/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.12840103]

Is there a book that explains this guy in one go? I don't actually care enough to read his word salad but I want context for other things I am interested in.

[Anonymous No.12840172]

>>12840103

stop hiding the fact that you kant understand kant, hes so easy baka

[Anonymous No.12840205]

>I want context for other things I am interested in.

you can get this in a paragraph then, kant is a formal idealist who thinks the real world exists but that we can only know it as structured by the conditions of our own experience, i.e., whatever a cube of boron "actually is," our mental apparatus sees it "as" a three-dimensional substantial object, is constrained to see it and think of it in certain ways, and manipulates it according to concepts that we have (which is why logically necessary demonstrations in geometry, mathematics, and abstract/newtonian physics are all possible).

kant's moral philosophy derives from principles of reason likewise built into us, which kant argues basically make enlightenment humanism and science self-evident to us. every person should be seen as a self-legislating and self-responsible agent, every man is entitled to and capable of reason, everything should be evaluated in the light of our shared faculty of reason, etc.

many of kant's most eager readers were young spunky germans living during the sturm und drang period and the french revolution, and they interpreted kant's focus on the "subject structuring the world" as a kind of ethical-metaphysical "heroic pragmatism" meaning that we can reshape reality to make it better, more rational, more complete, we can shrug off mere tradition and orthodoxy and legislate to the world itself according to our free, creative, moral natures - again, contemporary with the french revolution.

[Anonymous No.12840368]

>>12840205
What was his reason for rejecting solipsism?

[Anonymous No.12840401]

>>12840368
When I hear the word solipsism, I think not of Kant, but of René Descartes. He was a Frenchman with a very skeptical nature. Specifically, he was skeptical about how anyone could know anything for certain. For example, our senses can deceive us, therefore they are not to be trusted. He thought — if my senses cannot be trusted, how do I know for sure that anything I perceive actually exists and is not a delusion or hallucination? Come to think of it, how do I know for certain that I exist?

After pondering this a lot, he finally concluded: “Hey! There is no frigging way that all this pondering could be going on without something or someone to DO the pondering. When I think, there must, necessarily, be an “I” that is doing the thinking. I may not know for certain that anybody else or anything else exists, but I can know for certain that I do exist.

That's pretty solipsistic.

Then along came the empiricists, who said: “This precious “I” you’re prating about is just a blank slate. You don't know jack until you learn it through experience in the world of external phenomena.”

So there were these two factions with diametrically opposed, seemingly irreconcilable differences.

Kant bridged the gap between those like Descartes who believed reality is in the mind, and the empiricists, who believed reality lay in external phenomena. Kant said: “The empiricists are correct that objective phenomena are an important part of what we call knowledge, but it isn't true that the mind is a blank slate. In fact, the mind comes pre-equipped with modes of perception such as time and space. The fact that we can not conceive of anything happening without it happening in space and time means these modes are pre-installed without experience.”

So I think that Kant would say that without an “I” to perceive it, external reality would still exist, but knowledge would not.