I do not think he intended, and absolutely reject that he succeeding, in establishing any way to access external objects. — AmadeusD

Maybe you’re thinking of a different philosopher, because this is a really odd thing to say about Kant. Your move at this point ought to be to say that for Kant, external objects, which we do have access to, are mere phenomena, and thus mind-dependent. I take issue with that too but it’s at least a decent interpretation.

But that’s probably enough Kant for now.

And If I am wrong, I am arguing against Kant, not you. But I maintain that we do not have that access. As noted earlier with, i think Janus, You absolutely cannot access an empty bay in Bengal by experiencing a tidal wave in Chile. — AmadeusD

You are most definitely arguing against me too. We are animals in direct sensorimotor engagement with the environment. To deny this like a 17th century philosopher is perverse.

It's not access at all. This is why I'm asking for passages - I recall, and can find, nothing to support this formulation. — AmadeusD

Which formulation, exactly? I’m not sure which passages I should be looking for, since all I did in that paragraph was remind you what Kant famously set out to do in the CPR.

Which things are not 'in-themselves' or external. — AmadeusD

This is crucial. Kant does not conflate the empirical with the internal. In other words, things perceived and theorized about are not in the head, for Kant. A way to think about it: just because we perceive external things under an aspect, i.e., in a certain way, or expressed more generally, as phenomena, it does not follow that we do not perceive external things. Kant is explicit that external things are things we can possibly experience. External = empirical, and Kant is an empirical realist.

There are those who claim that Kant failed in his efforts not to be construed as a subjective idealist, and they sometimes have a point—it was his own fault to some degree—however, I think the direction of his project is in a contrary direction, and of course he was explicit in rejecting that interpretation, e.g., in the Refutation of Idealism, in which he argues that perceiving your own inner states is dependent on the existence of objects in space, i.e., so-called external objects.

Note that everything I said was standard and uncontroversial, except for my bit about the “fleshly container”, which is a modern spin on it.

It seems he is deeply committed, whether he states it or not, to a barrier between the world and our ability to intuit.. anything. — AmadeusD

I'm not sure what you mean by this. Since intuition, in Kant’s technical sense, is the capacity to form representations, and since he spends a lot of time showing how important it is for us, it’s clear enough that he does not think we intuit nothing. But maybe that’s not what you mean.

Anyway, the barrier, such as there is, is between human knowledge and things as they are in themselves.

Your formulation doesn't strike me as particularly workable - where's the access, if the system necessarily precludes it? If you mean to say that Kant advises us that the access we do have, as indirect and unreliable as it is, is in fact access, i would reject it even if i read that into Kant. — AmadeusD

In the Critique of Pure Reason he sets out to show how synthetic a priori knowledge is possible, without considering that it is not. Synthetic a priori knowledge is knowledge that is informative, universal and necessary. This is the reliable access you seek, and our sensibility provides the direct access to things about which we can have this knowledge.

As I pretty much said, if you are instead seeking access to things that cannot be accessed (things as they are in themselves) you will struggle.

Krysař or The Pied Piper, a Czechoslovakian animated film from 1986.

Kant does not, anywhere I've seen, intimate we have any access whatsoever to the things-in-themselves. — AmadeusD

Yes, in Kant's scheme this is almost true by definition, since a thing-in-itself is a thing unintuited, i.e., not presented to our minds through sensation. But since that's how we access things, only some logically possible non-sensible intuition (like a God-like perception) could access them otherwise, whereby they would be noumena, not phenomena--and that's not a talent that creatures like us happen to have.

The objects he discusses are those of the mind, as a result of perception and understanding arranging sense-data into a lil movie for us to watch via the internal projection system of the visual cortex. — AmadeusD

Kant was so steeped in the philosophy of his time that he seems to be understood today as promoting the idea of a barrier between inside and outside, and that's a shame, because when you read him you see that this is not really what he's doing. Rather, he is emphasizing that perception is not a barrier so much as a guarantor of access, and that we really can and do know objective reality (this is the whole point of the Transcendental Analytic). So I'd say the thrust of his thinking is the opposite of how he tends to be taken now, at least in the Anglosphere.

He is certainly explicitly against any movie-in-the-head kind of idea. Think of his epistemology more as stating what was not so obvious at the time, namely that when you think or discuss things, you are doing it in the only way you can: using your faculties of perception and understanding, which have their own structures. You're not a mind in a fleshly container equipped with receptors; you are that container, which includes the brain, directly connected with the rest of the world.

:up:

Yeh, it's good that we're invitation-only.

Thank you for the heads-up. :smile:

Banned @Steven P Clum for low quality culture war stuff and throwing around accusations when criticized.

My guess is audio visual link. Video calls and video-conferencing, basically.

Also, Ive never left Chicago in my life. How is it different out there? Is the sky purple? — an-salad

I've never been to Chicago. Is it different there? Is the river green?

The Aleph and Other Stories by Jorge Luis Borges.

You know, violent video games exist worldwide, but curiously, the shootings in schools happen on a large scale in the USA. — javi2541997

Video games in America are the same as everywhere else. If their implications would be grossly underestimated, then there ought to be more shootings in other countries, which don't have the mass shootings, but do have the same video games. — ssu

It could be the case that while violent video games are not enough on their own to cause school shootings, they do contribute to psychological and social developments which are manifested in school shootings under certain circumstances, in this case the American circumstance of a gun culture. It might be the case that violent video games are doing harm to all societies, but since those societies differ, the effects are not the same and are not equally visible everywhere.

:up:

It's maybe a little Austeresque too, certainly his more ambiguous and confusing stuff. Also reminded me of The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro.

Thank you for your interest. If I wrote a review it would not be about me: not about the progress of my mind or my perspective, not about whether I have been improved by the experience, etc. There’s probably plenty of that stuff on Goodreads and YouTube.

Sorry to be an elitist dickhead :grin:

Actually I don’t think it’s necessarily elitist to expect a book review to be about the book rather than about the reviewer.

Ice by Anna Kavan.

Uncanny, haunting, and disorientating. Recommended.

Great stuff. Subscribed :up:

Learning From Le Guin | Kim Stanley Robinson

:cool:

Sounds a lot like Adorno's Hegelianism.

I've been on the fence about reading 100 years for a while now but it's obviously a must read. I think it's in the wife's library... — Pantagruel

I was the same. Glad I went for it.

The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System by Milovan Djilas, a 1950s critique of the Soviet system by a Yugoslav communist, showing that the nomenklatura and the elite of the CPSU had become a new class, and therefore that what is important is not just ownership of the means of production but control.

A car-centric infrastructure is stupid and evil in cities, but maybe not for transport between cities. Put another way, public transport, especially trains, is best for cities, but cars might be best between them, depending on how far apart they are etc.

So it's not so much cars themselves which are evil but the urban planning that prioritizes them. The prime example of this evil is stroads:



(And many of them are worse than this one; this one at least has sidewalks)

It's a road where there should be a street. Where I am in Moscow there are effectively similar roads in the city centre:





They turn what could be an extremely pleasant city into a hellscape, and they're really bad at moving people about compared to trains etc. (BTW Moscow does have some great public transport but it's not enough and the car is still allowed to dominate.)

Western European cities have begun to move away from the car-centric paradigm. A good YouTube channel that covers this stuff is NotJustBikes.

(And talk about big government and liberty is really not relevant or helpful. It's worth noting that the car-centrism that began early to mid-twentieth century was partly the result of oversized influence from the borderline monopolistic car industry (partly also some misguided aspects of modernist architecture))

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket — Pantagruel

Have you read his short stories "MS. Found in a Bottle," and "The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall," written a few years before the novel? I've just read them and noticed that they both touch on the Hollow Earth theory, which is alluded to in the novel too, as I recall. Contrary to those critics who claim that Poe was just doing satire in these adventure stories, I reckon he was really into these theories.

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez — Jamal

Finished. Jamal scores it 11/10.

Now reading Passing for Human by Jody Scott.

:up:

Btw I would never describe myself as being “offended” by such inaccurate rumours, and wouldn’t want to give that impression.

I hear Putin is even militarizing migrants — jgill

Thank you for your concern, but what do you mean by "militarizing"?

Conscription of foreigners is a rumour that has been spread before on this site and elsewhere. I have to say I find it pretty annoying, and even irresponsible. As far as I know, migrants can be drafted if they've attained citizenship, as you'd expect, and non-citizens cannot be drafted.

If you know otherwise, let me know.

My father used to listen to that song often. The lyrics annoyed me back then but now I get it.

Interesting that he wrote it no later than 1964, which seems pretty early to have already wised (wosen?) up to the bullshitness of that kind of sixties politics.

About a quarter way into Life And Fate by Vasily Grossman. I would have to be him to describe what it is like. — Paine

I read it a few years ago. Very good.

Discussions in the categories of Politics and Current Affairs, Humanities and Social Science, and Science and Technology, all live on the home page, belonging to Interesting stuff. Whether that’s good for a philosophy forum is debatable (generally I think it is, but the interminable and mostly very unphilosophical discussions like those on Ukraine or climate change seem to require some other way of organizing things); but I’m not sure if the Lounge is the right place for them.

Anyway, the OP under discussion here was moved because it was lazy and far too brief. OPs need to have more than “x says y, true or false”.

@boagie has been banned for low quality and toxicity.

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez.

Penalty box, you say? Sure, why not? Consider it done.

Did I just dream it?

Maybe run it by Plush? — Leontiskos

As discussed, they won't be adding new functionality and we'll have to move to another platform.

Never mind racism: I'm surprised you haven't brought theism into this debate.

I like dark chocolate, but Bournville is IMHO the old over-sweet sickly sticky disgusting kind of dark chocolate. Also I abhor rum.

Raisins I can handle.

:vomit:

On January 1 (yesterday?) I cooked a shin of veal for myself and three others. The previous night we went out at 01:30 to see some fireworks and get some free vodka and mulled wine. By that time I had had several beers, two Irish whiskies, a bottle of Georgian wine, two Baileyses…

Today I cooked again. Slow-cooked pork ribs with buckwheat and onions. More Georgian wine, also Cava and Belgian beer.

We're having a STNG marathon — Vera Mont

I watched that a lot when I was a youngster, and would happily watch it again right now. Yesterday we watched Ivan Vasilievich Changes His Profession, an SF comedy film from 1973 in which Ivan the Terrible is transported by means of a time machine to a 1970s Moscow apartment block, and hilarity ensues.

It's getting down below minus 20 Celsius tonight, so the dog will be sleeping indoors. He’s made for winter, but not for sub-minus-20 temperatures.