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rothkowitz
Joined: 27 Apr 2006
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 Posted: Tue Oct 03, 2006 4:27 am Post subject: |
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If a phenomenon is merely "something" in how it is thought,nothing is being changed.Think of an Ad Reinhardt painting(a stone,a hexagon drawn in the sand,whatever) for example.You were looking at the same thing the whole time.
It was still the same thing.The only thing that could be "changed" is the mind moving towards a understanding of a finality of thought.ie an understanding of its own limits.
Good philosophy sets limits.Its up to the practical world to combine this not obviously self-interested outlook with precision to make elegant things.
Kant would have described it as "zweckmasigkeit"-bound to produce a result.
Why else would he never have got out of bell tower ring range in his lifetime?
Reading him does give me a huge headache.I like it when he's paraphrased succintly.(Cheers Spinoza)
Funniest Kant related quote was from my MA supervisor,who,when criticising a charlatan,ex-evangelist art critic at a neighbouring school said
"Some people shouldn't be allowed near Kant".
He said it in all seriousness.I never understood everything he said,but now I think it was a pretty cool thing to say.
At architecture school in NZ,Kant was brought up again(for me/to me)
The BA lecturer tried to say that Kant's critique of judgement was akin to standing on a mountain and making decisions.This was done so as to fit in Kant as an enemy or as antithetical to supposed PM inclusiveness.
When I remembered my old professors comment I just got depressed.
I WANT to make judgements because life isn't some free-for-all. |
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cdninkorea
Joined: 27 Jan 2006
Location: Seoul
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| Posted: Tue Oct 03, 2006 8:41 pm Post subject: |
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| SPINOZA wrote: |
| Your approach is all wrong, CDninkorea. Kant didn't start anything awful! He simply pointed out that we cannot have objective knowlege because reality does not contain the features of mind that we have in any description of it. Reality is non-linguistic, non-conceptual. That's very reasonable, and it's certainly an advance on Plato, who felt there is a realm of true propositions independent of humans ever thinking about them, ensuring the truth of our statements. Reality - das ding an sich in German (things in-themselves) is/are unknowable. Sadly, I can only explain Kant via a metaphor. Thinking of reality is like a baron, featureless, desert landscape, and our mind, concepts, perception, do a lot of 'coloring-in'. Creatures with different concepts, different shaped eyes, different brains, perceive the world differently, paint a different picture - there's just no way of testing whether our view of reality is the correct one! Cats can see in the dark much better than we can, dogs can smell and hear much more than we can - how on earth can we possibly say objective knowledge is possible with our 5 puny senses and capacity for abstract thought? |
That's completely different than my understanding of it. Before I give my understanding of it, I should preface it by saying the only primary work of Kant I've read is Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Besides that, I've read a few secondary sources and heard lots about Kant from various professors.
From my understanding of what Kant said, he argued that our brains are necessarily composed of Categories, like, for example, Cause and Effect. Reality may or may not actually have any such things as causes and effects, but since we can never see it outside that context, we can never know what reality is really like.
To use an analogy from one of my former professors: if you had red sunglasses permanently attached to your face, you'd never be able to see the world as anything but red. Is the world really red? You can never know- all you know is that it appears red.
What's so awful about that? If true, it means everything enlightenment stands for is pointless: if we can't know reality, why bother with physics? We can never know if it's true. Why study logic? That might be just another category in our minds. Etcetera.
But look around you: isn't the fact that skyscrapers exists evidence that architecture works? Isn't the fact that airplanes fly proof that math and logic are objective features of reality?
| gang ah jee wrote: |
So the 'father of existentialism' was writing less than 200 years ago? In that case I'm satisfied that you've shown that dominant philosophies of the past several hundred years have NOT been existentialist and postmodernist (unless you want to make the case for a pre-modern postmodernity). |
I'll be charitable and assume you missed what I said before:
| I wrote: |
Read what I wrote about Hume and Kant- was I shoehorning anything into 20th century or post-WWII approaches? |
| I also wrote: |
One could argue that Hume planted the seed in An Enquiry Into Human Understanding (something like that... I don't remember the exact title)when he argued that there exists a dichotomy between analytic and synthetic knowledge, the latter being of one we can never know with complete certainty.
Really though, it was Kant that started the awful trent away from Enlightenment thinking, by arguing that there is no objective reality (noumena), and if there is, we can never know anything about it. The influence Kant has had on philosophy since is enormous. |
| gang ah jee wrote: |
| 'No truth' applies to epistemology rather than 'reality', and this is a fundamental feature of scientific method now. 'Truth' values generally have to be determined through inferential statistics, and it is understood that there is always a slight possbility that any result could be due to chance. I suggest that you do some reading in philosophy of science to help you understand the problems with the enlightenment/Baconian model of scientific method. |
I refuse to accept that scientists don't believe their conclusions. If a medical scientist develops a new surgical technique, I like to believe he is certain it will work before operating on someone. If he really thinks "well, I'm pretty sure this won't kill my patients, but not completely" then goes and operates on someone anyway, he's evil.
It would be wrong for me to teach English grammar unless I knew I was right, but at least I wouldn't be jeopardizing people's lives. When a scientist applies or approves others to apply his conclusions which, if wrong, could kill people, he had best be certain his conclusions are right. Otherwise, that makes him evil. And I refuse to condemn science as evil. |
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gang ah jee
Joined: 14 Jan 2003
Location: city of paper
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| Posted: Tue Oct 03, 2006 11:41 pm Post subject: |
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| cdninkorea wrote: |
| I'll be charitable and assume you missed what I said before: |
So you're making the obvious point that existentialism and postmodernism have their roots in previous philosophies? Or are you saying that once a philosophy starts questioning objective reality and perfect epistemology it is necessarily existentialist or postmodern. Was Hume an existentialist? Was Kant? Anyway, whatever. I'll just take it that you didn't mean what you said in your first post in this thread.
| Quote: |
| It would be wrong for me to teach English grammar unless I knew I was right, but at least I wouldn't be jeopardizing people's lives. When a scientist applies or approves others to apply his conclusions which, if wrong, could kill people, he had best be certain his conclusions are right. Otherwise, that makes him evil. And I refuse to condemn science as evil. |
Might want to make a distinction between 'science' and 'scientist'. Regardless, you'll find that by your definition, yes, science is evil. |
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