chance to activate, due to a peculiar condition of the individual that nonetheless isn't typical of the capacities of the individual's species.

> Furthermore, if sensation is contained by pure intuition and we do not perceive it, then pure intuition is noumenal and we can't speculate about its nature with certainty.

You seem to be assuming the consequent.

> If X is noumenal, then X is not perceivable.

is not the same as

> if X is not perceivable, then X is noumenal

[Anonymous No.11858728]

>>11858700
>You still haven't made a counter-argument.
You haven't made an argument. Like 95% of /lit/ you have no idea what an argument looks like.

[Anonymous No.11858741]

>>11858700
>Yet this is exactly what we do, we base moral laws upon prevailing biases.
Not according to Kant
>A basis may have been offered, but it was not demonstrated
Why not?
>Universal ethics is a spook
nice

[Anonymous No.11858813]

>>11858700

> Yet this is exactly what we do, we base moral laws upon prevailing biases.

Fine. Kant recognizes a distinction between what we do versus what we ought to do - similar to his distinction between happiness versus the worthiness to be happy.

> Doesn't free will have to be demonstrated first?

Yep. Firstly, Kant argues in the antimonies of the first critique that free will can't be disproven. Secondly, he argues in the second critique that the direct feelings of moral obligation and guilt are only possible if we have free will; if we feel we ought to do something, then we can do it - so these feelings imply freedom. Personally I find this to be among Kant's least convincing arguments, but it's bound up with the rest of his whole enterprise so you really have to grapple with the total system in order to dismiss it.

> What is 'freedom', freedom from what?
> How does dignity precede desire?

I'm willing to discuss this further, but are you the anon (>>11858510) who wrote

> I'm not going to spoonfeed you or play the authority game. If you are familiar with Kant's work then employ his arguments to the contrary

[Anonymous No.11858827]

>>11858659
Reasoning requires experience of properties in the world like consistency and distinctness. 'Logical' and 'true' would have no meaning without experiencing certain relations. So I would posit that sensation is the only way to apprehend truth, and all abstraction is founded upon a base of sensation.

>How? It's only the recognition that all sensations occur within determinate forms (specifically, space and/or time).

The issue is that this recognition itself is predicated upon sense impression and thus experience. If pure intuition modulates the sensory but is not perceived itself, then it is noumenal and there is no way to speculate about its nature with certainty. No source of pre-experiential knowledge has been demonstrated.

>No, no. There isn't any knowledge that precedes experience. Knowledge begins with experience - and it is only after we have been experiencing for a while that we can rationally reflect upon this experience, to philosophically recognize the preconditions that such experience required all along. It is only from experience that we can learn the difference between is/ought and a priori/a posteriori. This is what Kant argues.

Neither distinction stands without a source of pre-experiential knowledge. If all concepts are initially formed by experience, then there is no a priori and no reason to conclude the existence of a category 'ought' which not subsumed by 'is'. If our recognition of the preconditions of experience is nonetheless delivered via experience, then it is similarly suspect and we have not escaped induction.

>Kant recognizes that we can't demonstrate everything, including the original sources of the human mind's faculties. At best, we can trace our mental functions to original, inexplicable powers (like sensibility, understanding, and reason) and rest content with this farthest-possible investigation of transcendental psychology.

If we can make such progress on explaining such powers with neuroscience, then I see no reason to favour transcendental explanations. If we accept the base uncertainty of sensory apprehension, then transcendental explantions are likewise affected and demonstrable/predictive explantions are to be favoured as more probable.

[Anonymous No.11858865]

>>11858813
>I'm willing to discuss this further, but are you the anon (>>11858510) who wrote
>> I'm not going to spoonfeed you or play the authority game. If you are familiar with Kant's work then employ his arguments to the contrary
He is, both of the posts linked to in your own (>>11858813) yield me (You)s. I'm the guy he doesn't want to spoonfeed.

[Anonymous No.11858968]

>>11858712
>If that person's mind could receive no sensory data in spatial form, then that person wouldn't be conscious of spatial dimensions - and this wouldn't challenge Kant's system in the least. This is why is why he is careful to say that although cognition undeniably BEGINS WITH experience, it does not therefore DERIVE FROM experience. An individual could have a priori faculties that are never given the chance to activate, due to a peculiar condition of the individual that nonetheless isn't typical of the capacities of the individual's species.

How does he know this? How does he know that experience doesn't actively shape our mental capacities (which neuroscience suggests it does)? I don't see a hard boundary.

>You seem to be assuming the consequent.

Is 'pure intuition' perceiveable? If it is, then we are informed of it via experience which is technically suspect. If it is not, then we still only infer it on the grounds of experiential knowledge. No certainty of knowledge is established, nor certain boundary with experience.

>>11858813
The point is that the is/ought distinction is not a hard one. Any sense of what we ought to do still descends from what is and our biases. At best, 'oughts' can be thought of as objective calculations of consequences, but some preference will still apply to the pursuit of various consequences.

>I'm willing to discuss this further, but are you the anon (>>11858510 (You)) who wrote

Yeah that's me. I wasn't expecting you to answer those questions, nor quote Kant with respect to them. Just pointing out the proliferation of assumptions. I see no reason we can't discuss the foundational without appealing to authority. If Kant was right and you grasp his thinking, then you should be able to demonstrate his positions without direct reference.

[Anonymous No.11858975]

>>11858968
>I see no reason we can't discuss the foundational without appealing to authority.
This is a discussion about Kant, not about your own personal assumptions about the concepts of duty, reason, and knowledge. Nobody gives a fuck about your masturbatory ramblings.

[Anonymous No.11859042]

>>11858975
It's a discussion about his ideas, not what he ate for breakfast. If his ideas have merit and you have grasped them, it should be trivial for you to argue from those positions on your own, in specific detail. If you can't or won't, just go away.

[Anonymous No.11859072]

>>11859042
I'm not going to spoonfeed you :^)

[Anonymous No.11859101]

>>11859072
There's no equivalence, you were responding to articulated propositions but unwilling to articulate yourself. You are a pitiable creature.

[Anonymous No.11859107]

>>11859101
The propositions you articulated were mostly just your own baseless opinions. When prompted to support them you refused to do so and kept fabricating garbage sophisms to distract from your own lack of knowledge about the actual subject matter (not “fundamentals” themselves but a few specific points in Kant’s theories of ethics and metaphysics).
I have no respect for you

[Anonymous No.11859251]

>>11859107
You are are the one in assertive mode. My propositions were logical and informed, and you refused to engage with them in detail (probably because you lack the capacity to do so). You attack me and demonstrate nothing -- very transparent.

I have no desire to be respected by those such as you.

[Anonymous No.11859360]

perfect thread to prove Ayn Rand right kek

[Anonymous No.11860260]

>>11858968
>Any sense of what we ought to do still descends from what is
You have this exactly the wrong way around. There is no objective 'is' which exists in any palpable way. There is only recursive discourses of power and ideology, and for every practical purpose, 'is' is a product of 'ought'.

[Anonymous No.11860292]

>>11860260
> Everything is power and ideology
tips fedora

[Motoko No.11860310]

There's a story about how Kant cheated a professor of philosophy out of his job because he wanted that job.
I don't know how true it is but I believe it.

[Anonymous No.11860450]

>>11860260
>makes objective truth claim about what is to deny the existence of an objective is

[Anonymous No.11860463]

>>11859251
You’re an idiot and I don’t think you’ve read Kant at all

[Anonymous No.11860542]

>we now know human beings don't have free will
>modern day people who agree with Kant's categorical imperative still think we ought to do certain things
lol, brainlet tier thinking

[Anonymous No.11860908]

>>11854565
She read the title "Critique of Pure Reason" and chimped.

[Anonymous No.11860912]

>>11853488
>All he ever wanted to do was to search for a truth that all people would be able to accept.
It's always the ones with the most naive outlooks on life who are the most dangerous. No one can just want to search for truth.

[Anonymous No.11860920]

>>11854280

what kind of brainlet do you have to be to belive this?

[Anonymous No.11861067]

>>11860908
From Philosophy: Who Needs It alone, Rand clearly read and understood him better than even the most devoted of Kantian scholars. Which is why her conclusion of him was so radically different; she figured out what Kant's philosophy actually amounted to vs what it purported to amount to.
-Kant's failure to differtiate perception and conception.
-The fallacy of the analytic/synthethic "dichotomy"
-The contradictions in the very premise of the categories.

Rand's discovery of psycho-epistemology, the intrinsic/subjective/objective trichotomy, and the new logical fallacies she identified alone make anything Kant ever did even if you DO accept his premises pale in comparison. There is one reason and one reason only why Rand is gatekeeped so hard in universities: meta-capitalist philosophy must NOT be allowed a foothold in academia.

[Anonymous No.11861112]

>>11861067

[Anonymous No.11861316]

>>11853488
>using "rational" as an unconditionally positive quality
*tips*

[Anonymous No.11861334]

>>11861316
it is.
fuck you and your feefees

[Anonymous No.11861340]

>Be Kant
>Logically deduce that an objective world must exist for anything to exist at all
>Articulate this point using thousands of lines of carefully organized and impeccably exact reasoning that leaves nothing out
>Niggas still mad

[Anonymous No.11861357]

>>11861340
He has the conclusion right, the path there is wonky and wrong

[Anonymous No.11861684]

>>11860542
>>we now know human beings don't have free will
We don't know this at all. We have no conclusive evidence to support this

[Anonymous No.11861740]

>>11861334
True 'rationality' is impossible. What makes something irrational or rational is determined by power structures rather than any objective 'rationality' connected to the thing in question

[Anonymous No.11861783]

>>11861740
oh yeah rationality is just capitalist construct and we all need to be communist rhizomes in a horizontal bottoms up organization sharing our ass to our fren

[Anonymous No.11861813]

>>11861783
That's right anon, only white supremacist capitalist patriarchal logic and rationality is real, everything else in irrational and illogical

[Anonymous No.11862784]

>>11858827
>>11858968

>Yeah that's me. I wasn't expecting you to answer those questions, nor quote Kant with respect to them. Just pointing out the proliferation of assumptions.

If anyone had quoted Rand's foundational principles, or any other Objectivist principles, I would have responded at an equal level. But the quotes themselves must have been built upon unprovided assumptions (and incorrect assumptions, as I wanted to point out) because they were not a criticism from first principles - there might have been a lot of preliminary writing of Rand's that was left out. I responded in like kind based on what was provided.

> I see no reason we can't discuss the foundational without appealing to authority. If Kant was right and you grasp his thinking, then you should be able to demonstrate his positions without direct reference.

It's not about appealing to his authority - it's about appealing to his actual beliefs, unlike Rand's caricatures. This thread was literally designed in opposition to Kant, my responses are completely appropriate; opposition to him is fine if its legitimately argued. And of course I'm going to support my counterarguments by referring to sources.

>Reasoning requires experience of properties in the world like consistency and distinctness. 'Logical' and 'true' would have no meaning without experiencing certain relations. So I would posit that sensation is the only way to apprehend truth, and all abstraction is founded upon a base of sensation.

Kant's argument is that unless your mind is already structured to reason and understand in set ways, you'd never become conscious of anything; the consistency, distinctness, and logicality of experience is recognizable by your mind because your mind imposes it in the very act of experiencing. You couldn't even have understandable sensations to assess the truth value of, and to abstract from, if your mind didn't impose spatiotemporal order on the raw sensations it receives.

Otherwise, why should mathematical and logical formulas that are provable in your mind apply with equal necessity to the outside universe? Why should you know that objects you encounter have a causal history, rather than existing with absolutely no explanation? How do you even know that the outside universe of objects exists? These are problems Kant designed his system to resolve.

We can question the success of his project, but I'm doubtful that Rand really conveyed a proper understanding of it.

[Anonymous No.11862812]

>>11858827
>>11858968

>The issue is that this recognition itself is predicated upon sense impression and thus experience.
> If we accept the base uncertainty of sensory apprehension, then transcendental explantions are likewise affected and demonstrable/predictive explantions are to be favoured as more probable.
>If our recognition of the preconditions of experience is nonetheless delivered via experience, then it is similarly suspect and we have not escaped induction.

That's a strong argument - I think Maimon tried, and maybe succeeded (I haven't read him), to refute Kant's transcendental deduction along a similar line.

But if such recognition discovers a priori laws of thinking that are the basis of mathematical and logical proofs, Kant argues, then that recognition is reliable to the same degree of self-evident necessity that characterizes the strongest proofs the mind is capable of. There are necessary mental processes that provide a foundation to all the variable aspects of experience and thinking, including induction. When the variabilities are abstracted away, the necessary laws self-evidently remain. Rand herself was a fan of the axioms, no?

>If pure intuition modulates the sensory but is not perceived itself, then it is noumenal and there is no way to speculate about its nature with certainty.
>Is 'pure intuition' perceivable?
>If it is not, then we still only infer it on the grounds of experiential knowledge. No certainty of knowledge is established, nor certain boundary with experience.

Again, just because something isn't perceived doesn't make it noumenal. Magnetism isn't perceived, yet Kant maintains we can infer its existence based on the behaviors of other phenomena that is perceivable. As with such empirical inferences, we can justify the inference to unperceivable forms of perception (like space and time) without that making them noumenal. I'll again refer you to the Transcendental Aesthetic; one of the arguments you'll find there is that we can imagine removing all objects from within space and time, but we cannot imagine removing the empty domains of space and time themselves. Thus, they are a priori forms - that is, they are operations of the mind itself, so the mind can't get rid of them.

Kant points to this indispensability in order to defend the certainty of spatiotemporal order; pure space and pure time ARE your mind at work, so there can be nothing more certain than their characteristics. He supports this by continually giving examples from mathematics, a paradigm of certain knowledge, arguing that the certainty of mathematical proofs is derived from the spatial or temporal origins of mathematical objects - like geometric objects.

[Anonymous No.11862832]

>>11858827
>>11858968

> The point is that the is/ought distinction is not a hard one.

Personally I'm sympathetic with this view, but my goal here isn't to describe my own beliefs, but to examine whether there are Objectivist refutations of Kant that are actually based on a proper understanding of his system.

>How does he know that experience doesn't actively shape our mental capacities (which neuroscience suggests it does)?
> If we can make such progress on explaining such powers with neuroscience, then I see no reason to favour transcendental explanations.

Because the nervous system is still only a spatiotemporal object - so like the rest of the universe you experience, it arises within your mind, rather than your mind arising within it. This is a core principle of idealism, so no matter how far empirical science goes, it will never reach the deeper level of transcendental argument. If transcendental explanations are invalid - as they may be - they'll have to be refuted logically.

Discoveries about how neurological anatomy and electrochemistry are correlated with cognition aren't sufficient to challenge Kant; he didn't question that there is a relation between consciousness and the brain - he questioned whether the relationship was one in which consciousness is a consequence of physical events, rather than vice versa. If a person's mind changes with brain trauma or surgery, or intoxication, or even just a temporarily strong influence of natural hormones, Kant can account for this by saying that these phenomena are the spatiotemporal appearances of whatever relations hold in the domain of things-in-themselves, where the being-in-itself of every mind (and every thing) is. In principle it's no different from the philosophical account he'd give of any other event in nature.

[Anonymous No.11862954]

>>11858827
>>11858968

>Neither distinction stands without a source of pre-experiential knowledge. If all concepts are initially formed by experience...

They're not. The mind operates by multiple a priori concepts, pure functions of thinking (whereas space and time are the mind's pure functions of sensing). Among these are the concepts of unity, plurality, necessity, negation, substance/accident, cause/effect. The empty structure of these concepts is innate, and that structure is filled in by sensations that have themselves been structured (but spatiotemporally). These pure forms of thinking and sensing are among the sources of pre-experiential knowledge (though since it's not actually possible to have knowledge before experience, it's better to call them pre-experiential sources of knowledge). The source of the concept of ought is in a pure form of reason; this concept is revealed in our experience of conscience, and after reflecting on how we ought to treat other persons we discover the pure law of morality, the categorical imperative.

[Anonymous No.11863689]

>>11861813
this but unironically

[Anonymous No.11863735]

>>11861067

>-Kant's failure to differtiate perception and conception.
>-The fallacy of the analytic/synthethic "dichotomy"
>-The contradictions in the very premise of the categories.

What are her arguments?

[Anonymous No.11863765]

>>11862832
>>11862812
>>11862784
Based student of philosophy

[Anonymous No.11864374]

>>11862784
Fair enough, as I said earlier -- I don't believe Kant was as epistemologically skeptical as many take him to be. I don't agree with Rand that he was evil, but I do agree with her about the consequences of Kant's philosophy and the flaws in his distinctions.

Certainly, we are 'wired' to sense in certain ways, but it is a stretch to go from:
-our mind being structured to recognize such properties and relations
to
-our mind 'imposing' these properties and relations upon our experience.
There is no certainty to this assumption. We can't know to what an extent -- if at all -- a mind could read such properties into an experience of void and nothing else, for example. How much of experience is a pre-existing filter of the mind and how much is the mind being structured in response to stimuli? Why does he tend to treat consciousness and reason as binary states, and not as potentials that develop in continuity with sensation? He didn't establish the certainty/a prioricity and hard boundaries that he imagined.

Formulas are only provable in your mind once you have experienced external relations, so of course those proofs relate back to the world. We aren't strictly certain that causality and the external world are what they appear to be. How would establishing the nature of our perception resolve this? There is always the possibilty that our perception and faculties are limited in ways we can't imagine.

We haven't escaped induction, but this hasn't been so much of a problem as extreme epistemological skepticism has been. We can take the caution that we can always be wrong and still accept that empiricism is the only apparent path to knowledge.

[Anonymous No.11864447]

>>11862812
I don't think it's been demonstrated that there are 'laws of thinking' or that the basis of logical systems is intrinsic to our minds. I don't see how the potential for recognition actually constitutes knowledge. It is possible that this same potential could adapt in various ways to a universe with different kinds of relations (provided they weren't so different or in specific ways that we died outright).

Yes, you're right there, I misapplied the concept of the noumenal. The problem still remains though, that we can't be certain we are apprehending/inferring the entirety of what pure intuition is, which I think puts the very concept on shaky ground.

Again, I think he's assuming that our concepts of space and time are actually produced by our recognition potential. Without any objects for reference (including our own bodies), space would no longer be apparent and our experience of time would be significantly altered. We don't know to what extent our assumptions about those domains are reliant on memories of past experience as opposed to emerging directly from our sensory potential.

Mathematics would only be certain knowledge if it was truly self-contained, which it is not. It is built upon experienced relations. If certain relations/properties changed tomorrow, existing math would only be true in relation to the old universe.

[Anonymous No.11864503]

>>11862832
How do you establish the certainty of the direction?
mind --) nervous system
nervous system --) mind
I understand Kant's proposition -- and it is logical -- but I don't see how he establishes certainty or even greater probability? How do we say with certainty what the mind is, or what the self is, or what thinking is?

>>11862954
That hasn't been established. What is a 'pure function of thinking' or even a 'pure function' and where is the hard boundary between it and experience? Kant is assuming many distinctions and abstractions that do not necessarily follow.

[Anonymous No.11864575]

>>11864374
>>11864447
>>11864503
Still not a single quote or citation

[Anonymous No.11865250]

>>11864575
Your reading hasn't done you much good if you can't manipulate these ideas on your own.

>"Space is not an empirical concept which has been derived from outer experiences. For in order that certain sensations be referred to something outside me (that is, to something in another region of space from that in which I find myself), and similarly in order that I may be able to represent them as outside and alongside one another, and accordingly as not only different but as in different places, the representation of space must already underlie them. Therefore, the representation of space cannot be obtained through experience from the relations of outer appearance; this outer experience is itself possible at all only through that representation."

Kant observes that we have an innate capacity for recognition of basic relations, but does not demonstrate:
-that these capacities come fully formed vs. being informed by and structuring in response to stimuli
-That our perception wasn't first ordered by existing relations/properties that preceded us.
-That potential recognition itself is the most significant aspect of representation -- constituting a 'pure form', as opposed to being one facet of a necessary integration/continuity. There is no reason to suppose that the outer experience would be any more possible without real external relations.

It is entirely fair to say that the structure of the mind necessarily shapes the experience to some unknown extent... Beyond that, his contentions/conclusions are speculative and assumptive. He never establishes the certain category of knowledge he seeks.

Are you happy now? Of course not, because you don't really care if I quote Kant, you just want a low-effort way to shit on someone you don't agree with. Well fuck you too, pal.

[Anonymous No.11865291]

>>11853469
All of Ayn Rand's philosophy are just retarded statements with no explanation why the statement is right other than "lmao, read Aristotle".

[Anonymous No.11865305]

Kantbros please fucking explain why the Third Critique was "necessary" to posit the imagination as the mediating faculty between intuitions and the understanding

Why is organic form so necessary? Why did everyone think Kant hadn't actually resolved Hume's problem of how the universal/rational relates to the particular/empirical? Why does an aesthetic/teleological solution work?! What the fuck

[Anonymous No.11865495]

>>11865291
Pretty sure she hadn't read Aristotle either. At a push she might have read Russell's History of Western Philosophy or something like that

[Anonymous No.11865500]

>>11865305
because Kant needed value and something to bridge pragmatic and pure reason + it ties to Kant's central thesis of "OBJECTIVY != OBJECT"

[Anonymous No.11865678]

>>11865250
You say he doesn’t demonstrate those things, but that’s one paragraph from a very dense philosophical output spanning a lifetime. I’m not even a Kantian but you’re misrepresenting him.

[Anonymous No.11865868]

>>11865678
Well, I haven't found where he provides such demonstrations... But obviously you have, since you know I'm misrepresenting him. So perhaps you can point to them, or summarize them yourself (bullet points are fine, I'll follow up).

Or more likely, you don't know what you're talking about but are for some petty reason compelled to make your non-contribution.

[Anonymous No.11865947]

>>11865868
There’s no reason to get indignant. Plenty of people think that dismissals like the ones you’re making count as legitimate critiques. It’s not my fault you’re wrong. You’re convinced that your notions are correct and Kant’s, wrong because he doesn’t endorse your position. I don’t care what you think.

[Anonymous No.11866133]

>>11865947
If you can't point to how I'm wrong or how he's right, or make a logical argument yourself -- then you're not saying anything. That's the bottom line.

You couldn't be more vague if you tried, and your passive-aggressiveness is truly repulsive.

[Anonymous No.11867588]

>>11864374
>>11864447
>>11864503

> as I said earlier -- I don't believe Kant was as epistemologically skeptical as many take him to be. I don't agree with Rand that he was evil, but I do agree with her about the consequences of Kant's philosophy and the flaws in his distinctions.

This probably has something to do with how his philosophy was portrayed and misunderstood as more skeptical than it was. I haven't read Jacobi but I get the impression he was responsible for a good deal of this early on. Hopefully Rand doesn't exaggerate his skepticism in the course of her criticisms. Hopefully.

> Certainly, we are 'wired' to sense in certain ways, but it is a stretch to go from:
-our mind being structured to recognize such properties and relations
to
-our mind 'imposing' these properties and relations upon our experience.
>There is no certainty to this assumption.

It would be a stretch if Kant left the inference at that, a mere assumption - but he develops the inference extensively, including in the ways I've previously described. Mathematical and logical relationships known mentally are equally known of the external world; physical laws like causality are known with a certainty that mere induction could never give them; the very existence of the external world is bound up with the activity knower's mind, so the former can't be skeptically doubted any more than the latter.

>Mathematics would only be certain knowledge if it was truly self-contained, which it is not. It is built upon experienced relations. If certain relations/properties changed tomorrow, existing math would only be true in relation to the old universe.

Are you saying that we learn the laws of mathematics inductively, and we might discover that in some physically anomalous section of the universe, 2+2 doesn't equal 4? Or that maybe next week, the universe will start to change so that the logical axioms of identity and non-contradiction do not apply? I'm truly not trying to make assumptions about what you're arguing, given the course of our discussion, but I'm really not sure what to infer from the claim that mathematics (and logic, as I have been mentioning) could change as the properties of the universe change. What properties do you have in mind?

[Anonymous No.11867621]

> How much of experience is a pre-existing filter of the mind and how much is the mind being structured in response to stimuli?
>I don't think it's been demonstrated that there are 'laws of thinking' or that the basis of logical systems is intrinsic to our minds. I don't see how the potential for recognition actually constitutes knowledge.
> That hasn't been established. What is a 'pure function of thinking' or even a 'pure function' and where is the hard boundary between it and experience? Kant is assuming many distinctions and abstractions that do not necessarily follow.

It's not that he just makes all these assumptions -
it's that they require hundreds of pages to explain and defend. As you ask specifically for explanations, I'm happy to give as much detail as my time and motivation allows. But if it seems like a claim hasn't been supported, just ask about it.

The formal aspects of experience comprise the a priori filter; again, we recognize them as the orderly patterns of experience that are so foundational that we cannot mentally discard even when we try. Spatial dimensions and temporal succession - try imagining a sensation without them. Concepts like that of unity ("one," "a"), that of negation ("is not"), that of causality ("was caused by something and is causing something else") - try thinking of a physical object without them. Forms of reason such as logical consistency and mediated inference - try expecting a future outcome or constructing a syllogism or without them.

The self-evident indispensability of these order-imposing mental functions is recognized after philosophical reflection, as I've said; in other words, philosophical reflection cleanses away all of the dispensable aspects of experience that do not belong innately to the mind's functions. Experience displays all ranges of colors, sounds, temperatures and smells - all particular sizes and shapes of objects, all unpredictable sensations to be discovered around the corner or across the solar system or within an uncorked bottle. But no matter what particular sense data we encounter, we know a priori that such data will be structured into objects that have measurable spatial dimensions and temporal durations, that each of these objects (whether blue or red, shiny or dull, dense or vaporous, fragrant or acrid, or any combination imaginable) must be conceived as "one" thing and "not" some opposing thing and must be explainable as "the effect of some cause" while in turn must be "causing some effects," and that whatever unpredictable sensory content future objects and events will have, we can infer with necessity that such content will be ordered into these same forms.

...

[Anonymous No.11867639]

>>11864374
>>11864447
>>11864503

...We can reason about fictional worlds and a different course of historical events, but we cannot reason about anything that violates or abandons the laws of reason; we can understand if an event is not the effect of the cause we first believed (the ripples in the pond were not caused by an acorn from above, but by a bubble from below), but we cannot understand if an event is not an effect of any cause at all; we can imagine space and time being filled by all varieties of color and flavor and sound and touch, but we can't imagine spacelessness and timelessness.

That's one way Kant does it.

> Formulas are only provable in your mind once you have experienced external relations, so of course those proofs relate back to the world.

That's a perceptive response, but if Kant's method had tautologically attributed to our innate mental structure everything that he first noticed in the world, then he would be unable to account for the dispensability and variability of sense data. But he can account for them.

> Why does he tend to treat consciousness and reason as binary states, and not as potentials that develop in continuity with sensation? He didn't establish the certainty/a prioricity and hard boundaries that he imagined.

I think maybe you're the one grasping to assumptions. Very interestingly, Kant wrote that states of consciousness can vary in intensity and clarity, and I believe he uses the analogy of how sensations of light can very from very dim to extremely bright: think of a scale of intellectual intensity that ranges in infinitesimal degrees from idiocy to temporary confusion to the mundane awareness of routine-following to the close attention of a craftsperson to the eureka-moments of insight. Different people will have different strengths of intellect, and may wander along sections of the scale depending on their education or their medical history, but all of these conscious minds will operate by the bare minimum of a priori structure described above; maybe not everyone is as sharp at discovering exact causes to explain events, but everyone is conscious that there is *some* cause for each event, and is aware of this in tandem with all the other a priori forms of consciousness - or else they are so mentally impaired that they aren't conscious.

Also, depending on the different types of objects a mind can be conscious of, the mind's a priori functions can interact in differing ways, producing different states of consciousness; an artistic object can stimulate the aesthetic consciousness of contemplation, while a criminal event can stimulate moral consciousness of blame, and a natural phenomenon can stimulate the theoretical consciousness of scientific inquiry. But again, there must be a minimal threshold of conscious functionality if there is to be consciousness at all - consciousness can't be uncategorizably fuzzy or amorphous.

[Anonymous No.11867654]

>>11866133
t. has no understanding of how philosophy works but thinks it’s just about calling someone wrong over and over again

[Anonymous No.11867671]

>>11864374
>>11864447
>>11864503

> We aren't strictly certain that causality and the external world are what they appear to be. How would establishing the nature of our perception resolve this?

Because to grasp that causality and the rest of the external world are your mind at work, is to grasp that they are as intimately known to you as your own mind is; they are as orderly and understandable and secure as your very consciousness, which is the securest past of you - it IS you.

> It is possible that this same potential could adapt in various ways to a universe with different kinds of relations (provided they weren't so different or in specific ways that we died outright).

That same potential could not, because the potential is what determines the universe it experiences to function as it functions. It's not that humans have an innate mental structure that corresponds with the structure of the human-independent physical universe; it's that there is no human-independent physical universe. For the physical universe to exist IS for it to exist as a representation within human minds.

>The problem still remains though, that we can't be certain we are apprehending/inferring the entirety of what pure intuition is, which I think puts the very concept on shaky ground.
> There is always the possibilty that our perception and faculties are limited in ways we can't imagine.

Kant acknowledges this - remember what I wrote previously (>>11858659) about basic powers. He even wonders about non-human minds and about consciousness in an afterlife (though he insists nobody can claim knowledge about any of this), thinking about how the limits of such minds would differ from our own. But if we have innate functions that we are not aware of, it's not legitimate to fear that those powers oppose the functions that *are* discoverable in experience; we have no logical grounds to think, for example, that some undetectable faculty of ours might be infringing upon our own faculty of logical thought.

[Anonymous No.11867681]

>>11864374
>>11864447
>>11864503

> We haven't escaped induction, but this hasn't been so much of a problem as extreme epistemological skepticism has been. We can take the caution that we can always be wrong and still accept that empiricism is the only apparent path to knowledge.

I'm also sympathetic with this - although I'm not so sure that it's extreme epistemological skepticism that's so blameworthy, despite how objectionable it is on philosophical grounds. On historical grounds, I would expect the disastrous ideologies of the last 200 years to owe more to how popular movements are persuaded and organized - and I don't think most laypeople take the time and energy to become extreme skeptics, or to systematically examine whatever ideology they've adopted, to see whether it rationally connects with their goals, even if the minority of their ralliers are willing to be so exhaustive. Maybe I'm wrong about this. But I think you could raise a population of "extreme skeptics" to be about as brutal or benevolent as any other movement of people.

>How do you establish the certainty of the direction?
mind --) nervous system
nervous system --) mind
>I understand Kant's proposition -- and it is logical -- but I don't see how he establishes certainty or even greater probability?

Kant adds extensive arguments about paradoxes that arise when we treat the physical universe as if it exists independently of the human mind. One example: If the universe exists apart from human experience of it, then the total universe exists on its own as either spatially infinite or spatially finite; there is no rational alternative to these two, yet both are impossible (you can't have an infinite totality - something has to be enclosed, whole, to be total - and if the universe is spatially finite, then it is bounded by nothing, which is also impossible, because then it would have no boundary and would be totally infinite, which it can't be). The only way to dissolve this contradiction is to deny the premise it's grounded on - the premise that the universe exists apart from the human mind - and this can be done by adopting an idealistic system in which the universe exists insofar as it is being experienced by human minds; this experience can progress infinitely, searching out further and further reaches of space, but the universe can never be thought all at once as an infinite total, because the relevant functions of the human mind (the innate concept of "infinity" and the spatiotemporal forms that present sensory objects singularly) cannot operate in such a combination. Kant's paralogisms are full of examples like this. He defends his idealism by using it to resolve other kinds of classical dilemmas too - this is the purpose of the entire Transcendental Dialectic.

[Anonymous No.11867689]

>>11864374
>>11864447
>>11864503

> We can't know to what an extent -- if at all -- a mind could read such properties into an experience of void and nothing else, for example.
>Again, I think he's assuming that our concepts of space and time are actually produced by our recognition potential. Without any objects for reference (including our own bodies), space would no longer be apparent and our experience of time would be significantly altered. We don't know to what extent our assumptions about those domains are reliant on memories of past experience as opposed to emerging directly from our sensory potential.

Kant can compellingly argue that such an experience is impossible; it is our knowledge of individual objects and our experience of their interactions in events that displays the regular, necessary forms of experience as opposed to the variable, contingent content of experience. Only after we have had such experience can we recognize that those orderly forms of the world are the very functions of our consciousness, so for them to be absent is for us to be unconscious. If we have already had our consciousness activated with experience, then we can imagine floating through empty space, starless, experiencing only black expanse and the passing of silent time; but if we never actually had any sensations except those of this void, then our mental life would be equally impoverished of form, impoverished of consciousness - if not utterly unconscious (since monochromatic space at least minimal form - but with no perceivable events to fill time, it would be impossible to distinguish one moment of time from the previous or the next), then at best catatonic. The result in this second case would be a mental state we actually can't imagine.

> How do we say with certainty what the mind is, or what the self is, or what thinking is?

Reflection upon experience, isolating the different aspects of the mind in relation to experience, testing in thought how these aspects can be combined and separated, and seeing whether the new results can solve problems that older systems of philosophy couldn't solve. A lot of the certainty comes from first-person confirmation about what it's like to be a thinker yourself - you the reader can see whether Kant's descriptions match your own subjective experience. That's much of the fun.

Not that I'm as certain that Kant was of the correctness of his system - but he earned his confidence.

[Anonymous No.11867692]

>>11858827
>If we can make such progress on explaining such powers with neuroscience, then I see no reason to favour transcendental explanations.
Wrong. You'd think we aren't the end goal of the Universe, but there is something beyond us within the properties of the Universe, yet to be found. All of that was in the potential and actual origin source of the whole Universe.

[Anonymous No.11868589]

>>11865305

> please fucking explain why the Third Critique was "necessary" to posit the imagination as the mediating faculty between intuitions and the understanding

One reason is that imagination allows for recollection - the passing sensations that you see or hear aren't immediately forgotten, but you can retain them in memory as you continue to experience the unfolding of the artwork. As the music develops, as the dancers move, as the poem arouses internal images, as the surface of a painting or sculpture is scanned and scanned again, the recollections of imagination allow you to continually reflect on the entire progression of the artistic display, in order to seek the exact concept that is adequate to define it. The understanding will never settle on any such exact concept, and this is what keeps the understanding in free play with the imagination - both faculties are in pleasant stimulation, simply having their basic functions exercised in harmony with each other. If sensibility and understanding were left on their own, without imagination, then you could feel the fleeting pleasure of a sweet smell or a savory taste or a vivid color, but these are merely pleasures of gratification, which vanish as soon as the sensation itself does.

> Why is organic form so necessary?

One reason is that it shows that mechanical causality (like Newtonian physics) isn't sufficient to explain all natural objects. Organisms have reciprocal causality among their parts, meaning that the organs of a living thing all depend on one another in order to function over time; if you remove the heart or lungs, the whole organism dies, and if you remove the whole organism, the heart or lungs die. This is unlike the progression of inanimate causality, in which the existence of effects depend on their causes but the existence of causes do not depend on their effects. Kant felt that because organisms couldn't be mechanistically explained, they helped prepare the mind to understand an order of explanation that is separate from nature; in this life we cannot claim knowledge of such a supernatural order, but we can orient our minds towards its possibility by reflecting on the purposiveness of nature.

> Why did everyone think Kant hadn't actually resolved Hume's problem of how the universal/rational relates to the particular/empirical?

I'm not familiar with this historical situation you're describing.

> Why does an aesthetic/teleological solution work?!

Both aesthetics and teleology acquaint the mind with phenomena that it cannot find an adequate concept for; aesthetic objects cannot be completely understood, and teleological objects cannot be completely rationalized, but both are still orderly *enough* to be objects of experience - otherwise they'd be impossible. This lets us interpret all of nature as a purposive order for the advancement of intelligent and moral agents such as ourselves, the goal of which is to prepare us for an afterlife of eternal moral progress.

[Anonymous No.11869577]

>>11867588
I'm saying that once mathematics is abstracted from concrete relations, it then becomes a self-referentially logical system (which doesn't necessarily have to describe the world). It isn't truly self contained though, as it is traceable back to those relations in the world, and experience of those relations is necessary to be able to ascertain logicality or truth in the first place.

In a universe where no spatial dimensions were apparent (disembodied consciousnesses with no indications of proximity to eachother), would math be constructed in the same way and to the same extent? Perhaps they could work out something from intervals in language, but how far could they extrapolate from that to construct geometry like ours? Now say we stumble into an area of the universe where upon entering, all objects fuse into one homogenous being, with a homogenized and continuous stream of sensation (no intervals) of only itself. What would 2+2 describe in such a state? It would still be true self-referentially and would still describe relations in the rest of the universe, but how would our blob-being define 2+2 to equal 4 without apparent distinction?

I am not contending that a universe could exist where non-contradiction wouldn't apply (I can't imagine it), but rather that such laws are not just axioms but observations of how things actually are. Our abstractions (math) are then constructed upon these observations of how things actually are, and if these relations could be different, so would our abstractions of them.

>>11867621
I do not argue against the indispensability and inescapability of those mental functions, but I do question whether that is sufficient grounds to consider them 'pure' (we can't know to what extent they are limited) or necessarily containing of everything else as opposed to being contained themselves. If we are able to theorize correctly about spatiotemporal relations we can't experience (even if we must represent the information in recognizeable forms), then what is the actual significance of the a prioricity of the form of our experience? Obviously it is significant, but where is the hard boundary and what certainties are established only by the form of experience itself? The potential to detect shape does not grant me the capacity to imagine/recognize a triangle without having prerequisite experiences; nor does the potential dictate what I'll perceive (only how) or the entire nature of 'what is' (only the natural limits of my perception).

[Anonymous No.11869787]

>>11867639
I'm not sure about that. Can we not imagine base existence as just being, with no cause itself and no beginning or end, and containing time so as to be timeless (it's abstract, but it seems conceiveable)? Can we imagine space prior to sensory content? Is sense data completely dispensable?

Quite likely I'm grasping at some assumptions, I think it's unavoidable to an extent, and you are definitely better versed in Kant's work than I.

It is agreed that our consciousness is a spectrum of potential experience but always spatiotemporal in nature. The issue still remains of where the hard boundary between that which senses and that which is sensed lies. Does my consciousness actually function without sensory content? If it does not, then how can I know to what extent experience has shaped those functions as opposed to vice versa?

>>11867671
>Because to grasp that causality and the rest of the external world are your mind at work, is to grasp that they are as intimately known to you as your own mind is; they are as orderly and understandable and secure as your very consciousness, which is the securest past of you - it IS you.

Isn't this an assumption of unlimited perception and a bit of composition fallacy? How do we now that there aren't crucial mental functions we aren't aware of, that consciousness is 'us' in a complete sense, and that casuality is only what we infer of it from our limited perception?

>That same potential could not, because the potential is what determines the universe it experiences to function as it functions. It's not that humans have an innate mental structure that corresponds with the structure of the human-independent physical universe; it's that there is no human-independent physical universe. For the physical universe to exist IS for it to exist as a representation within human minds.

Right, now this where Kant skips the rails for me (and probably most who have issues with his thinking). This seems like pure assertion with no certain way to establish precedence. It is entirely coherent to instead suppose that our minds evolved to sense in certain terms because those terms were actual properties of the environment and that our entire cognition has been shaped in response to stimuli. For a mind to exist is for it to exist as an object in a physical universe, and there is no necessary boundary between the two.

>But if we have innate functions that we are not aware of, it's not legitimate to fear that those powers oppose the functions that *are* discoverable in experience; we have no logical grounds to think, for example, that some undetectable faculty of ours might be infringing upon our own faculty of logical thought.

Agreed, but what does the 'purity' of intuition mean if it is not necessarily complete and the content of experience can't be neatly divorced from it?

[Anonymous No.11869795]

>>11853446
his head too big for his face

[Anonymous No.11869858]

>>11854355
>Only a vicious represser, who feels a profound desire to lie, cheat and steal, but forces himself to act honestly for the sake of “duty,”
it seems similar to Nietzsche quote(pic related)
which I agree with a person with no capacity for evil/selfish action (power per se) should not be praised for their (non existant) restraint

[Anonymous No.11870044]

>>11867681
>I'm also sympathetic with this...
Yes, I mostly agree with your assessment. I do wonder though to what extent some philosophical positions have been 'memed' into cultural consciousness by intellectuals. In this way, more abstract ideas could become quite accessible and influential -- even taken for granted as true. Still, I expect that evolving material circumstances are the primary driver and that complex reasoning is usually tacked on ex post facto.

I think such paradoxes can also be resolved by supposing that spatiotemporality exists, that our intuition of it is incomplete and subsequently that our concepts are often inadequate to describe 'what is'. If we posit that the universe is spatially infinite -- quite possibly because spacetime is perpetually generated in a non-intuitive fashion -- then why must it be constrained by a limited notion of totality? It seems the notion of totality applied is likely an artifact of limited perception... Why can't a spatiotemporally infinite universe have variable totality? If totality must be defined as a static and enclosed (by what?) wholeness, then I submit that we have arbitrarily hobbled the concept. The same thing happens in the instance of the finite universe: Why must finite space be bounded, can we not simply look at it as a limited quantity? Are we not contradictorily assuming that 'nothing' is an actual thing -- an actual alternative state to 'something'? Why would a finite universe necessarily have a boundary, could it not curve back upon itself while remaining finite in quantity?

>>11867689
Even with memories of orderly relations, one experiences disorientation in response to a lack of external reference points. Our intuition of orderly relations can produce things like optical illusions which are contrary to knowledge. I agree that experience is crucial to recognition, and also in shaping the nature of a consciousness... Which leads me back again to not seeing the hard line between form and content, sensor and sensed.

[Anonymous No.11870138]

>>11867689
>Reflection upon experience, isolating the different aspects of the mind in relation to experience, testing in thought how these aspects can be combined and separated, and seeing whether the new results can solve problems that older systems of philosophy couldn't solve. A lot of the certainty comes from first-person confirmation about what it's like to be a thinker yourself - you the reader can see whether Kant's descriptions match your own subjective experience. That's much of the fun.

So induction upon impression then; which is indeed fun, but not technically certain.

The only absolute certainty I've been able to arrive at is that everything experienced exists as something, even if the fullness of that something is not perceived. In other words: Some real distinction and being must produce any appearance of distinction and being. The logical component here seems trivial, but I suppose we can also be certain of the soundness of the very basic logic which constitutes a part of (but not not the entirety of) that recognition. This certainty seems to me as the brute a posteriori fact of experiencing anything at all, as opposed to an a priori deduction subsequent to that experience (nor does it seem that treating this distinction as a hard one is sensible).

Beyond this, we technically suppose about the nature of the 'self', 'thinking', the experience of others, and more complex relations.

Yes, self-referential logical systems are certain because they are defined that way, but I question the notions of a prioricity and discreteness assigned to them since they are constructed upon experienced relations (even if those relations are the form of our experience, we can't know that without content).

This brings me back to: Why would we favour transcendental explanations then -- which are at best inherently inductive beyond the brute fact of experience (and at worst prone to assumption and circular reference of concepts) -- over other inductive methodology?


Thanks for sharing your time and knowledge btw -- it's appreciated.

[Anonymous No.11871636]

>>11869577
>>11869787
>>11869858
>>11870044

Appreciated in return! This will probably have to be my final post though, and abbreviated.

One issue we've kept returning to is the experiential abstraction of mathematics and logic - you say that they are therefore necessarily* inductive, and can always be revised or overthrown by future experience.

But notice *this inference of logical necessity! This very inference can't be defended on a wholly inductive, observation-based account of logic; your only absolute certainty, as you describe it, is that your experience of beings that are different from you must be explainable by something that is different from you, but this logical component (which Kant calls the ground/consequent relation) seems too basic to justify your inference ("if a procedure is inductive, then it cannot reveal inviolable a priori laws that make possible inductive procedures"). That's one reason that Kant's answer is that logical laws are in your mind already, and you recognize them in the world and in your thought after your mind has already spontaneously applied them to the structuring of experience. You seem to acknowledge this sometimes (>>11864374 >certainly we are 'wired' to sense in certain ways)

But your question has remained - rightly - whether this innate structure actually helps generate the physical universe, or whether it is merely accommodated to a physical universe that exists independently of it but is structured isomorphically with it. If the universe is separate, then it would follow that the universe could start changing tomorrow, leaving our mental faculties in the dust - but this amounts to a refutation ad absurdum, because even the concept of change assumes the temporal and logical functions of thought that would supposedly be left obsolete, and thinking a different natural order in which 2+2=5 or a=not-a is as impossible as thinking that 2+2=5 or a=not-a in this natural order; your mind can't do it, it's the hallmark of contradictions, which we discard as illegitimate. Kant will insist that the only way to explain the self-evident necessity of logical and mathematical laws is to interpret them as generating the order of the natural universe, not functioning in our mind alongside an independent physical universe.

[Anonymous No.11871699]

>>11869577
>>11869787
>>11870044
>>11870138

The premise of self-evident forms are very important for Kant - his term is "apodeictic" - and again, it's the same self-evidence that allows pure forms to be differentiated from sensory content; "pure" does not mean unlimited (a form can only impose order because forms *are* limits - formlessness is unstructured, unintelligible, impossible to experience) it just means without empirical data. So, for example, while you can only imagine space as filled with some content - like uniform blackness, or whiteness, or redness, or whatever - you can recognize that space does have a pure aspect because the content can be ever-changing and unstable, imagine what you want, but spatial relations, spatial *form*, cannot change with it.

Again, this inductive exercise can still reveal an underlying necessity of spatial relations, he can argue; even thinking about logical axioms is a procedure that takes place over time, that we can do over and over again in application to different experiential situations (maybe your premise or proof is about dogs, or about dollars, or about whatever particular subject) but all this inductive evidence-gathering that provides content to the form of our premise or proof still does not challenge that form's validity, which is self-evidently necessary and a priori.

Wish I could have again answered each of your objections specifically, but that will have to wait for another thread. In the meantime maybe I'll read Rand's relevant writings, or some other Objectivist writings like those I'm already familiar with - but in any case, I'll keep an eye out for you in the future, provided our universe's laws don't invert or subvert or revert before(?) then.

[Anonymous No.11872853]

>>11861740
i think instead of "true rationalism" you ment universal rationalism

[Anonymous No.11873335]

tell me how you have the time and energy to write out posts like that on an Norwegian snime basket weaving forum

[Anonymous No.11873462]

>>11873335

The ideas are life-changing. That's all.

[Anonymous No.11874063]

>>11861740
Power structures are no predicated on arbitraly unfair oppression but competence in field they are based upon

[Anonymous No.11874088]

>>11874063
Which (I should have added) Has to be in tact with objective truth in order to Has real world value /party which uses objective wisdom allways ends up at the top of hierarchy in our objective (by definition) world/

[Anonymous No.11874335]

>>11855667
...
Yes she did. Frank O'Connor. She didn't have children, mind you, but her intellectual heir Leonard Peikoff had a daughter, Kira Peikoff.

[Anonymous No.11874466]

>>11874335
It is somewhat interesting that none of her characters ever have children.

[Anonymous No.11875227]

>>11871699
I suppose it's that I also see the logic as 'built in' to the experience and 'what is', but to an even greater extent than Kant admits to -- such that I don't see how parsing 'laws of logic' from our experience is sensible in a literal way. It is a crucial asbtraction, no doubt -- laying the foundation for deliberate reasoning -- but Kant attempts to make such distinctions concrete ones (my primary objection in all this) so that they can ascertain knowledge outside of our experience to an extent that he hasn't assured.

It is fair to say we can't breach our experienced relations, but it is assumption to say that this is because no other relations can be possible or that this isn't a dependence due to us being produced by those relations. Even if we suppose that any possible life relies on basic relations, it does not necessarily follow that an existence of considerably different relations is impossible, nor that existence is antecedent to experience. Yes, we can say that existence or 'being' itself and any logic which is that simplest notion of being must underlie all... But the bridge between this basic recognition and Kant's transcendental conclusions remains unclear. The apodicticity of such recognitions does not negate the necessitation of experience in knowledge, nor does it grant the certainty that the form of our experience can be generalized to all existence (aside from the brute fact of being).

Cheers, I'll see you around. I think we can bet on the actuality of our universe remaining stable for the time being.