Kant

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Eodnhoj7
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Re: Kant

Post by Eodnhoj7 »

Atla wrote: Tue Oct 08, 2019 4:46 am
Eodnhoj7 wrote: Tue Oct 08, 2019 1:40 am
Atla wrote: Mon Oct 07, 2019 6:19 pm
I mean does the "vs" have a built-in generator now or what.
If cognitive illusions are grounded in a divergence from "reality", thus vs is an underlying function.
Yep which implies a hidden universe-wide mechanism/infrastructure implementing such a 'function'.

No sign of this was ever found of course, besides 'function' is a human-made abstraction anyway, so why the hell would we ever find it. Yet again a really good example of a cognitive fallacy/illusion.

Well really bye now, don't want to disturb your genius at work.
That universal type mechanism which forms that function is cognitive by nature, as the "vs." is strictly an observation of seperation or an intrinsic emptiness to phenomena...this is both abstract and universal. All distinctions through "vs." results in the localization of a phenomenon from another thus resulting in a singularity that is intrinsically empty on it's own terms...thus illusive.

That function is cognitive precisely because it shares the same nature of intelligence: the manifestation of definition with both objective and subjective reality existing through the intrinsic emptiness of assuming other phenomena.

People assume and are assumed by phenomena. So are natural forms such as solids, liquids, gases and plasma.
Atla
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Re: Kant

Post by Atla »

Hmm this quote looks interesting, here Kant seems to have been shown wrong. It's true that our sensations of absolute space and time are indeed sort of 'a priori' cognitive functions, ways how our experiences are constructed.

However there's a twist, all our experiences and 'a priori' cognitive functions are bound to, happening withing Einsteinian spacetime and causality. I don't even quite see how he could have dismissed his era's Newtonian causality and absolute space and time ideas.
The anonymously published work Aenesidemus was one of the most successful attacks against the project of Kant. According to Kant’s teaching, things-in-themselves cannot cause appearances, since the Category of causality can find application on objects of experience only. Kant, therefore, does not have the right to claim the existence of things-in-themselves.

This contradiction was subsequently generally accepted as being the main problem of the thing-in-itself. The attack on the thing-in-itself, and the skeptical work in general, had a big impact on Fichte, and Schopenhauer called G. E. Schulze, who was revealed to be the author, “the acutest" of Kant’s opponents.
nthornton
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Re: Kant

Post by nthornton »

I am just beginning to read CoPR. Thus far, I understand the distinction between a priori and a posteriori being, broadly speaking, empiricism, and that the only perceptions we have a priori are for space and time. Kant, in CoPR claims that the transcendental aesthetic cannot contain more than the two 'elements'. Kant claims that motion cannot be a priori because:

"Motion presupposes the perception of something moveable"

This, for me, is false. We can sense motion before we perceive something as moveable. We perceive motion being awake or conscious; our bodies move. So, I think, 'motion' is a third a priori 'element'.
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bahman
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Re: Kant

Post by bahman »

He is making a distinction between two things, reality as it is and what we perceive.
Veritas Aequitas
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Re: Kant

Post by Veritas Aequitas »

nthornton wrote: Wed Jul 29, 2020 3:44 pm I am just beginning to read CoPR. Thus far, I understand the distinction between a priori and a posteriori being, broadly speaking, empiricism, and that the only perceptions we have a priori are for space and time. Kant, in CoPR claims that the transcendental aesthetic cannot contain more than the two 'elements'. Kant claims that motion cannot be a priori because:

"Motion presupposes the perception of something moveable"

This, for me, is false. We can sense motion before we perceive something as moveable. We perceive motion being awake or conscious; our bodies move. So, I think, 'motion' is a third a priori 'element'.
You cannot judge Kant's argument that hastily until you have read the whole of the CoPR at least 20 times.

In the CoPR what Kant presented is there are only two PURE intuition, i.e. PURE a priori elements, space and time and he argued why only two.
There are various a priori elements as in the Categories.

You have to read further to understand how Kant dealt with the concept of 'motion' [in relation to Newton's & Leibniz] in detail why it is an empirical concept and not a PURE intuition.
Atla
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Re: Kant

Post by Atla »

nthornton wrote: Wed Jul 29, 2020 3:44 pm I am just beginning to read CoPR. Thus far, I understand the distinction between a priori and a posteriori being, broadly speaking, empiricism, and that the only perceptions we have a priori are for space and time. Kant, in CoPR claims that the transcendental aesthetic cannot contain more than the two 'elements'. Kant claims that motion cannot be a priori because:

"Motion presupposes the perception of something moveable"

This, for me, is false. We can sense motion before we perceive something as moveable. We perceive motion being awake or conscious; our bodies move. So, I think, 'motion' is a third a priori 'element'.
Don't know the details of that, but you can safely ignore anything Veritas says, he reads everything 20 times because he can never understand them.
odysseus
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Re: Kant

Post by odysseus »

Atla
Phenomena = appearances, and noumena = things-in-themselves, so far so good (if I understood correctly).

But did he understand that technically and objectively, all phenomena are noumena (the noumena in the human head)? So some of the noumenon is directly 'knowable'.
Of course one cannot know noumena. That was the point. Noumena are not "in the head"; they are rather an abstraction inferred from phenomena, that is, a conclusion grounded in the reasoning that there must be something that representations are "of" but since time and space are the apriori structures of all experience and these are presupposed by any and all ideas, anything "outside" (an impossible word in this context, really) of time and space (all apriority is, of course, subjective) is unthinkable.
If you want something close to "direct" knowing of "things themselves" (not IN themselves) you should read Husserl. See his Cartesian Meditations, Ideas, and others.
odysseus
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Re: Kant

Post by odysseus »

nthorton
I am just beginning to read CoPR. Thus far, I understand the distinction between a priori and a posteriori being, broadly speaking, empiricism, and that the only perceptions we have a priori are for space and time. Kant, in CoPR claims that the transcendental aesthetic cannot contain more than the two 'elements'. Kant claims that motion cannot be a priori because:

"Motion presupposes the perception of something moveable"

This, for me, is false. We can sense motion before we perceive something as moveable. We perceive motion being awake or conscious; our bodies move. So, I think, 'motion' is a third a priori 'element'.
The Transcendental Aesthetic attempts to explain what necessarily underlies experience, its formal features, not content. Time is the issue here and time's formal structure is derived not from what is found IN experience, but what is presupposed by experience, like two points in time excluded from occupying the same point in time.
"Sensing" motion as with all sensed things cannot be apriori for the senses tell you nothing about apriority. They are "blind" as Kant put it. The "what" of what is perceived is not delivered apriori qua sensation; only the necessity (apriority) of its form as an experience of any kind can be intuited.
Atla
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Re: Kant

Post by Atla »

odysseus wrote: Sat Aug 01, 2020 2:15 pm
Atla
Phenomena = appearances, and noumena = things-in-themselves, so far so good (if I understood correctly).

But did he understand that technically and objectively, all phenomena are noumena (the noumena in the human head)? So some of the noumenon is directly 'knowable'.
Of course one cannot know noumena. That was the point. Noumena are not "in the head"; they are rather an abstraction inferred from phenomena, that is, a conclusion grounded in the reasoning that there must be something that representations are "of" but since time and space are the apriori structures of all experience and these are presupposed by any and all ideas, anything "outside" (an impossible word in this context, really) of time and space (all apriority is, of course, subjective) is unthinkable.
If you want something close to "direct" knowing of "things themselves" (not IN themselves) you should read Husserl. See his Cartesian Meditations, Ideas, and others.
Yes that's the more surface level way of looking at it, my point was, did Kant understand that phenomena and noumena are fundamentally two inseparable parts of the same reality? That they are the same kind of thing, even though the noumena are unknowable and we can only attempt to infer them through the phenomena we experience, through representations?

In short: that phenomena are representations and directly experienced things-in-themselves at the same time.

I was just trying to figure out why Western philosophy never reached critical depth, there always seems to be some kind of wrong duality involved.
odysseus
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Re: Kant

Post by odysseus »

Atla
Yes that's the more surface level way of looking at it, my point was, did Kant understand that phenomena and noumena are fundamentally two inseparable parts of the same reality? That they are the same kind of thing, even though the noumena are unknowable and we can only attempt to infer them through the phenomena we experience, through representations?

In short: that phenomena are representations and directly experienced things-in-themselves at the same time.

I was just trying to figure out why Western philosophy never reached critical depth, there always seems to be some kind of wrong duality involved.
As to the critical depth, there was more than a hundred years of Kant dominated philosophy, and even now, even analytic philosophers have to admit they are working in the shadow of Kant (with their positivist, anti Kantian thinking. Kant is considered the founder of both positivism AND phenomenology): The "depths" that have been plumbed get very, very technical. Not a stone, nor even a grain of sand, left unturned.

The trick is getting deeply into the scholarly works, and this in itself is a doctoral thesis, and then some. Robert Hannah is a great modern defender of Kant, and available online, I think.

As to your above: "inseparable parts of the same reality"? Kant, as a positivist, tells us nothing can be said of noumena. Utterly transcendental, as is the source of the issuance of experience, the transcendental ego. The pure forms of reason, the logical structure of language that carries meaning, empirical of otherwise, cannot be spoken, for the speaking requires those very forms for the utterance. Logic cannot tell what logic is since that would presuppose logic, and this would be question begging. Yet all of what we can make reasonable is carried out by logic. There is no way out of this. Logic cannot "speak" noumena, for noumena is outside of language. It's supposed to be what is there beyond the structures of experience, not in them. So we live in a kind of epistemological bubble ( a metaphor, for all such talk is metaphorical given anything we might say would be a bringing eternity INTO a conceptual scheme). Therefore, since the idea of the same "reality" begs the question, what reality, and since this refers to noumenal reality, the unifying reality beneath all things (of some sort), Kant would tell you the question is nonsense.
Atla
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Re: Kant

Post by Atla »

odysseus wrote: Sat Aug 01, 2020 5:37 pm
Atla
Yes that's the more surface level way of looking at it, my point was, did Kant understand that phenomena and noumena are fundamentally two inseparable parts of the same reality? That they are the same kind of thing, even though the noumena are unknowable and we can only attempt to infer them through the phenomena we experience, through representations?

In short: that phenomena are representations and directly experienced things-in-themselves at the same time.

I was just trying to figure out why Western philosophy never reached critical depth, there always seems to be some kind of wrong duality involved.
As to the critical depth, there was more than a hundred years of Kant dominated philosophy, and even now, even analytic philosophers have to admit they are working in the shadow of Kant (with their positivist, anti Kantian thinking. Kant is considered the founder of both positivism AND phenomenology): The "depths" that have been plumbed get very, very technical. Not a stone, nor even a grain of sand, left unturned.

The trick is getting deeply into the scholarly works, and this in itself is a doctoral thesis, and then some. Robert Hannah is a great modern defender of Kant, and available online, I think.

As to your above: "inseparable parts of the same reality"? Kant, as a positivist, tells us nothing can be said of noumena. Utterly transcendental, as is the source of the issuance of experience, the transcendental ego. The pure forms of reason, the logical structure of language that carries meaning, empirical of otherwise, cannot be spoken, for the speaking requires those very forms for the utterance. Logic cannot tell what logic is since that would presuppose logic, and this would be question begging. Yet all of what we can make reasonable is carried out by logic. There is no way out of this. Logic cannot "speak" noumena, for noumena is outside of language. It's supposed to be what is there beyond the structures of experience, not in them. So we live in a kind of epistemological bubble ( a metaphor, for all such talk is metaphorical given anything we might say would be a bringing eternity INTO a conceptual scheme). Therefore, since the idea of the same "reality" begs the question, what reality, and since this refers to noumenal reality, the unifying reality beneath all things (of some sort), Kant would tell you the question is nonsense.
Yeah it seems to me that this is the kind of nonsense that has held back Western philosophy from reaching critical depth:

Though it's true that strictly speaking we can't say anything about the noumena, in the most basic aspect we should do so anyway. The default position is to assume that it has the same kind of existence as phenomena, that the two are somehow one and the same. Especially after this picture is 100% consistent with what science has found. Not assuming anything about noumena is akin to solipsism, only my mind exists or appears to exists, and I won't assume anything beyond that. One CAN take that position but it's just dumb.

What we must NOT assume however is that the noumena is the source of experience, because that sets up a kind of dualism, a "relationship" between noumena and phenomena, but there is no reason to believe in such a relationship, since the two are most likely one and the same thing. So what I was wondering was whether Kant understood this?
odysseus
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Re: Kant

Post by odysseus »

Atla
Yeah it seems to me that this is the kind of nonsense that has held back Western philosophy from reaching critical depth:

Though it's true that strictly speaking we can't say anything about the noumena, in the most basic aspect we should do so anyway. The default position is to assume that it has the same kind of existence as phenomena, that the two are somehow one and the same.


Exactly! One response to Kant is that if you think there is something IN experience that warrants positing noumena, which he does since he spends a lot of words talking about how we cannot talk about it, then there is an established theme for discussion: what is it that is THERE in experience that gives warrant for noumena being a meaningful term at all? Lots of very good things written on this. I am reading Eugene Fink's 6th Meditation, and Michel Henry's discussion affectivity of revelation in Heidegger. the point I would make is that there is this and much, much more that looks into Kant's (reluctant) claim that noumena is NOT an absurd term.

Especially after this picture is 100% consistent with what science has found. Not assuming anything about noumena is akin to solipsism, only my mind exists or appears to exists, and I won't assume anything beyond that. One CAN take that position but it's just dumb.

What we must NOT assume however is that the noumena is the source of experience, because that sets up a kind of dualism, a "relationship" between noumena and phenomena, but there is no reason to believe in such a relationship, since the two are most likely one and the same thing. So what I was wondering was whether Kant understood this?
Such a good question. See how you align with Eugene Fink, who writes,

Originating in the radicality of utmost self-reflection, our meditative thinking, in performing the phenomenological reduction, brought us into the
dimension in which we stand before the problem-field of philosophy. Instead of inquiring into the being of the world, as does traditional "philosophy" dominated by the dogmatism of the natural attitude, or, where inquiry is not satisfied with that, instead of soaring up over the world "speculatively," we, in a truly "Copernican revolution," have broken through the confinement of the natural attitude, as the horizon of all our human possibilities for acting and theorizing, and have thrust forward into the dimension of origin for all being, into the constitutive source of the world, into the sphere of transcendental subjectivity.


Of course, the Copernican Revolution is a reference to Kant's Idealism. Fink is about to discuss how one can approach the matter of a kind of noumenal presence in presence itself, and this begins with Husserl's famous epoche, a reduction of a perception from its apperceptive attending ideas to its phenomenological presence. It is a long story, but the idea is essentially what you bring out: what is thought "out there" and separate from thought and sensation is really "in here" and so are the clues for clarifying the generative conditions that make it happen, that "generate" experience. Finks is an exposition of the transcendental ego. Really fascinating, but not an easy read with out Kant and Husserl under your belt.

This may sound high flung and jargony, but that is where this kind of discussion goes. It gets much worse, that is, in terms of making sense of what has to be apparent in experience in order for a term like noumena to be a non-nonsensical one.



Husserl really wanted nothing to do with Kant's noumena. He thought the "otherness" of the world was right there in our midst, in the phenomenon.
odysseus
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Re: Kant

Post by odysseus »

Incidently, Atla, if you are reading Kant, would like to read him, Husserl, Heidegger or any of the other existentialists (taking up the Kantian banner, really) I am available for any discussion you might find interesting. So much I haven't read and would like to.
Atla
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Re: Kant

Post by Atla »

odysseus wrote: Sun Aug 02, 2020 12:45 am
Atla
Yeah it seems to me that this is the kind of nonsense that has held back Western philosophy from reaching critical depth:

Though it's true that strictly speaking we can't say anything about the noumena, in the most basic aspect we should do so anyway. The default position is to assume that it has the same kind of existence as phenomena, that the two are somehow one and the same.


Exactly! One response to Kant is that if you think there is something IN experience that warrants positing noumena, which he does since he spends a lot of words talking about how we cannot talk about it, then there is an established theme for discussion: what is it that is THERE in experience that gives warrant for noumena being a meaningful term at all? Lots of very good things written on this. I am reading Eugene Fink's 6th Meditation, and Michel Henry's discussion affectivity of revelation in Heidegger. the point I would make is that there is this and much, much more that looks into Kant's (reluctant) claim that noumena is NOT an absurd term.

Especially after this picture is 100% consistent with what science has found. Not assuming anything about noumena is akin to solipsism, only my mind exists or appears to exists, and I won't assume anything beyond that. One CAN take that position but it's just dumb.

What we must NOT assume however is that the noumena is the source of experience, because that sets up a kind of dualism, a "relationship" between noumena and phenomena, but there is no reason to believe in such a relationship, since the two are most likely one and the same thing. So what I was wondering was whether Kant understood this?
Such a good question. See how you align with Eugene Fink, who writes,

Originating in the radicality of utmost self-reflection, our meditative thinking, in performing the phenomenological reduction, brought us into the
dimension in which we stand before the problem-field of philosophy. Instead of inquiring into the being of the world, as does traditional "philosophy" dominated by the dogmatism of the natural attitude, or, where inquiry is not satisfied with that, instead of soaring up over the world "speculatively," we, in a truly "Copernican revolution," have broken through the confinement of the natural attitude, as the horizon of all our human possibilities for acting and theorizing, and have thrust forward into the dimension of origin for all being, into the constitutive source of the world, into the sphere of transcendental subjectivity.


Of course, the Copernican Revolution is a reference to Kant's Idealism. Fink is about to discuss how one can approach the matter of a kind of noumenal presence in presence itself, and this begins with Husserl's famous epoche, a reduction of a perception from its apperceptive attending ideas to its phenomenological presence. It is a long story, but the idea is essentially what you bring out: what is thought "out there" and separate from thought and sensation is really "in here" and so are the clues for clarifying the generative conditions that make it happen, that "generate" experience. Finks is an exposition of the transcendental ego. Really fascinating, but not an easy read with out Kant and Husserl under your belt.

This may sound high flung and jargony, but that is where this kind of discussion goes. It gets much worse, that is, in terms of making sense of what has to be apparent in experience in order for a term like noumena to be a non-nonsensical one.



Husserl really wanted nothing to do with Kant's noumena. He thought the "otherness" of the world was right there in our midst, in the phenomenon.
It can be seen as a fact that the phenomenal and the noumenal worlds are one and the same world, unless proven otherwise. By Occam's razor this is the default position, it requires no assumption. Saying that they are different (at least in the sense that we shouldn't talk about one of them), requires an added and baseless assumption, maybe that's why I don't really see the point of getting into Kant.

It's very simple really, in the human head there is something that's a part of the world and a representation of the world at the same time. Transcendental ego, noumenal being, phenomenal being, whatever, are fundamentally all the same being, which leads to nondualism (what I meant by critical depth).

To me this seems mindboggingly simple and can be expressed in a few sentences, and I really don't understand why Western philosophy always got stuck because of some kind of dualism of our own creation.
Veritas Aequitas
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Re: Kant

Post by Veritas Aequitas »

odysseus wrote: Sat Aug 01, 2020 2:15 pm
Atla
Phenomena = appearances, and noumena = things-in-themselves, so far so good (if I understood correctly).

But did he understand that technically and objectively, all phenomena are noumena (the noumena in the human head)? So some of the noumenon is directly 'knowable'.
Of course one cannot know noumena. That was the point. Noumena are not "in the head"; they are rather an abstraction inferred from phenomena, that is, a conclusion grounded in the reasoning that there must be something that representations are "of" but since time and space are the apriori structures of all experience and these are presupposed by any and all ideas, anything "outside" (an impossible word in this context, really) of time and space (all apriority is, of course, subjective) is unthinkable.
If you want something close to "direct" knowing of "things themselves" (not IN themselves) you should read Husserl. See his Cartesian Meditations, Ideas, and others.
Agree with the point re noumenon, there is nothing to know re the noumena except it is only used a limiting concept thus of negative employment.
Kant wrote:The Concept of a Noumenon is thus a merely limiting Concept, the Function of which is to curb the pretensions of Sensibility; and it is therefore only of negative employment. B311 CoPR


The argument of the CoPR is divided in certain phases, e.g. Sensibility and the Understanding.
To focus so as to exhaust whatever there is within 'sensibility' Kant introduced the idea of 'noumenon' [simply a thought] as a logical contrast to phenomenon to stop people from thinking too far and off topic, thus as a limiting concept.

After exhausting all the argument within sensibility 'that thing' is deliberated within the Understand into Transcendental DIALECTIC where Kant argued and concluded the noumenon at this phase as the thing-in-itself is an illusion.

Kant warned,
There will therefore be Syllogisms which contain no Empirical premisses, and by means of which we conclude from something which we know to something else of which we have no Concept, and to which, owing to an inevitable Illusion, we yet ascribe Objective Reality.

These conclusions are, then, rather to be called pseudo-Rational 2 than Rational, although in view of their Origin they may well lay claim to the latter title, since they are not fictitious and have not arisen fortuitously, but have sprung from the very Nature of Reason.

They are sophistications not of men but of Pure Reason itself. Even the wisest of men cannot free himself from them.

After long effort he perhaps succeeds in guarding himself against actual error; but he will never be able to free himself from the Illusion, which unceasingly mocks and torments him. B397
But because Kant's ideas are so complex, those neo-Kantians, Sopenhauer Husserl, Heidegger, et al. cannot grasp Kant's idea of the illusory thing-in-itself and could not free themselves from the grasp of the thing-in-itself into thinking IT is 'something'.
But philosophers of the East, especially Buddhism and Hume are in agreement with Kant.

The issue is very psychological.
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