Except that Kant also worked in Veselovka, and Jarnołtowo, and biographies like to paint pictures.

Yeah, and also it's Konigsberg, not Leipzig. I botched that one, and your general point about biography is good.

I can't even pronounce those places, and of course looked them up, but I knew he'd traveled some, and didn't like to be tied down by much, kind of big on autonomy.

Carry on...

Actually, this convo does go back to an old question which I'm still interested in, but not currently pursuing, @csalisbury

I remember we stalled at CoJ because of life and stuff, plus it was incredibly difficult. But I remember there was a tension between the CoJ and CPR, that you have already mentioned. I'd definitely like to explore that tension more.

Also, I picked up the CPR again maybe 6 months ago and found myself disagreeing with it along the way. But very much in a notional sense -- just getting a sense of disagreement. So one particular question that interests me is, "What is the best way to disagree with these arguments?" -- or, even, just outlining a rational disagreement.

All notional at the moment, and I'm reading other things, but Kant exegesis has been a long-standing question for myself.

What I vaguely remember is that certain objects introduce either discord or increased harmony between reason/understanding/sensibility. (one species of) the beautiful isthis kind of free-play where the object doesn't get quite subsumed by the concept, and so there's a self-sustaining pleasant play of the faculties rather than a cognitive process with a clear moment of completion (which i guess would be recognition?) And the the sublime is something like the understanding failing in the face of natures wonder or terror, and that failure kind of sends reason whirring - but in this weird precise way, I can't remember. Not sure how accurate that is though, been a while.

I'd say that's why he's silly. The British Empiricists already explained (or described) agreement-- people experience, share an idea, observe the same thing, etc.

Kant's philosophy is driven by the denial of people, as if it were not enough for agreement to be defined by existing. He wants agreement to somehow to be defined by something other than ourselves, as if the world and our understanding were defined by this outside viewpoint or standard.

In this respect, he's really a follower of Descartes. Instead of treating our (contingent) experiences as trustworthy, he doubts them. Rather than accept agreement and awareness of as a function of our experiences, he asserts we needs some necessary force for the outside to avoid the problem of doubt. Kant is motivated to explain agreement because he doesn't think we can do it by ourselves in the first place.

That sounds about right -- of course it's been a long time for me too. We got through the aesthetics, I remember -- we got stuck on the second half on teleological judgment where an uncharitable first reading on my part was "sooo ... you can know the noumena" :D

Spinoza is sort of both.

He's dual aspect becasue he holds the attributes of thought and extension. His philosophy is also a a sort of neutral monism because Substance is an infinite expression, which is neither the attribute thought and extension, so both the mental and physical are of the same realm.

oh whoa, I forgot all about the teleological judgment section. I remember it being weird, and there was a bunch about 'the organism' but not much else. Do you remember what struck you, charitably or not, as being like knowing the noumena?

Would you say that Hume makes the same error when discussing necessary, demonstrable truths stemming from the 'relations of ideas'?

the focus, ironically, becomes the image of an isolated self producing its own experience. — csalisbury

This is not Kant's idea at all. The transcendental ego is not understood by Kant to be an "isolated self". That is sheer nonsense.

I agree. I probably should have been clearer, but I was trying to say that the picture people seem to have of Kant is way off.

My apologies then, I misunderstood it as representing your own interpretation. In any case, reading what has been said about Kant's ideas in this thread, I certainly agree with you about many people's pictures being way off.

Is it the historical reconstruction that's compelling, or Kant's viewpoints in response to it? I'm willing to grant the former (though I don't know – the empiricist/rationalist divide is a little wonky, even in the terms you present it: for example, Berkeley is an 'empiricist' who believed in godly fiat and not pure habit, just like Descartes, and Malebranche is a rationalist who did away with the necessity of Newtonian causation, making it utterly contingent [on God's whims again]), but I don't accept the latter. If believing this story is supposed to make me more sympathetic to Kant, I just don't see it. For one, the Newtonian picture was invented to account for several phenomena, not the whole world (it never did and never has, and there are a lot of atrocious Enlightenment philosophers who just assumed it would extend to all human activities, and drew preposterous conclusions about morality and sex and so on from this). For two, it seems like an attempt to enshrine contemporary physics forever by fiat, instead of doing the reasonable thing, which is admitting that while explanatorily powerful, the Newtonian picture was without epistemic foundation (as Newton himself seems to have held). You cannot invent epistemic foundations out of thin air where they seem to be needed – they must actually be there. Yet this is precisely how Kant reasons in his 'analytic' deductions.

Kant's epistemic foundation for science, or empiricism is mathematics. If it can't be rendered mathematically, then it isn't science. As science does require an a priori, or "pure part", in his view.

“in any special doctrine of nature there can be only as much proper science as there is mathematics therein”

So basically, the only requirement is quantifiability. That's pretty damn controversial, and all victorian or whatever.

He argues that psychology isn't science, for instance, as in the only quantifiable aspect of the inner sense is time, which isn't enough.

Not exactly.

I do think Hume externalises it inappropriately. Like Kant, he sort doesn't recognise that (our use of) concept and pure logic is a knowledge of our experience. That, in effect, any instance a priori knowledge or relation of an idea is, also posteriori or matter of fact.

Hume has an important difference though: he doesn't treat logical necessity as a requirement for coherency. States of the world are contingent and that works with meaning. It doesn't create any sort of problem defining how the world works or how people might agree. Universals aren't needed to define truths of the world.

While Hume doesn't quite get that any instance of knowledge is experience, he does get that the world doesn't have to follow some particular rule to be coherent-- hence it might be or do anything, even if its entirely absurd to how we understand the world.

Though, as TGW has noted in the somewhat recently, Hume, with his all scepticism, quickly becomes uninteresting. While he might be right about the world being contingent, it's also true that whatever exists at a moment has a particular meaning or significance. So obsessed with saying what might happen, Hume sort of doesn't acknowledge what does.

@The Great WhateverThat's fair, and I've been defending Kant a little more fiercly than my own beliefs warrant - I think there's a lot to take issue with. I think parts of him are very useful and still relevant, while much is questionable. But, to return to your initial question, about why philosophers often believe odd things - I think the dialectical/historical narrative, however crude, helps explain a bit. At worst, he at least makes clear how radical Hume's treatment of cause and effect really is. Like: ok, you can agree with hume and you can agree with newton, but how are you going to reconcile the two? This is a valid and difficult question. (newtonian physics still holds more or less good to this day, doesn't it? It's just a little too baggy and restricted to certain scales?)

I personally think Kant's good on the conceptual nature of perception, and the broader idea that the relationship of the mind and the world involves a complex process of mediation.

Not in any precision. Vaguely, I seem to recall the way he talks about God in that section seemed to at least get very very close to the noumena. I think he meant to place the power of judgment somewhere between pure and practical reason, but the way he talks about God in CoJ seemd to contradict the way he talks about God in CPR.

man, I'd be interested in reading COJ again, some day. I'm also very curious about his final work, Opum Postumum, but its suuper expensive.

For two, it seems like an attempt to enshrine contemporary physics forever by fiat, instead of doing the reasonable thing, which is admitting that while explanatorily powerful, the Newtonian picture was without epistemic foundation — The Great Whatever

I think the tension between the problem of induction and the necessity which we see in the world with Newtonian physics is what's at issue more than a foundation, per se. He intended to derive Newtonian physics from the categories eventually, but I think it's the implication of Newtonian physics -- that we will know where the cannon ball will land, that the sun will rise tomorrow, and we know these things partly based upon a priori knowledge -- more than asking after foundations is what's the goal. (or, goal? Maybe focus is better -- Hume's critique of causation vs. the fact that Newtonian physics shows we have knowledge of causation as the tension)

Me too. CoJ is definitely a book I'll be rereading again.

I have access to the Opum Postumum, but my eyes kind of glazed over when I tried it, to be honest. :D I was kind of "Kanted out" at the time. I do want to read it some day though.

ha i get that. Deleuze got fired up about Opum, I think in What is Philosophy, but was reallly vague, and didn't say much besides connecting it to Turner's late paintings and old age :s

I think the very notion of tension or conflict is the silliness.

In the face of radical contingency and the patterns of causality, the automatic assumption is there is some sort of problem. Why? How come we automatically assume these are inconsistent with each other. Why can't the world just do something, express a particular meaning, fit a particular rule, for as long as it does? What if there is nothing that needs reconciling between Hume and Newton in the first place?

Hume is right: anything might happen. Newtown is right: the behaviour of many states reflect his rules. The conflict only occurs if one tries to make Newton's laws function in terms of logical necessity, as if everything and anything must always follow them and there was never any other possible outcome.

Discard that assumption (which is antiscientific, as it tries to say what they world does without reference to observing it), and there is simply no conflict between Hume and Newton.

I think you may have meant to respond to @Moliere (though I agree with his post)

Edit: Or maybe not. The word "tension" stuck out.

An omission of ignorance isn't a failure of reconciliation. It's possible to believe in Newtonian mechanics because you take its effects to be observable, and not know why they obtain. In fact, if you actually don't know, no attempt to make up reasons that you know will make you know. So if Kant asks you 'how will you reconcile?' the right answer for the Humean is 'I don't know, but I do know that I won't lie.' We don't need, at any particular moment, to make sure we have an answer for everything – if we do that, we're going to do bad philosophy, because where we actually don't have an answer, a bad/wrong one will arise in the attempt.

I like David Stove's idea of a neo-positivism, where the philosophical tradition collects historical examples of bad reasoning to become slowly sharper in the sorts of arguments it makes. Kant allows us to understand the badness of a certain kind of transcendental argument, and why the impulse behind it is mistaken.

I was addressing the following and its relationship to the defence of Kant:

But, to return to your initial question, about why philosophers often believe odd things - I think the dialectical/historical narrative, however crude, helps explain a bit. At worst, he at least makes clear how radical Hume's treatment of cause and effect really is. Like: ok, you can agree with hume and you can agree with newton, but how are you going to reconcile the two? This is a valid and difficult question. (newtonian physics still holds more or less good to this day, doesn't it? It's just a little too baggy and restricted to certain scales?) — csalisbury

My point being this defence of Kant only works if you are already bringing his prejudice. Kant's silliness (and the silliness of many other philosophers) is the assumption of a conflict between radical contingency and the presence of meaningful existing states.

With nothing to reconcile between the two, Kant's question and subsequent reasoning isn't valid or difficult. It's just a laborious process of trying to work a way out of an empty conundrum of his own creation.

I'm going to give you a 'bad' answer, because I gotta finish a paper (on the goddamn Iraq War) before midnight, and have to tear myself away from the forum for now. But I think the obvious rejoinder to Hume is that the sun-not-rising tomorrow is utter bullshit. It will. So: anything could happen, at any moment, but the things that do happen, always fit the model, every time, well.... aren't we lucky?

Conjunction leading to an association leading to the idea of cause and effect only works if the conjunction is constant. What are the chances? (Meillassoux, who is kinda like 21st century Hume, tries to explain that probability doesn't obtain here, because of set theory. But his explication of how this works is...limp. IIRC, it's something like the rules of probability doesn't work when the possible outcomes are infinite. Like: since there are infinite possible outcomes, it's less strange that the outcomes that do happen aren't distributed as you'd expect? It's not a very good line of thought. )

We're contingently, factically (sp?) in this, but 'this' follows certain rules.

I really like that Stove idea, and agree that it works well with approaching Kant.

But the Humean doesn't say "I don't know" really, does he? He explains it forthwith. Constant conjunction, habit, custom.

I think it would be fun to dig into Kant's second analogy (which, google has refreshed me, is where he deals with cause and effect most explicitly).

I read Hume as given a psychological explanation for human behavior in the face of uncertainty, not a reasoned justification for it (his position seeming to entail that there is no reasoned justification).