/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.7761310]

Now that the dust has settled, we can all agree that he's the greatest philosopher of all time, right?

[Anonymous No.7761326]

more like the greatest dweeb of all time

His philosophy leads you to horribly stupid conclusions and he's a terrible writer. For one example, Kant concludes that if a person is hiding in your home from someone who intends to kill her, and that person knocks on your door and asks where she is, you are morally obligated to tell the truth. Anything less is using that murderer as a means rather than an end.

[Anonymous No.7761329]

>>7761310
What is freedom for Kant:
For Kant, freedom is (following Rousseau) is “obedience to a self imposed law”. Randomness not what Kant claims. If it is not mere randomness, then what is it?
- It is a certain sort of following a law, but what kind of rule of law? It cant be a law thats imposed on us from outside by nature, or an external agent. If such a law were imposed on us, then it would conflict with the notion of positive freedom. It must be a law that comes out of our own rational nature, and hence a law that a law that we embrace as our own.

Kant is against ‘heteronomy’ = obedience to a law imposed on the subject by something (e.g., nature) or someone other than the subject itself.

Kant advocates for the autonomy of the subject.
Autonomy: giving oneself the laws, actively embracing the
laws as our own = to exist as a free rational being.
(1) Partial autonomy: the understanding ‘gives’ the laws to nature but is constrained by what sensibility passively received from nature.
(2) Complete Autonomy: We give ourselves the moral law and nothing else is needed.

As rational beings we “give” ourselves the moral law = we obey the law and embrace it as our own (as opposed to an imposed law - heteronomy). Keep this in mind!

- The Noumenal world is the source or seat of autonomy (as required for practical reason); At the same time, the noumenal world is a threat to, or constraint for, the autonomy of theoretical reason. This Noumenal world has 2 different roles, on one hand, it is the source of sensations and the ground of appearances and is responsible for this partial autonomy.

- The Moral Law: Always act so that the maxim of your will could always hold at the same time as a principle establishing universal law.

Kants Discussion of suicide - Plan of action: “From self love I make it my principle to shorten my life if its continuance threatens more evil than it promises pleasure” Could this become a natural law of nature? (could it be added to the other laws of nature?). There is nothing morally wrong with this when it comes to Kant. According to Kant, you should imagine a world where this law is a law of nature. Then you have to ask yourself whether this could coexist with the other laws in that world. He says no, because the nature would contain a contradiction: The feeling of self love in nature has the function to prolong and preserve; this feeling cannot at the same time have the function of destroying others.

a categorical imperative: “Do X!”, regardless of the conditions and aims.
not a hypothetical imperative: “in circumstances Y, do X!” or “if you want Y, do X!”.
-- a ‘formal’ law (to be applied without presupposing values, aims, etc.)
-- not a ‘material’ law (application presupposes particular values, e.g., “do what promotes happiness”). His Moral law will be finished next class.

[Anonymous No.7761336]

>>7761326
hows high schol

[Anonymous No.7761350]

>‘By means of a faculty’ – he had said, or at least meant. But is that – an answer? An explanation? Or is it not rather merely a repetition of the question? How does opium induce sleep? ‘By means of a faculty’, namely the virtus dormitiva – replies the doctor in Molière,

>quia est in eo virtus dormitiva,
>cujus est natura sensus assoupire.

>But answers like that belong to the realm of comedy

N doesn't even bother arguing against him, he just brings him out for a laugh. Greatest philosopher? Please.

[Anonymous No.7761465]

>>7761326
You're actually morally obligated to refuse to answer.

[Anonymous No.7761759]

>>7761350

Kant says that our explanations have to stop somewhere - we have to account for things by means of more basic things, until we can't acess anything more basic. Kant acknowledges that we can never have knowledge of why our mental faculties are constituted the way they are, and can never have knowledge of any common source that our several faculties spring from - because such knowledge would be of our own being-in-itself, whereas we are limited to the knowledge of how we we appear to ourselves. We can have insight into the mechanism of opium's interaction with the brain, because both the drug and the organ are physical objects, and thus conform to the scientific laws of the natural world; but we can't demand the same kind of insight into the mental faculties of ours that provide those scientific laws, and thus that form the natural world - mechanistic physical explanations belong to the empirical level of phenomena, while our faculties belong more to the deeper transcendental level of the thing-in-itself. We can know what results (conscious experience of inner and outer sense) from the cooperative functioning of our mental faculties, but we can only recognize those faculties after we've experienced empirical life for a while through them, by reflecting on our empirical experience and isolating in our thought the formal regularities that have structured that experience all along.

[Anonymous No.7763343]

But J S Mill is the greatest philosopher of all time.