:up:

That's interesting, thanks. I have not read the Critique of Judgment and was not aware of any non-conceptually grounded universality. I am guessing that, roughly speaking, this has something to do with the form of an aesthetic judgement: it's not "I like this," which would be subjective but not universal, but "this is beautiful," which has the same form as "this is triangular," judgements that demand assent or denial. Others may disagree that it is beautiful, but the point is that the judgement would, if true, have the consequence that these people are wrong—and this just is how these judgements work. Something like that perhaps.

:grin:

And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore — Jamal

Nice, javi — Baden

:cry:

:up:

:up:

To me it's like a parable of climate change, but maybe more likely connects with social conflict in Ireland. Great imagery anyway.

Much of what you say is agreeable. On the connections and differences between K and H, I got a lot from that paper I linked to in my last post:

Sebastian Luft, "From being to givenness and back: Some remarks on the meaning of transcendental idealism in Kant and Husserl" (PDF)

he haw lantern, Seamus Heaney. This collection of poems is very Irish. It reminds me of the green plains, cloudy sky, the waves beneath me, and you, my Irish friend. — javi2541997

“Postscript” by Seamus Heaney

And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you’ll park and capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

I did actually create a draft announcement but didn't follow through. Now that things seem to have calmed down, I'm not going to bother with the announcement—a decision I may regret when I have to repeat the response another 25 times.

Regarding objectivity in Kant, there is a way of putting it which is less apologetic, less embarrassed about its apparently subjective flavour. For Kant, sensible access to things is subjective, but the resulting understanding is not, because the understanding applies a priori principles.

The specifically novel element here is that objectivity itself, that is, the validity of knowledge as such, is created by passing through subjectivity — by reflecting on the mechanisms of knowledge, its possibilities and its limits. In this system the subject becomes if not the creator, then at least the guarantor of objectivity. — Adorno, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason

Objectivity is reached by passing through subjectivity, but is not thereby tainted by it. Unless we're clinging to the promise of God's perspectiveless perspective, this almost seems like common sense to me: knowing is something creatures do, and creatures have points of view. What's the problem?

In this move to an anthropocentric model of cognition, Kant proposes to investigate the world as it is given from a perspective, and this perspective is, for us, the human standpoint, the only one we know of (though we can conceive that other creatures have theirs). Hence, Kant introduces a radically finite perspective to human cognition . . . insofar as a standpoint puts limitations on experience: I cannot simultaneously see an object from the front and from the back. — Sebastian Luft, From being to givenness and back: Some remarks on the meaning of transcendental idealism in Kant and Husserl (PDF)

However, this doesn't make the understanding finite and subjective:

For, the point of Kant’s entire critical project is precisely to justify the belief that despite our subjective perspective on things, we can have objective, a priori cognition. As a priori, it is a-perspectival. Cognition exists, as human cognition, but it is a priori cognition.

I think the upshot is that I was wrong to respond to @Hanover by saying that according to Kant, the human understanding, like human perception, is not the only one possible: human understanding is the only knowledge-generating mechanism possible (although it might not be only human; rational extra-terrestrials could have the same understanding), but it could apply to different kinds of perception.

The picture we're left with is something like this: whatever kind of subjective perspective rational creatures might have on things, their understanding allows them to achieve the same knowledge of those things, which are thereby the very same things, even though they are "for us".

My understanding of Kant is that he saw epistemological basis of knowledge as being a complex interplay of both the empirical and the nature of reason. Here, he definitely saw the 'noumenon' and the transcendent as being beyond the scope of comprehension. In this respect, he saw the limits of espistemology; with a sense of a possible 'transcendent' beyond comprehension. The idea and scope of reason was a way of approaching this territory of thought.

The particular dichotomy between the 'known' or 'unknown' according to reason or the empirical is of particular significance in epistemological and empirical understanding. The two dichotomies may be opposed and how they are understood or juxtaposed may be of critical importance. In other words, to what extent is the basis of empirical knowledge important as a foundation of knowledge? To what extent may it be contrasted by a priori reason, or ideas of 'the noumenon'; which go beyond the physical basis of understanding of ideas. — Jack Cummins

Yes, and the interesting thing is that even though the field of possible experience and cognition is immanent--lying within the bounds of sense and understanding--even so, within these bounds human knowledge always reaches towards the unknown, as if it is immanent but transcendently-inclined.

Another way to think about this, using terminology I don't believe was available to Kant: Objectivity would be universal intersubjectivity. We can theoretically have universal agreement on phenomenal facts, like the cat's whiskers. This avoids the charge that my belief in my cat's whiskers is "merely subjective," while not going so far as to claim that I've achieved the "view from nowhere." — J

Yes indeed, that's the way I think about it, and I'm a bit puzzled why this point is not often made. I guess it's because in Husserl's scheme, there is no thing-in-itself, and the intersubjective is all there is. That seems to be the way I'm reading Kant, taking him in the direction of Husserl (even at the risk of reading too much back into Kant).

Talking of Husserl, in my Googling I noticed the following in a review of one of Dan Zahavi's books:

Husserl's transcendental idealism, according to Zahavi, then accounts for the fact that we never have access to the world except through the mediation of some sort of meaning, but does not thereby assume that meanings are a distortion of the mind-independent world, but rather our modes of access to it through which being itself, including spatio-temporal objects within the world, can appear to us. Beings just are those things that appear to us when knowledge is successful, not something behind the appearances. To recognize that all objects appear to us through the lens of some meaning (i.e., are, as Husserl calls them, intentional objects) does not mean that the further course of experience cannot confirm that they are indeed genuinely real objects. Conversely, it makes no sense to talk of consciousness or mind except as a way of relating to the world that appears to it. Mind is not a self-enclosed realm but the field of experiencing in which the world is there for us. — NDPR

I think that might go some way to answering @Hanover's questions too. It's a description of Husserl's account but there's nothing in it that isn't also in Kant, though in the context of a different system and using different terminology. It's pretty much how I've been reading Kant, or trying to.

Saying "objectivity is immanent" is tantamount to saying it is subjective isn't it? Doesn't immanent mean to be something that comes from within the perceiver? — Hanover

This is a key point. Immanence is within the limits of possible experience. It is opposed to transcendence, which would denote contact with something beyond, like God or monads or Forms or noumena. It’s debatable whether immanence is subjective or not. I think not necessarily, but in Kant it somewhat is. As @Fooloso4 said…

objectivity is universal subjectivity — Fooloso4

Which again looks Hegelian to me.

It was moved to the Lounge. I gave the reasons here:

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/880144

You’re the best, prax!

"The essences of light and colours (said Scaliger) are as dark to the understanding, as they themselves are open to the sight.—Nay, undoubtedly so long as we consider these things no otherwise than sense represents them, that is, as really existing in the objects without us, they are and must needs be eternally unintelligible. Now when all men naturally inquire what these things are, what is light, and what are colours, the meaning hereof is nothing else but this, that men would fain know or comprehend them by something of their own which is native and domestic, not foreign to them, some active exertion or anticipation of their own minds…" — Cudworth, quoted by Manuel

Nice. I had a look at the epistemology section of the SEP page for Cudworth and he does seem remarkably Kantian.

I'm quite open to the Hegelian criticism/solution, but I just haven't got around to reading him yet. I'm a bit more familiar with Wittgenstein's angle: everything is open to view, and truth or knowledge as "agreement with reality" is an unclear concept except in familiar everyday situations:

203. . . . What does this agreement consist in, if not in the fact that what is evidence in these language games speaks for our proposition?

214. What prevents me from supposing that this table either vanishes or alters its shape and colour when on one is observing it, and then when someone looks at it again changes back to its old condition? - "But who is going to suppose such a thing?" - one would feel like saying.

215. Here we see that the idea of 'agreement with reality' does not have any clear application. — Wittgenstein, On Certainty

The idea of agreement is unclear in this case because nothing could speak for our proposition, and yet by design, nothing could speak against it either, so nothing could agree or disagree with it.

I take this to be a simpler way of putting Kant's point that asking about agreement with reality for such cases is to reach beyond possible experience for an impossible transcendence.

Assuming I got all that right . . . — Hanover

Seems reasonable.

. . . my next question is whether your comment that "By 'universal' he means it holds for all rational creatures," is itself a priori true or a posteriori true, meaning must #1 and #2 logically exist for a creature to be rational or does it just happen to be the case that rational creatures on planet earth have #1 and #2 and that makes them rational, but one could be rational with other a priori structures? — Hanover

A rational being for Kant is one with that active faculty, your number (2), i.e., the understanding, which is the spontaneity of the mind. And we're the only ones we know about. But Kant does admit that he is not able to rule out the possibility that there are kinds of intuition other than sensible, and (I think) other kinds of understanding, i.e., maybe there's some kind of perception that does not depend on the senses in the way ours does but which also provides knowledge, conditioned by a different kind of understanding.

I ask this because if Kant can say that these faculties we have are the only faculties that can yield rational results, then he could possibly escape idealism because he'd be saying we have that which we must have in order to have true knowledge.

I don't like that solution. It feels like Descartes' injection of God into the mix by just declaring that there's no way we'd see things in a wrong way and that the way we see things must be right. — Hanover

He does show (or claim to show) that these faculties are the ones that happen to yield results for us, which is the same as to say they are the only ones that work for us. I don't know if you think he thereby escapes idealism or not. Personally I'm discovering that to preserve what is best and most revolutionary in Kant I might have to drop my insistence that he was not idealist, and admit that the second edition of the CPR, in trying to defend against that accusation, just introduced inconsistencies which disappear if you just admit that everything we know is known for us, and that there are no things in themselves. This way lies Hegel, a very worldly kind of idealist.

Real objects, objects we can know, are objects in space that are given to us in perception; these phenomena are beings of sense, whereas noumena are beings merely of understanding. — Jamal

I don't follow this. What would be an example of a noumenal being of the understanding? It would not be something we could sense for sure, but what is something just in my understanding? This almost sound like Plato's forms. — Hanover

The noumenon is the concept of an unconditioned thing, a correlate of experience that is independent of experience. But the noumenon is not such a thing itself, but is the concept of it, an artifact of the understanding. It has no known correlate, so there is nothing but a detached thought in the head, no Platonic form or anything.

Is it not correct to describe the phenomenal state as a modification of whatever that primordial mass was that that preceded the formation of the phenomena? I use modification and distortion interchangably here, unless you think that's not a fair move for some reason. — Hanover

I think you can reasonably say that the stuff of perception--light, sound, etc--is physically modified, such as when light is refracted by the cornea. But I don't think it's correct to say that phenomena are modifications of noumena, in Kant's terms. I will have to say more some time.

Isn't this just a vacuous concept by definition then? — Pantagruel

The noumenon? It’s a critical concept: philosophers like Leibniz built systems around noumena, and Kant is diagnosing this disease. He also thinks he can’t just ignore it, because he regards it as an unavoidable product of the understanding.

Good, difficult questions.

What does "objectively" mean as you use it?

If we concede there are conditions for our knowledge and our knowledge is subject to those conditions and if those conditions are peculiar to the perceiver, how is our knowledge of anything objective? — Hanover

I’m trying to use it as Kant did, to refer to universally valid judgements about the objects of experience. By “universal” he means it holds for all rational creatures, and it's based on a priori structures of knowledge that are independent of experience (though they only produce knowledge when applied to experience).

The two need not be in conflict: you and I have objective knowledge that cats have whiskers and that fire burns human flesh, even though we know it in our own special human way. This is pretty much the way I use the word myself. You, in contrast, imply that you understand objectivity to require an absolute perspective—a view from nowhere. I think this is a more recent sense of the term. Kant describes such attempted judgements not as objective but as transcendent, and as applying to the unconditioned.

Something can be known objectively without being known independently of experience, since in fact it is only to the given content of experience that knowledge applies. Knowing is a process that happens in a certain way to specially constituted knowers, but it is not thereby subjective. Objectivity is not transcendent, but immanent. The basic idea is similar to Hegel, of a unity between subject and object, even though the object is an object for us, not in itself.

I don’t want to pretend there are no difficulties. It might be fair to interpret Kant as establishing objectivity only by downgrading it to a feature of the subjective. What I’m doing is trying to get at what Kant was doing and what he meant; I'm not claiming that his arguments were entirely consistent and valid or that they didn't lead to unforseen conclusions.

If upon transcendental contemplation we determine X,Y, and Z are the conditions for our knowledge, doesn't X,Y and Z become the lens upon which we view the noumenal and what we then actually perceive we refer to as the phenomenal?

I get that science will only concern itself with the phenomenal, but I don't see how you reject the suggestion that the phenomenal is a distortion of the noumenal. Isn't the phenomenal just the noumenal filtered through X,Y, and Z as you described it?

Your description of the transcendental was most helpful, but with Kant I'm always stuck with the meaning, purpose, and relevance of the noumenal and the difficulty in saving him from idealism. — Hanover

Maybe we have to get into the differences between the thing in itself, the positive noumenon, the negative noumenon, and the transcendental object. But here is a first attempt...

The first appearance of noumenon in the first edition is here:

If . . . I suppose there to be things that are merely objects of the understanding and that, nevertheless, can be given to an intuition, although not to sensible intuition . . . then such things would be called noumena (intelligibilia). — A 249

From the beginning, Kant uses the term to refer to objects of thought: as unavoidable results of the operation of the understanding, which attempt to refer to something beyond possible experience. Real objects, objects we can know, are objects in space that are given to us in perception; these phenomena are beings of sense, whereas noumena are beings merely of understanding.

I posted a long response to you on the old forum, attacking your notion of distortion and attempting to show that it was incoherent. Looking back, it might have been badly written--you never did reply--but I'd still want to make the same point. Only a signal can be distorted. That is, only one's perception is subject to distortion. The object perceived cannot itself be distorted by its perception.* The noumenon is the concept of a purported thing beyond possible experience, and as such cannot be distorted.

That is to say, there is nothing there to be filtered or distorted. Simply to be an object of knowledge is for a thing to be known via the senses and understanding. If there is no possible disembodied, unperspectival way of apprehending a thing, then the idea of distortion has no meaning.

* I’m not saying the object perceived is the noumenon, by the way.

:up:

Lately been listening to a lot of baroque music. There's something strange in it that I cannot explain. — Olento

Is it that it lies in an uncanny valley or a liminal space between the pre-modern and the modern? That it’s strange and familiar at the same time?

Do we infer the unperceived existence of what we perceive from the nature of our experience? If so, how? If not, why not? — OwenB

On second thoughts, I don’t think it is worded very well. At least, it’s not precise enough. It might be asking a general question about perception: does it work by inference? (Russell, following Hume, seemed to think so) Or, more precisely, is inference the way that we know things via perception?

If the answer to that is yes, then the questioner may also want to know if we thereby (by inference) know of the existence of things when we’re not perceiving them—but this isn’t explicit in the question, as @bert1 pointed out (it’s “do we infer,” not “do we correctly infer”). Personally I’d assume the question does have this meaning even though it’s ambiguous.

If the answer to the first question is no, then either we know of the continued existence of things unperceived by some other means than inference, or, agreeing with Hume, we don’t have any such knowledge at all.

Also, there is a major interpretative choice to be made in dealing with the question. Does “the unperceived existence of what we perceive” refer to the continued existence of things while we’re not perceiving them, or does it refer to the thing as it is in itself, roughly speaking the aspect of a thing that is not subject to the structures of human perception and cognition. I think it’s the former (how do you know the cup is still there when you close the cupboard door), because the wording used is similar to that found in Hume. (EDIT: it should also be noted that these are close to being merely two descriptions of the same thing, i.e., the thing as it is in itself is, from a certain point of view, synonymous with the thing as it is when you’re not perceiving it)

If you need to contact me privately, use private messages here on the website, not email. Go to my profile and click “send a message”.

Unperceived existence.....ask about this.... clear as mud?? — Mark Nyquist

I suggest you take a break from this particular thread, Mark. Maybe it’s just not for you, you know?

More off-topic responses will be deleted.

Is this about the British empiricists? Locke, Berkeley, Hume? — bert1

Looks like the person who formulated the question has that background in mind. Whether Owen’s daughter is expected to know that or has any such reading materials, I don’t know.

Still works. For “unperceived” you could think “continued, when we’re not perceiving it”. The question as asked is just very condensed and terse.

@OwenB

I have no idea if this is a good way to go for your daughter in her particular situation, but the way I’d look at it is to tackle David Hume’s argument against the inference of continued (unperceived) existence in the Treatise of Human Nature. He says that we infer continued existence—the existence of the cup in the cupboard when you can’t see it—from the constancy of our perceptions, but that this is unjustified.

When we believe any thing of external existence, or suppose an object to exist a moment after it is no longer perceived, this belief is nothing but a sentiment — David Hume

That quotation is from the “Abstract”, which is a summary of the Treatise. The argument itself is around 1.4.2 (that’s Book.Part.Section).

But there must be secondary sources that could make it more manageable.

Unlike others, I don’t see anything wrong with the wording of the question. It’s out of Hume.

You need to parse each word or phrase in a nested set if that is any help.

Looks like four elements.

You probably need to start with your best theory of mind to make any progress. — Mark Nyquist

@OwenB You will probably get many answers that are useless or worse, like the one I’ve quoted here. I hope someone will come along and suggest a good approach. It’s a difficult question though. Michael’s suggested SEP article is good, but maybe it’s not entry level.

Great post. I particularly appreciate two things: the analogy of writing, which I’d never thought of before (I’ll probably use that in future); and the idea that the back-and-forth between radical sceptics and their opponents is perennial, rather than just a debate of the modern period.

We are biological entities, engendered and evolved in a physical environment, governed by and dependent for survival on the same physical laws as are all the inanimate and animate entities in that 'outside world'. Being delimited by a thin layer of dermis and epithelium does not truly divide us from the physical world of which we are a product and in which we live.

Before we evolved to the point of being able to perceive and reason, we received sensory input and nourishment from that same physical outside; we responded to it, interacted with it, injected waste products into it, manipulated and altered it.

Why should be we not be able to say how we experience it, now that we can enhance, measure and articulate our sensory input? — Vera Mont

This was the very first response in the discussion and it might still be the best one. It eschews a direct engagement with the OP's argument and instead offers a better conceptual framework (or paradigm or what have you), one that can replace the worn out assumptions of the early moderns. Philosophical advances tend to be made that way, rather than with direct point-by-point refutations.

But some philosophers, or enthusiasts of philosophy at least, tend to cast such responses as philosophically naive, as if the modern scientific conception of lifeforms reciprocally engaged with their environments, while it might be okay for practical purposes, is inadequate to the higher demands of philosophy, where it obviously just begs the question (because evil demons and the Matrix and so on).

The OP begins in the head. Vera is saying, let's begin in the world. My question is for everyone here: is there a serious problem with this? If you say it's begging the question, that scepticism about knowledge and about the external world is still appropriate, then don't you need grounds for that doubt? In the face of our knowledge of the world, of the evolution of animals, of ethology, anthropology, and sociology, what warrant do philosophy enthusiasts have to carry on interrupting by saying, ah, but couldn't it all be a dream?

In any case, what justification is there for beginning in the head anyway? Developmentally, we are social first, and only later retreat into our thoughts.

I specifically mention philosophy enthusiasts rather than philosophers per se, because as far as I can tell, the latter indulge in this kind of scepticism as a teaching tool for the history of philosophy, and no longer take it very seriously. Someone can correct me if I'm wrong about that.

We've had two centuries* of philosophers rejecting the solipsistically-inclined philosophy of Descartes and Kant's epistemology of the independent bourgeois individual, etc. When is everyone else going to catch up?

* Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Wittgenstein all reject the Cartesian starting point in philosophy

Your questions imply that you consider the seeing of a thing to require that there be no light passing between the thing and the eye; that if there is a physical process involved in the perception of a thing, that thing is not being perceived. — Jamal

This is not my position and I have absolutely no clue how you could possibly glean this from anything I have said. — AmadeusD

I got it straight from this:

I'm still wanting an explanation of how it's possible we're seeing "actual objects" that i can explore. Every explanation attempting to do so just ignores entirely that we literally do not see objects, but reflected/refracted light which in turn causes us to 'see' a visual construct. No one seems to disagree, but still reject the fact that we cannot ever access external objects. — AmadeusD

Here, you imply that we cannot see objects, for the reason that light intervenes between the objects and the visual system. If that is not what you meant, and there is some other argument here, I cannot see what it could be.

You say we see light — Jamal

I do not. — AmadeusD

But that’s what you said:

Every explanation attempting to do so just ignores entirely that we literally do not see objects, but reflected/refracted light which in turn causes us to 'see' a visual construct. — AmadeusD

Is there some other way to understand “we literally do not see objects, but reflected/refracted light”?

If you don’t actually mean what you say, and you can’t remember what you said, and you’re unwilling to read over what you’ve said before to understand my objections, then it’s not surprising that I’m not getting through to you.

I can’t tell if it’s just that your reading comprehension is bad or if you’re intellectually dishonest. I’ve responded to you patiently and very precisely, each time quoting what you said and responding directly, and now you’re flying off the handle, ranting and raving, and making very little sense. This discussion hasn’t gone the way I hoped, so I’ll bow out.

I'm not going to get into it this time. This is partly because I don't like the debate any more, but also because since you developed your more reasonable version of indirect realism a couple of years ago, it pushes the debate back to more deep and difficult matters: the distinction between appearance and reality, the idea of things "as they really are", etc., all of which I am deeply suspicious of. I think that internally your position is well-argued, but I just don't think I accept the terms any more, the way it's all framed. Sorry to be so vague.

Under certain definitions I can settle for either (1) or (2). It depends. (2) could describe various correlationisms. Whether it's direct or not might not be a fruitful debate, because the way the term is understood is so diverse as to be hopelessly confusing. One person might mean "as it really is, independently of perception," and another might mean "perceived without intermediate objects of perception" or whatever. Seems like a historical debate and I don't know what to do with it any more.

Yes, I understand. You can be a phenomenalist or indirect realist without making mistakes like “all we see is light”. So yeah, your view is more advanced, since it avoids the linguistic confusions—but it is thereby even more deeply wrong. :grin:

I'm still wanting an explanation of how it's possible we're seeing "actual objects" that i can explore. Every explanation attempting to do so just ignores entirely that we literally do not see objects, but reflected/refracted light which in turn causes us to 'see' a visual construct. No one seems to disagree, but still reject the fact that we cannot ever access external objects. It's an odd thing to note. Seems to always boil down to 'we look at something, therefore...' with no treatment of the intermediary.. — AmadeusD

Ah, so you’re one of those guys!

—I can see rain over there behind that hill
—Actually, you can’t
—What?
—All we see is light!
—Oh my God, this shit again.

Your questions imply that you consider the seeing of a thing to require that there be no light passing between the thing and the eye; that if there is a physical process involved in the perception of a thing, that thing is not being perceived. Why would you think this? We see things by means of reflected/refracted light, don't we? This is part of how we access things around us.

But it’s actually quite hard to tell what you think, because your use of terms seems quite unstable. You say we see light, which in turn allows us to “see” visual constructs, which suggests that you think we don't really see things or the visual constructs of those things (since you put the word "see" in quotation marks for the latter). But a more common form of phenomenalism would say that internal images (or models, representations, whatever) are the objects of perception, rather than the raw sensory stimuli; I would have expected this to be your kind of position. And in any case, why does your personal use of the word differ so much from everyone else’s?

The propagation of light, the movement of the perceiver’s eyes, the retinal photoreceptors, the special cells, the electrical signals in the nervous system…and so on. There is a lot that happens to enable us to see things. And yet you deny that we see things. Don’t you think it’s weird that we would have evolved such an elaborate system if it were not for perceiving things in the environment?

Of course, the particular problem here is really just linguistic (ideological too, but I won't get into that), like when people say, without thinking, that what we think of as solid objects are not really solid. I'm not going to fully untie the tangled usages, since what I've said should already suggest a strategy of auto-disentanglement.

To use an analogy: neither travelling to New York, nor travelling to New York directly, demand that I use a teleporter. There is an intervening process, and yet it’s still New York I’m travelling to, directly.

At the risk of being moderated for self-promotion ... I deal with some of these issues in an old article that used to be on the TPF articles site but is now just on my blog: The Argument for Indirect Realism (and there are also two discussions on TPF about the article).

But, having recently come to the CPR I literally have never seen a respected philosopher claim what you're claiming. Perhaps 'patent' is a touch far, but as I see it, this is the standard for anyone not trying to be edgy. — AmadeusD

We were talking about two worlds vs two aspects. The latter is the predominant interpretation of Kant among philosophers. You didn't know that, but now you do. Check the books and the internet if you don't believe me, rather than shouting about how incredulous you are. They asked this question in the last PhilPapers Survey: Kant (what is his view?): one world or two worlds?.

Just because two aspects is more popular (except in Canada) doesn't mean it's right, but it does show that your incredulity is inappropriate.

And didn't you see my quotation from Kant himself, arguing against two worlds? Is he not a "respected philosopher"?

However, if you're referring to the more edgy side of my interpretation, namely that Kant is not any kind of idealist at all--despite incorporating something called transcendental idealism in his system--then that has support among respected philosophers too, notably Arthur Collins in his book, Possible Experience: Understanding Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. As I recall, I actually think Collins goes a bit too far and lets Kant off with too much--but anyway, I haven't even said much along these lines in this discussion; most of what I've said is pretty standard.

If there is any particular statement of mine about Kant's philosophy that strikes you as outrageous, then please quote it and I'll either elaborate on it until you begin to nod in agreement, or else correct myself.

The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares. — Jamal

Finished. Score: 4.2/5. Susanna Clarke must have been influenced by it when she wrote Piranesi.

Next:

• Thus Were Their Faces by Silvina Ocampo
• Inverted World by Christopher Priest, a favourite author of mine who died a few days ago

Corrections are intended to correct. I do not see that you've done this. Asking to be corrected is not asking to be either taken for a ride, or to accept any objection on its face. I've tried to explore the ideas you've put forward and tehy are left wanting to me. If you see this as you describe, far be it from me :)

Yes. They are. Unsure why you're somehow using that as the examplar of the argument, rather than a fairly direct and illustrative couple of analogies. Which you've said it is. So, at a bit of a loss mate :\ They illustrate well that aspect of what I've put forward that you are not getting. If you're not wanting to explore that, then so be it! No issue :) Perhaps I just don't understand - and if that's the case, I couldn't accept what you're putting forth anyway so please don't fault me for either 1. disagreeing with you; or 2. Not understanding you. I am trying to be honest, not difficult. — AmadeusD

Stream of consciousness is cool in modernist fiction but confusing in this context. :wink:

Anyway, it’s rhetorical bluster with a hint of bullshit, but it seems good-natured so you’re forgiven :grin:

But as an example, it seems patently incorrect when you reject the notion that Kant uses the 'two worlds' model. It is clear he does, and this is expressed by other philosophers constantly — AmadeusD

Patently incorrect to agree with the majority of philosophers today, who reject the two world interpretation? It’s a debate with respected adherents on each side—and always has been. So it’s patently incorrect to say that the two aspect interpretation is patently incorrect. The key secondary text is Allison’s Kant’s Transcendental Idealism.

Having said that, I always feel like saying that the two world interpretation is patently incorrect, since Kant is quite obviously drawing a dichotomy between things (regarded) as X vs things (regarded) as Y. But I can’t say that, since I’m forced to admit that Paul Guyer, proponent of the two world interpretation, is a respected Kant scholar.

Talk of a noumenal world looks plainly wrong to me, since noumena are objects of thought, insofar as they are objects at all. They are conceptual. Bearing this in mind, Kant does address a two world interpretation:

Hence the division of objects into phenomena and noumena, and of the world into a world of sense and a world of understanding, cannot be per­mitted at all in the positive signification, although concepts do indeed permit the distinction into sensible and intellectual ones. — A255

This is because the concept of a noumenon is…

… only a boundary concept serving to limit the pretension of sensibility, and hence is only of negative use. But it is nonetheless not arbitrarily invented; rather, it coheres with the limitation of sensibility, yet without being able to posit anything posi­ tive outside sensibility's range.

But remind me why we’re talking about the two world interpretation?

BTW I have personally found LLM AI tools to be sometimes bad with philosophy so I suggest you avoid them except perhaps for guiding your study—certainly don’t give them the last word.

I will say you are perhaps the sweetest person I have interacted in this forum so far. Of course, the bar is not high — okay the bar is low —, but you do come across as kind. — Lionino

You reap what you sow. Since I invited you a couple of months ago you've been arrogant, snarky and insulting to people. And you like to throw around these blanket insults too: sometimes it's that most people on TPF are idiots, now it's that they're not nice.

Fix yourself first. You can't even give a compliment without insulting somebody else.

[And I haven't even mentioned your bizarre fixation on Latin vs French, and the strong possibility that you're a returning banned member who hated the place so much he couldn't get enough of it]

Initially you seemed to be asking for someone to correct your interpretation of Kant if you’d got anything wrong, which is the only reason I commented. But you are sticking to your misinterpretation, and sticking to what really seems like a wilful misunderstanding of what I’ve said, e.g., that I've claimed, contrary to what I've explicitly said a few times, that Kant believes we can access things as they are in themselves—so I won’t continue down that road. I'll just leave you with these, which I think you have not absorbed:

[the thing as it is in itself] is merely an aspect of an external object, the aspect that we logically cannot access — Jamal

The short answer is that Kant is an empirical realist, but the thing-in-itself is not an empirical thing. It's a conceptual construction, a thing imagined as having no properties, and as such a limit beyond which there is nothing more to know. We should not expect to have access to such a thing. — jkop

(There is a very slight tension between these descriptions, which seems to align with the difference between the thing-in-itself and the noumenon)

The example was in response to (i think Janus) positing that via the senses, the inference we make to external objects is essentially 'perfect' and provides 'direct access' to those objects in some way.
My response was to deny this categorically, and the examples used were:
A shadow does not give us any access to the object that caused it to appear, despite (possible) a 1:1 match in dimensions.
The second example was that if you're standing in a bay (A) and a tidal wave hits (lets assume you're Dr. Manhattan) this gives you no access whatsoever so the empty bay(B) across the ocean whcih caused it. While crude, I think these hold for Experience (A) and ding-an-sich (B). — AmadeusD

These are just analogies. Assuming they apply is to beg the question. I thought, from what you said, that you had a better argument.

We Who Are About To... by Joanna Russ. — Jamal

It was really annoying so I abandoned it.

The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares.

We Who Are About To... by Joanna Russ.