:) Thanks.

One day, I'll be strong enough to do the third reading, where-upon the true and secret meaning I've been seeking will reveal itself to me. :D

I finally realized that if I wanted to go down the route of making sensible claims about what Kant really meant then I'd have to actually become an academic, and I decided against that.

So, a medal? Sure. "The medal of loving the critique of pure reason" :D

Don't get me wrong, I definitely respect the hell out of Kant, and recognize his influence/significance in the history of philosophy (and cosmology/astronomy, surprisingly!)... but I definitely don't enjoy reading much of his writing (the CPR in particular is especially impenetrable- — busycuttingcrap

An exceptional thinker. I heard Bryan Magee talking about this - he said Kant wrote abysmally and was a great chore to read. He suggests a reason - Kant is one of those rare people who did his best work in old age (post 60 years) He didn't know how much time he had left and he had so much to say. So he wrote hurriedly. And yet I have read passages by Kant about noumena that are elegant and vivid. Perhaps he could have been a great prose stylist if he'd started at 30. :wink:

Don't be so modest, reading the entire CPR (let alone doing so more than once!!!) and doing so with your sanity intact is no small feat- plenty of bright philosophical minds that have been defeated by Kant's prose... So maybe something like "the medal of surviving the CPR... multiple times" :grin:

A fair point.

I agree with most of what you wrote there, understood from a certain perspective. 'Realism' is an ambiguous term, though, with quite different meanings in different contexts.

It seems to be well accepted that Nietzsche contradicts himself often in his works, He presents multiple different perspectives and I think arguably takes none of them as absolute, in the way classic realists take their positions to be absolute.

I found this quote from Nietzsche online:

“There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective "knowing"; and the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our "concept" of this thing, our "objectivity," be.”

― Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals / Ecce Homo

So Nietzsche wasn't right much of the time, but he was always interesting, — busycuttingcrap

So I would agree with this, but add the caveat that he wasn't wrong either; that "right or wrong" is not a suitable lens through which to view Nietzsche or in fact most of philosophy. That is to say that I agree with Hegel that philosophical ideas contain their own negations; that any idea can appear right from some perspective and wrong from others.