Veritas Aequitas wrote: ↑Fri May 07, 2021 6:36 am
I don't intent to avoid any main issue and I don't believe I have missed any. If you think I have missed any of your main points you can remind me of it.
Here is a reminder then: you have not responded to any of these arguments:
Conde Lucanor wrote:So, you either acknowledge that there's no academic consensus on the interpretation of Kant's CPR, or that you were simply wrong about Kant.
Conde Lucanor wrote:Let's put it this way: you used to agree that the 'universe does not exist if there are no humans' Then I argued against it and now you don't agree with it anymore.
Conde Lucanor wrote:So in the end you're actually saying humans don't exist as mind-independent things, as things in themselves. Not only I would be an illusion for you, you would be an illusion for yourself. Then, how do you know anything? Who or what is having the illusion of you?
Conde Lucanor wrote:There are plenty of subjects in SEP, for example, ancient atomism. Does that mean that ancient atomism is not a defunct doctrine? How about the entries on physicalism, dualism or eliminative materialism? Does that mean that they are for you doctrines still doing just fine?
Conde Lucanor wrote:at one point I alerted that the article actually confirmed my views, and you replied confidently, as if knowing enough of the content of the article, that I was "likely mistaken", and in complete disbelief challenged me to show which points converged with mine. Was that also the result of another "quick and hasty" action of yours?
Veritas Aequitas wrote: ↑Fri May 07, 2021 6:36 am
The point is I am very well aware Transcendental Idealism I is CENTRAL and critical as a backbone to the whole theme of Kant's CPR. SO if TI is defunct so is Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. There is no way I would have accepted that!
In contrast the analytic philosophers treat Kant's TI as a separate part of Kant's main philosophy. That is why they claim TI is defunct because they faced their own invented controversies in Kant's TI.
Actually, analytic philosophy has ignored Kant's overall program as it has ignored idealism in general, because idealism has nothing to offer there. Besides, ever since the first edition of CPR came out, there's simply no consensus about what Kant's TI actually entails.
Veritas Aequitas wrote: ↑Fri May 07, 2021 6:36 am
Kant's TI has no practical values to humanity?
You are just ignorant on this.
Kant is touted as a godfather of Cognitive Science and respected in many other fields of Knowledge.
Kant would be as much of a godfather of cognitive sciences as Aristotle would be a godfather of biology. Just because they contributed with early speculations on the subject, does not mean those ideas made it into contemporary sciences.
Veritas Aequitas wrote: ↑Fri May 07, 2021 6:36 am
- Through nineteenth-century intermediaries, the model of the mind developed by Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) has had an enormous influence on contemporary cognitive research. Indeed, Kant could be viewed as the intellectual godfather of cognitive science.
https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... Kantianism#:
An important distinction is necessary: we should be talking about modern cognitive sciences, not just any theoretical pre-scientific approaches to the subject. Kant's ideas of cognition were interesting and actually were reasonably fine at the basic level one can expect from pure speculation, but the most ambitious concepts that form the core of his speculations are at worst confusing and not useful, and at best completely distanced from scientific realism. Science without an ontological commitment to a mind-independent reality is simply not science, and the very first problem that anti-realists encounter in order to advance a systematic, coherent approach within their doctrines, is to solve the puzzle of other minds. They can't.
Veritas Aequitas wrote: ↑Fri May 07, 2021 6:36 am
Conde Lucanor wrote:
You forget again that your request implied that you knew the content of the article. You were so sure that you even said I was likely mistaken. The key point is that you never thought there could be contentious issues about TI among Kant's scholars, but you always said that it was just me not understanding it. That is not an argument you can advance any more. Not only that, but I have shown that your understanding of Kant's work and its scholarship is fundamentally wrong.
This is pointless speculation on your part.
Having done such extensive coverage of Kant's CPR I am well aware of the contentious issues re TI among Kant's scholars.
No, I'm not speculating anything. It is a pretty straightforward logical argument derived from actual statements of yours in this thread, and you are (again) not responding to it.
BTW, that you may have "done extensive coverage of Kant's CPR" is by no means an indication that you have secured a proper understanding of what CPR entails.
Veritas Aequitas wrote: ↑Fri May 07, 2021 6:36 am
This is where I think you are wrong in understanding the article.
Kant never positioned himself as a 'realist' [philosophical realism] against the idealism of Berkeley. Rather he differentiated his Transcendental Idealism from Berkeley's problematic or subjective idealism.
First of all, what I said was not my take on Stang's article, it is my understanding of Kant's positions as almost universally agreed, which is therefore also supported by Stang's article. Stang did not make it up as an interpretation of his own.
You seem to be too much dogmatically entangled with labels and philosophical schools, instead of trying to understand and deal with what is entailed in them. So I said realism and you immediately associated it with what you understand as philosophical realism, but realism in general simply expresses a commitment with the actual existence of some things that have objective properties, even if they are Platonic entities. So this notion of realism shows two aspects: one about existence of things, and another one about the objectivity (mind-independence) of those things. Philosophical realism is simply a commitment about those things being mind-independent entities. The opposite stance, represented by subjective idealism, advances the notion that all there is are only mind-dependent entities. Whoever expresses the view that there are only mind-dependent entities is then associated with the philosophical anti-realism of subjective idealism, represented (although there's controversy on that) by Berkeley. So, by Kant distancing himself from Berkeley and his stance against mind-independent things, he was rejecting his philosophical anti-realism and therefore positioning himself as a realist of mind-independent things, aka an empirical realist:
Britannica wrote:
Britannica: Realism-philosophy
The 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant recognized that Berkeley’s “dogmatic idealism” involved denying the independent reality of space. Berkeley’s arguments, he thought, were effective against metaphysical positions which assumed that space is a property of “things in themselves,” as opposed to their representations, or “appearances,” in the mind. Kant argued to the contrary that space as well as time are forms of “sensible intuition,” or the mode in which the mind is affected by sensible objects. Thus, the reality of objects external to the mind (objects in space) is guaranteed, because being in space and time is a condition of being an object of sensible experience at all. Kant’s combination of transcendental idealism—the doctrine that what is given in experience are only appearances—with empirical realism—the view that there are objects external to the mind—allowed him to reject the conception of external objects as “lying behind” appearances and as knowable only (if at all) by a problematic and ultimately indefensible inference from what is given in experience to its hidden causes.
It's a fact that Kant denied the objective existence of space and time, and that is the core of Transcendental Idealism. Those things, according to him, could never be things in themselves, mind-independent realities. However, whether Kant rejected the possibility of existence (ontology) of the objects “lying behind” appearances or not, is somehow disputable, depending on whether one advocates the epistemological, non-ontological interpretation, or the ontological one. The epistemological one, advocated by the likes of Allison, entails no assertion or denial of the objects “lying behind” appearances, the things in themselves, but an ontological agnosticism. Kant's assertions are merely about our claims of knowledge of the reality of things, which he thinks is indefensible (the claim of knowledge, not the reality of things). The ontological one entails the assertion of actual existence of the objects “lying behind” appearances, the non-spatiotemporal things in themselves, of which we would know nothing else. His agnosticism remains as to how these things actually are. The position that you're defending in this forum, however, is that Kant advanced the ontological statement that things in themselves do not, and cannot, exist independent of minds (the two aspects of realism mentioned above), which is actually Berkeley's view, from which Kant moved away.
Veritas Aequitas wrote: ↑Fri May 07, 2021 6:36 am
Kant did claim that things-in-themselves do not exist as real in the spatio-temporal sense within human conditions.
However things-in-themselves can ONLY exist as
transcendental objects which are merely
intelligible entities. These are something like Plato's universals and forms which cannot exists as real at all albeit has some uses.
One thing is to claim that time and space only exist in minds and that therefore objects appearing in time and space do not exist, and another thing is to claim that objects as independent realities of minds do not exist at all. Kant evidently argued for the first, but he did not argue for the second, which would imply that he had obtained the intellectual intuition that he denied humans had.
Veritas Aequitas wrote: ↑Fri May 07, 2021 6:36 am
As far as ontology in the realists [yours et al] sense, Kant condemned ontology, i.e. things existing as real objectively in the independent external world.
Not really, he condemned those who claimed to have knowledge of how things in themselves actually are by virtue of how they appear to our cognition, as spatiotemporal objects. So he condemned a spatiotemporal ontology, while remained agnostic or skeptic about what the actual ontology is.
Veritas Aequitas wrote: ↑Fri May 07, 2021 6:36 am
You are conflating the perspectives I proposed.
I am claiming as with Kant,
- 1. A mind-independent reality exists - as evident.
2. BUT ultimately this "mind-independent reality" cannot be absolutely independent of the human conditions. [Kant Copernican Revolution].
Note what each statement entails:
"1. A mind-independent reality exists" ==> A reality independent of humans exists.
"2. A [...] "mind-independent reality" cannot be absolutely independent of the human conditions" ==> A reality independent of humans does not exist.
One sentence contradicts the other. It's an absurd construction, and notwithstanding all the problems with Kantian doctrines, that is not what Kant argued.
Veritas Aequitas wrote: ↑Fri May 07, 2021 6:36 am
Note the point is humans [observers] are NEVER
acquainted with objective reality [things-in-themselves].
What humans are acquainted are only the sense-data of a
supposed-thing-in-itself[Russell].
As such, ultimately, whatever is supposedly mind-independent, is always in entanglement with the human conditions.
The third statement does not follow from the first two. If there are mind-independent things that cannot be cognized as they actually are, all that could be derived from this is that humans are always entangled with things as they appear in cognition. It doesn't mean that mind-independent things, things in themselves, are always necessarily entangled to cognition. I see the Moon as a spatiotemporal object and perhaps it is not quite like that, it is just the appearance of the Moon to my cognition, an illusion in Kantian terms, but even if I accepted those terms, one could not guarantee that there really isn't a Moon at all, and that it didn't exist before my experience or anyone's else experience of it. And I could also argue, against Kant, that the Moon I'm seeing can be indeed a spatiotemporal object actually existing independent of that experience, as this does not violate the dependency of knowledge from sense-data.
Veritas Aequitas wrote: ↑Fri May 07, 2021 6:36 am
As Russell doubted, perhaps there is no real table out there at all.
Russell: "Perhaps There is No Table At ALL?"
He could perhaps doubt it, but he could not make the assertion that there isn't.