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I was reading a book which mentioned it. I decided to give it a go. Then after reading at a rate of 1 page a day, I'm not sure I get it.
Anyone here does?
We can never experience the universe as if actually "is" as our senses perceive it and translate it so that we can can process the information "as humans"
Roughly.
Kant was very rarely stable, you know.
I thought this was a cockney asking someone to explain that county to the south of London.
Nice vid, finishing line is good.
cheers! funny but informative video.
that guy was definitely not stable.
In what context? Ethics? Morality? Reason? Epistemology? Metaphysics? I don't find Kant particularly accessible or rewarding- as a modern reader I find his style of writing very dry and tiresome. As such a continued influence across western thought there are loads of interesting takes on Kant from all sorts of thinkers addressing specific moments in his work that might be more useful.
[url= http://plato.stanford.edu/ ]Stanford's[/url] wiki pages are handy for a broad (if dull) intro...
Kant was very rarely stable, you know.
He was inclined to be a bit erratic.
No, but I do remember he was a piece of cake compared to Heidegger.
(who was a boozy beggar if memory serves)
I always imagine a middle aged woman from kent saying a rude word when I sse this philosopher/physcholigist's name.
If you think Kant is bad, try reading Hegel. I was supposed to read the Philosophy of Right for an essay when I was at University. I didn't even get past the first page. Relied on the synopsis instead 😉
Let's not discuss Hume. Or at least lock the cabinet before we do.
And, best keep Mill off the shandy.
Can someone explain Kant: Critique of pure reason???
No Pooftahs.
Kant? You could set your clock by him. If you lived in Koningsburg in the late 18th century. That is.
No, really, he was such a creature of habit and orderliness that the locals set their time pieces to his daily perambulation.
Gosh, this is really exciting. A three year philosophy degree and I can finally provide some information to someone on the internets that really really wants it.
Right, there's this big debate in philosophy whether the world actually is as we perceive it or whether our perception mediates it to such an extent that all we can claim to know is what we perceive, and we can't really claim to know what the world essentially is.
Kant examines our powers of perception and reason in the Critique. He recognises that our understanding of the world is shaped by our faculties for perception and reason (for instance, the way that we interpret what we see so that we perceive three dimensional space). This breaking down of the stages of perception into 'sense data' (for sight, the light hitting our eyes) and interpretation (our cognitive facility for understanding the patterns made by light hitting our retina) was an important leap in understanding.
However, it begs the question whether us making sense of the light hitting our retina and understanding that there's a dog in front of us (in my case) actually tells us anything at all about the essence of dog. The 'thing in itself'.
He wavers about whether we can really know the thing in itself, or whether we can just know that there is a thing in itself 'beyond' our perception of it but its essence is ineffable. Or whether the thing in itself, being unknown (as we only have our perception) cannot even be postulated. At this point you have to peer beyond the curtains of reason, and that would be a very worrying thing to an 18th century German.
To be honest, it's 20 years since I last wrote an essay on Kant so I can't remember what his actual conclusions were (hmmm, I think they might even have been a little inconsistent). However, my dog definitely has an ineffable essence.
Liked that video, clicked on a few more. Everyday is a school day on STW
"Curtains of reason"?
Can someone explain Kant: Critique of pure reason???
I Kan't.
The CoPR is essentially his attack on empiricism (Hume, Locke). In a nutshell:
[i]We all understand the world through a filter (our minds) that determines how we experience everything and imposes a shape of that experience - we are stuck with this filter and cannot experience anything without it. So all we can do is accept that it is there and understand its effects on how we experience things.[/i]
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Who are you calling a Kant?
Right, there's this big debate in philosophy whether the world actually is as we perceive it or whether our perception mediates it to such an extent that all we can claim to know is what we perceive, and we can't really claim to know what the world essentially is.
Isn't that getting into Schrödinger territory a bit? Is the dog that you perceive alive or dead? 😉
Kant's problem was whether the dog is really as we perceive her or even real independent of our perceptions of her.
Schroedinger assumes the cat is real and that his equation models the way that quantum mechanics work and draws attention to the paradox that that the equation implies two simultaneous states - until an observation is made, the wave collapses and the equation is solved for one state or the other.
As I understand it.
I'm sure Kant would have liked quantum mechanics and multi-dimensional maths, and I wonder whether he would have taken them as evidence of things which exist beyond our ability to perceive them.
As it was, he was immediately succeeded by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Schopenhauer went all zen and eastern mystic on the existence of a transcendental reality. Nietzsche invented perspectivalism which abjures a 'one truth' approach and does not necessitate a transcendental reality. Although much of Nietzsche's work is in aphorisms and you can argue that he meant pretty much anything. Sadly enabling a great deal of misappropriation.
Shouldnt this topic be closed for swearing avoidance?
😉
I remember seeing a film about Emanuelle but never realised her surname was Kant or did I see her...
Right, there's this big debate in philosophy whether the world actually is as we perceive it or whether our perception mediates it to such an extent that all we can claim to know is what we perceive, and we can't really claim to know what the world essentially is.
Isn't this Plato?
However, it begs the question whether us making sense of the light hitting our retina and understanding that there's a dog in front of us (in my case) actually tells us anything at all about the essence of dog. The 'thing in itself'.
Obviously not. This is easy to prove just by talking to anyone in the world anywhere. I could post up a picture of say, my back garden, and ask people about what they see beyond the obvious, and you'll get a massive variety of results. In some cases even the obvious varies.
And let's just clear something up. Schroedinger was not a philosopher, he was a physicist. The cat thing is simply a layman's illustration of the consequences of his equations.
Alan Partridge might be able to.
No actually he Kant