Prolegomena to any future metaphysics

[Anonymous No.18790799]

I just finished this, and would love to discuss it with someone. First impression, that weird section in the appendix where Kant spends a couple pages seething about critics, is that typical for him? I've also heard about him sperging out over someone writing a criticism of the categorical imperative. I took a few pages of written notes on the text, what has struck me most is the point he made about Math being, essentially, axiomatic in being based on space and time. Since math is my worst area, I can't help but feel that I am doing myself a disservice by simply accepting what Kant said about Math necessarily existing in the pure concepts of space and time. Other reflections, I was quite lucky to be vaguely familiar with the ideas of Hume, Berkeley and Descartes which he tackled, as I probably would have been lost without that foreknowledge. I had read online that you don't really need anything to read the Prolegomena, since it is basically an intro to the Critique. However I think saying that is a bit misleading. No you don't HAVE to know Hume, Berkeley or Descartes, but a good chunk of the text deals with their ideas. It isn't like you need to have read 100000 pages of either of them to get those ideas either, a post on here could summarize the salient parts. Anyway, Kant is definitely a smart nigga. I would like to go onto the Critique, however it would take forever if I took notes on it at the same time (a forever I do not have to spare) and I can't kick the nagging sense that I won't learn much of anything if I don't take notes.

Other than my immediate thoughts, if anyone wants to discuss any of the central ideas, it would make my night. They're still fresh in my head, and if I say anything tangentially related to "a priori reasoning," one more time to my girlfriend she'll probably leave me, as this book is all I've been jabbering about to her since I started it.

[Anonymous No.18790903]

nobody wants to be my friend :(

[Anonymous No.18791323]

You should skim over the chapter on the immediate reception of Kant's work in, if I'm remembering right which book it is, Fate of Reason. Specifically the one about the Garve/Feder review and maybe the Aenesidemus critique. Kant was bitter because he spent ten years, "the silent decade," working on the CPR which he felt was revolutionary and a much needed response to contemporary crises in science and philosophy, and it was immediately ignored and misunderstood.

In fact it was worse than that because Kant was really working on it for 20 years, and the crises he was trying to address were even beginning to eclipse him personally and professionally in the figure of his own student, Herder, and his other friend, Hamann, who had abandoned the enlightenment and its rationalism for an unscientific mysticism. Hamann was also Herder's teacher so Kant was pissy. Also from Kant's letters yes he seems to be a bit of a spiteful bitch, like when Swedenborg didn't reply to him properly he seems to have gotten bitter. Hard to say though.

The initial reception of the CPR was lousy though. Nobody really noticed it the way we would think they must have, looking back. That's why there are two editions of the first critique, the A and B versions you now see collated into one super-edition in most modern versions (best in the new Guyer/Cambridge edition). Aside from being generally ignored, Kant was baffled that Garve/Feder misunderstood him as a Berkeley style idealist. To be fair to Berkeley, nobody really understood or gave him a fair shake (nobody does even today), and this was intended to imply simplistic metaphysical idealism. So Kant's attempt to dethrone naive metaphysics was misunderstood as yet another naive metaphysics. That pissed him off, and the Prolegomena and 2nd edition of the CPR are the result.

>what has struck me most is the point he made about Math being, essentially, axiomatic in being based on space and time.
Just remember, it is axiomatic in a certain sense, i.e. it is a priori (prior to external experience), but it is not axiomatic in another sense, i.e. it is synthetic (non-tautological, aka cannot be acquired simply by expanding existing concepts into their components). The whole 12 = 7 + 5 NOT being an analytic part of the concept "12" thing. Kant is fascinating on maths because the whole analytic tradition wants to draw upon his analytic/synthetic distinction for slightly wonky reasons but then they are forced to deal with his explicitly synthetic, not analytic, view of mathematical truths. Brouwer is an interesting mathematician who later took seriously Kant's attempt to derive mathematical foundations from something other than simplistic rationalistic analytical/tautological deductions.

[Anonymous No.18791331]

>>18791323
(cont)
You should definitely try tackling the Critique. It will put hair on your balls and make you a real man. It's not even impossibly hard either, as you are saying yourself, you already feel that you have handholds and points of ingress. It will still fucking break you the first time, but not in the way the Phenomenology of Spirit does where you simply accept that it's a fever dream and not meant to be "gotten." The CPR can definitely be gotten, and once you hit the critical mass point you feel like you've taken apart a car or a gun and put it back together again, which not only gives you a sense of accomplishment but changes how you see other machines too. Suddenly you realise every good "architectonic" is a machine like this one and can be taken apart too.

You can always learn more though. Every few years I reread Kant and feel I never really got him until THIS time.

I highly recommend Guyer's editions, plus anything by Beiser (Fate of Reason), plus Cassirer's life of Kant. Oh and one thing that helped me tremendously in understanding the hardest part of the CPR, the infamously opaque parts on the transcendental schema and the imagination: Sellars' essay on "one plausible interpretation" of Kant's intended meaning.

[Anonymous No.18791375]

>>18790903
sorry man, good thing you are hyped about this but I just cant deal with this shit
I'm a phil undergrad and just took a year off because I just cant stand these niggas talking non stop crap
fucking faggots
but thats just me
have fun with Kant, its really cool when you keep going and see how far he took his autism

[Anonymous No.18791421]

>>18791331
>infamously opaque parts on the transcendental schema and the imagination
I dont know what part this is.
Can you list this with that page thing, like A186/B199?

[Anonymous No.18791462]

>>18791323
>>18791331
I've saved the recommendations you've posted, as I am on my own with my interest in Kant, and can use any level of guidance anyone can offer. So, firstly, thank you for what you've offered.

I am, if you can further explain, interested in the reception of Kant's work by his contemporaries (purely from a place of curiosity). Was he an established academic by the time he published the Critique? Did the Prolegomena successfully rehabilitate the former tome among his intellectual peers? And were people just incapable of understanding his ideas, or did the lack of appreciation/understanding of the CPR have a lot to do with the infamous (though I cannot attest to it personally) complexity of the text itself?

Further, if you can explain, did Kant have as bitter of a rivalry/antipathy for Hume as I felt he seemed to from the Prolegomena. Even within the introduction, I couldn't help but feel that he had a distaste for Hume's epistemological arguments. More specifically, he charged Hume with making an egregious mistake in arguing against Deism by presupposing an anthropomorphic God. Now in terms of Hume I have only read his ideas on innate knowledge and skepticism, so I wasn't sure what Kant was referring to in particular.

Either way, I thought the Kant made a whole lot of sense. I have been grappling with the question of certain knowledge for a long time now, months even, and reading someone who seems pretty smart basically say "yeah we can know what things really really are, but we can know what we see is something we can work with, and here is a compelling argument why,".

[Anonymous No.18792113]

>>18791421
I think around A140/B180 mainly, but there's a whole wiki page for just the schema that is pretty helpful:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schema_(Kant)

This is the article I mentioned:
http://www.ditext.com/sellars/ikte.html

>>18791462
Everybody's on their own with Kant my friend. Glad if anything I can say helps point you in some useful direction.

>interested in the reception of Kant's work by his contemporaries
Beiser is absolutely best for this. Most of his books are in some way about the reception of Kant's watershed in German philosophy and his main ones are focused on it directly, like Fate of Reason and Struggle Against Subjectivism.

>Was he an established academic by the time he published the Critique?
Yes, he was an established and respected if not groundbreaking professor in the Wolffian-Leibnizian tradition, and like many others at the time he was also extremely interested in natural science and kept up with latest developments as much as he could. He was a huge fan of Newton (as all 18th century STEMbros were, seeing him as the 18th century Einstein who found the skeleton key to reality pretty much). At some point he wanted to make a physics textbook for young people with Hamann. He also was one of the first proposers of the (correct) nebular hypothesis of solar system formation due to angular momentum, using Herschel's observations. So he was always interested in the clash between the exciting and breakaway developments in contemporary science, and the older philosophical frameworks for understanding wider metaphysics, and the orthodoxy in his place and time was the Leibnizian rationalism and logicism he gradually began to critique from inside it.

>Did the Prolegomena successfully rehabilitate the former tome among his intellectual peers?
I'm not sure about its reception specifically, but I do know (again from Beiser) that Kant didn't get much attention still until the release of the second edition and when a fellow Leibnizian rationalist philosopher named Reinhold wrote a series of "letters" on Kant that popularised Kant's philosophy while also subtly misinterpreting it as still being within rationalism. Kant was indebted to Reinhold but sensed that he hadn't quite gotten him. This process repeated itself weirdly often as Kant seems to have had hot and cold relationships with figures supposedly appreciative of him, like Solomon Maimon, Fichte (whose anonymous first essay was so Kantian it was mistaken for Kant, but who then quickly became an absolute idealist and pantheist). Kant was more of an Enlightenment figure so he seems to me not to have noticed or to have detached himself from the 1790s fervor around his work by the romantics around Goethe and the Schlegels. The Schlegels were more Fichtean than Kantian and Goethe wantonly misinterpreted Kant's third critique as platonist mysticism pretty much.

[Anonymous No.18792115]

>>18792113
>And were people just incapable of understanding his ideas, or did the lack of appreciation/understanding of the CPR have a lot to do with the infamous (though I cannot attest to it personally) complexity of the text itself?
A lot of it was its notorious complexity, something people like Schopenhauer and Goethe frankly admit to in their writings and letters. But a lot of it was also creative misinterpretations, intentional and otherwise, like Fichte and Goethe. A lot of "orthodox Kantians," unlike Fichte and Goethe in that they just read and "got" Kant reasonably well, aren't very visible to us because they just weren't what was exciting to people in the days when Fichte was at Jena. Schiller for example was a very good reader of Kant but people pay far more attention to his friend Goethe's misreading of Kant.

But the difficulty and opacity were definitely factors and running jokes even for the "back to Kant" and neo-Kantian movements later on. Although Kant never seems to provoke the same accusations of willful obscurantism that Hegel regularly gets (especially among neo-Kantians).

>Further, if you can explain, did Kant have as bitter of a rivalry/antipathy for Hume as I felt he seemed to from the Prolegomena.
I can't remember honestly, that is interesting though. I will say I have seen claims that Kant never read much Hume or only summaries, or properly read him later on. But I've seen others push back against this more recently.

I know he had a fairly low opinion of the Scottish common sense movement, of which Hume (along with Reid and Beatty) were considered the major representatives, and very popular in Germany around that time, in fact one of the trends Kant (with his science and certainty fetishism) was trying to fight back against by putting science on a new "metaphysical" (transcendental) footing. So maybe he is responding against what he perceived as the overly enthusiastic German common sense / proto-pragmatist philosophers surrounding him, e.g. in Hamann, who combined admiration with Hume and admiration for Plotinus and pietist mysticism. As opposed to Hume directly. I don't remember him being overly snarky toward Hume, and looking back at it now it reads to me like he's being frank that some of Hume's arguments are well-placed and some miss the mark.

I don't think he's defending deism though, I think he thinks deism is meaningless and pointless, just an empty hypostasis of ideas of reason ("transcendental theology" - https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-religion/#KantDeisThei).). It's empty because it proceeds from the ideas of reason (e.g. looking for the highest being, or first being) which normally regulate our inquiries into CONCRETE causal relations, but in order to find the abstract "highest being in general" or "first being in general," which is simply the empty image of that very concept, because we just do not have an empirical content (of God or the divine) to "fill" the abstraction.

[Anonymous No.18793494]

>>18792115
I'm sorry it's been too long (like 8 hours). What do you think of Whitehead and speculative realists?