Philosophy Discussion Forums

Burning ghost wrote: ↑March 31st, 2018, 1:22 am
It is neither easy nor enjoyable to read.

This is the best book recommendation I have ever seen.

I tried to explain to a friend of mine I was reading Philosophy. He wanted to know how much time I was spending on this activity, as if it was all just wasted time.

Ephrium wrote: ↑March 30th, 2018, 11:14 amNow how shall I take Kant’s theory

As some mad skitzo ramblings, it's completely useless in modern settings, why not even billion dollar businesses doesn't want to hire philosophers for thinking and researching.

Ephrium wrote: ↑March 30th, 2018, 11:14 am I have heard a lot about Kant and am a philosophy undergraduate. However, even after researching many areas, these scholastic papers do not seem to tell me whether Kant is correct or wholesale wrong. For instance even Stanford encyclopedia of Philosophy just state what Kant’s viewpoint is

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant ... -idealism/

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-spacetime/

They do not state whether it is rubbish or what

In contrast, other topics such as Causation in philosophy or Justified True Belief have more definite answers whether they are “right or wrong”

Now how shall I take Kant’s theory

You might start with stating one part of it to discuss.
You cannot expect decent advice from a question that spans the entire lifetime of a thinker.

Causations and JTB are also theories. Neither right or wrong.

Ephrium wrote: ↑March 30th, 2018, 11:14 am ...
Now how shall I take Kant’s theory

As a student of philosophy, it seems to me, you would be well advised to "take" Kant as you should take Descartes, Locke, Hume, Berkeley, Leibniz, Spinoza, or any other canonical philosopher in the Western tradition, and that is as part of a 2500-year-long conversation which started in Ancient Greece and which may or may not have ended in the mid-20th-century Anglo-American Academy.

Ephrium wrote: ↑March 30th, 2018, 11:14 am scholastic papers do not seem to tell me whether Kant is correct or wholesale wrong. For instance even Stanford encyclopedia of Philosophy just state what Kant’s viewpoint is

Since Kant was a theoretical physicist and a neo-Platonist it's possible to venture that although Kant was not a hundred percent right in all things he said, neither was he entirely wrong. In the least, Kant understood enough of Newton and Plato to raise some very good points.

One place to start might be his derivation of apparent phenomenal 'objects', whether these be personal or scientific, by the application of the mind to raw sensations of a postulated 'noumenal' world.

I finished half of CPR. Especially his thesis regarding space. Sadly I found counter arguments so strong that I do not bother about the rest. His thesis seems just a single opinionated piece which is utterly refutable.

To imagine the absence of objects, one may visualize empty space, but how does one visualize the absence of empty space? The absence of nothing, is a double negative which seems to be impossible, for how can something which is already not there, be anymore not there then it already is?

From the SEP article,

Kant wrote:Space is not something objective and real, nor a substance, nor an accident, nor a relation;
instead, it is subjective and ideal, and originates from the mind’s nature in accord with a stable law as a scheme, as it were, for coordinating everything sensed externally.

SEP article wrote:Is space “real,” or is it “ideal” in some sense? Is it a substance in its own right, a property of some substance, or perhaps neither?
Is it somehow dependent on the relations among objects, or independent of those relations?
What is the relationship between space and the mind?

Since space is not there, it is not objective and also because it is not there, it has no substance. Space is implied by objects which exist within space, so in that sense space is an idea in the mind. All things exist within space, including mind and yet space itself isn’t there. The not-there-ness of empty space is what allows room for that which is there.

Kant wrote:
Space is not something objective and real, nor a substance, nor an accident, nor a relation

There's a double twist. Space, as it is naturally experienced by most people most of the time, like it was an absolute container, in which everything is located "within", is indeed not real, it's just a somewhat misleading way how the human experience is constructed. However, relational "space" is real.

Precisely. In my thesis I presented space as mere illusion merely an aspect. Not a thing. When there is a door, we just represent to ourselves the door. Once the door is not there there is nothing there, no space.

Ephrium

Precisely. In my thesis I presented space as mere illusion merely an aspect. Not a thing. When there is a door, we just represent to ourselves the door. Once the door is not there there is nothing there, no space.

No. When the door is not there, there remains your apriori intuition of space which is presupposed by the possibility to even have an experience of a door. Space is a structural feature experience, and does not go away any more than math goes away when you close your book. It abides in you.

Nor is space an illusion or an aspect. Calling it an aspect is the same as calling it a property, and predications of properties (snow is white) presuppose space. An illusion? That would require something NOT being an illusion that you can pin down, in order for the illusory whatever to not be that. Kant says you cannot talk about such things meaningfully.

It is entirely possible for me to envision the absence of space. When you see a Mickey Mouse cartoon does the “space” surrounding it mean anything? I can both see visually and mentally picture ONLY the Mickey Mouse.

If you keep focusing and thinking of this thing space yes admittedly it is difficult to represent to yourself it’s absence. I suggest picturing the Mickey Mouse ONLY. When it disappears there is nothing there and hopefully you can stop representing to yourself this space

Ephrium wrote: ↑March 30th, 2018, 11:14 am I have heard a lot about Kant and am a philosophy undergraduate. However, even after researching many areas, these scholastic papers do not seem to tell me whether Kant is correct or wholesale wrong. For instance even Stanford encyclopedia of Philosophy just state what Kant’s viewpoint is

...[links omitted because this site will not let me post links]

They do not state whether it is rubbish or what

In contrast, other topics such as Causation in philosophy or Justified True Belief have more definite answers whether they are “right or wrong”

Now how shall I take Kant’s theory

The reason for that is really quite simple. Most things in philosophy are controversial and there is very little in the way of consensus. Consequently, some philosophy professors regard Kant as being horribly wrong, and others regard him as the greatest philosopher ever. And then, of course, there are opinions in between. There is no standard criteria for deciding which philosophers are correct and which are not, unlike, say, physicists, where empirical testing is used to determine which theories are correct and which do not match reality. As a consequence of this, there are many resources which attempt to give an "objective" perspective on various philosophers, rather than expressing an opinion on whether the philosopher in question is right or wrong about the things they state.

And, of course, before judging whether something is correct or incorrect, one must first understand what, if anything, is being claimed. So that tends to be what such sources attempt to help one with, though obviously some are better than others at such things, and, however much one might try to be objective, most people do have an opinion about the things they know about what various philosophers claim.

In the case of Kant, he is too important to the history of philosophy to ignore, so if you are going to major in philosophy, you should study him, even if you think he is utter crap. You will also want to study Plato and Aristotle and Hume for the same reason, that they are all very highly regarded by a significant number of people, and they have all been extremely influential in the history of philosophy. So someone majoring in philosophy should try to understand the main ideas of all of those philosophers, even though, of course, at least three of them must be wrong in a big way about something, since they all contradict each other.

I do agree with Jack's comment above. No consensus. However, please consider the following concept that Schopenhauer takes from Kant:

Our brain is wired in such a way that we perceive things as being cause: within logical space time. We cannot think of a thing as it is, only as how we perceive it. The phenomena (perceptions of things) are directly related to our senses and brains. The things in themselves are different that how we perceive them, in such a way as our senses and brains function.

The space-time dichotomy is, in a logical sense, translated into predicates and operations. The predicates relate to the space interpretation of the noumenon (=the thing in itself) and the relations to the time interpretation of the noumenon. It is precisely this that Kant is trying to point to. Namely that there is a thing and we attempt to assign predicates and operations to it. Here we enter the realm of quantum mechanics and 2nd order logic.

Namely: There is a thing that has predicates Hs (the Human Socrates) and relates to another thing Od (Oracle in Delphi).
More logically: There is a thing (existential quantor, 2nd order logic) that has predicates Hs and relates to another thing Od (First order logic).
I wish I could show logical formula's.

And now think about the other philosophies, that only work within cause and effect. Teleological, as opposed to deontic. Within causation, not quantum mechanics. You choose which to adopt.