I pointed out that this is no more than saying that we can put a negation in front of any proposition. It's grammar masquerading as profundity. — Banno

I haven't suggested it is profound. Grammar reflects our thinking, which is dualistic; and that is basic. But it is simplistic to suggest that it is merely a matter of grammar.

Kant's antinomies are based on metaphysical speculations. It's not merely a grammatical matter; the grammar reflects what is imaginable. Any speculative idea may be true or false, or at least so we might think. Scientific theories themselves are never proven; they can, and often do, turn out to be wrong. — Janus

is utterly hollow. You keep saying nothing of consequence, as if it were relevant. — Banno

What I said there asserts or implies that:
Philosophers have been speculating about the nature of the universe for millenia, about, for example, whether it is infinite or finite, eternal or of limited duration, created or not, designed or not, and so on.
This is an exercise of the imagination, considering what is possible, speculation constrained by a dualistic logic.
Our grammar merely reflects this.
We have no way of determining whether even the best theories of science reflect some objective, mind-independent reality.
Scientific theories are never proven, etc...

All you can come up with is to attempt to dismiss what I've said as "utterly hollow", "nothing of consequence", "irrelevant". Yet the topic is Kant's Antinomies. Why are you here if it is of no interest to you? All you ever seem to do is whinge about the poor quality of threads on here and yet you are here more and make more posts than just about anyone else. It just looks kind of sad and hypocritical to be honest.

So it just looks like you don't even have any counter-assertions, let alone counter arguments. This is not engaging in discussion in good faith on your part.

You want to claim that Kantian thinking is "not useful" not merely to you, but per se, and this attitude is nothing if not tediously dogmatic. Who are you to decide what is useful for others?

I'm happy to be done with you.

'It' has sure done a lot of 'appearing' to you for something which is other than it appears. — Isaac

Do you think that it follows from the the fact that something appears that the something is as it appears. If so, do you have an argument for that or is it merely a matter of faith?

You're full of shit, Banno. Sometimes I think you are just a troll.

Brilliant rebuttal as usual! :roll:

I suspect that precious few academic philosophers nowadays would count themselves Kantian. If you want a more sophisticated counterargument, you might first produce a more sophisticated argument. That is, it's not clear what is being posited here, by the OP or by your good self. — Banno

I don't have a lot of time for academic philosophers; too much peer pressure at work. I doubt that many "sophisticated" philosophers (outside the 'analytic' tradition at least) do not recognize the enormous influence of Kant on modern philosophy.

In any case, these kinds of things can be looked at from so many angles, that it comes down to personal preferences: there is no fact of the matter as to whether Kantian style thinking is useful or not.

I have read a couple of his books. — Banno

It'd be interesting to know which ones you've read.

Are you referring to Innatism, Enactivism, Kant's a priori intuition, etc, in that life has evolved in synergy with the world for at least 3.5 billion years. I agree, if you are. — RussellA

It seems I missed this response of yours previously. I'm not sure about "innatism", but enactivism and Kant's a priori intuition (if you mean space and time) seem about right.

I see things when I am asleep. — I like sushi


This must be quite a skill. If I find you sleeping and held a stick in front of your face you would able to see it. I bet your peeking. — Richard B

No doubt I'll be corrected if wrong, but I think the reference is to dreaming.

Yeah, but we can move (have moved...) on. That very differentiation of how things appear as against how they are can be seen as a misapprehension of how language works. That's the lesson of Wittgenstein, Austin, and so on. — Banno

You may think that you have moved on (not sure who you think the "we" are), but many would disagree with you; some may say we have moved backwards rather than "on" (forwards).

Seeing that differentiation "as a misapprehension of how language works" seems implausible and simplistic to me. I doubt Wittgenstein would agree with your interpretation of him.

I'm not familiar with Evald Ilyenkov’s Cosmology: The Point Of Madness Of Dialectical Materialism, so I don't think I'll be recommending it.

Of course. He makes use of Hegel, and is quite amusing (snuffle, pull t-shirt, whip nose on forefinger.) That's so much more interesting than talking about Hegel. — Banno

Ah, so you see him as using Hegel as a prop for stand-up comedy or some such? I agree he is a very amusing talker, but if you want to know what he thinks about Kant and Hegel you need to read his books.

...and no reason to think that it might be other than it appears. Kant is just using language badly.

I don't mind Zizek. — Banno

Right, we have no reason to think that it is or is not how it appears, or even that it might be one or the other. Precisely Kant's point; and nothing to do with bad language use.

Zizek is an avowed Kantian (and Hegelian). It's very warm and fuzzy that you don't mind him, but I would be surprised if you agreed with him about Kant (or Hegel).

It's not just about you; we all have our presuppositions, preferences and prejudices.

As I see it Kant doesn't offer the thing-in-itself as an explanation of anything, other than to point out that if something appears it seems to follows that there must be something which appears. and we seem to have no reason to believe that that which appears is the exactly the same as its appearance, or even anything at all like it.

Some people have found this helpful, and that says something about them, but if you do not, that's fine and it also says something about you.

I can't think of any novel way to approach these ideas. Maybe try Hilary Lawson's Closure, or Zizek, but I don't expect you will find them useful. I look forward to being pleasantly surprised.

The significance is no more than recognising that the question remains unanswered, indeed, unanswerable. — Banno

Which is exactly the point of Kant's antinomies as I understand it; to indicate the aporias that inevitably attend upon dualistic thinking. Kant referred to the "transcendental illusion". His project was aimed to draw a distinction between the transcendental, that which is beyond human experience and judgement, and the transcendent; that which is (unjustifiably) posited to, not be merely imagined or imaginable, but to actually exist.

Kant introduced the idea of things in themselves only to denote the hidden nature of empirical things, their super-sensory attributes we can know nothing about. That doesn't help us to know anything about the ultimate nature of things (obviously) but it shows the limitation of human experience, judgement and thought.

It seems obvious that you find all this unhelpful, but that fact indicates more about you than it does about the value of Kant's philosophy.

I'm not seeing the relevance to the question as to whether the cosmos is infinitely large or finite in extent.

Janus points to reification as an example, while I was pointing out that, the mere fact that we can negate any proposition tells us nothing about how things are. — Banno

None of our imaginative speculations tell us how things are. It is even questionable that scientific theories or mathematical discoveries do. The fact that our thinking is dualistic tells us something about how we think, about its limitations, is all. Do you think the Koch snowflake tells us anything about the nature of the cosmos?

"Limited" as I read it just means something like "of finite extent". That is probably what Kant meant. Can you propose an alternate usage?

I agree it is. like most philosophical discussion, of little use; it's just a way to pass the time.

I think we are misled mostly by reification; the "fallacies of misplaced concreteness". I think we are misled when we think that our dualistic abs tractions can capture the real. We are also misled when we become preoccupied with philosophical discourse. and concerned with propositional correctness, at the expense of the kinds of transformative philosophical practices in which much of ancient philosophy consisted. I suppose grammar plays a minor role in this, but I think it mostly reflects our illusions rather than creates them.

This is all just my opinion, containing the seeds of its own negation, of course.

It would be a shame to mistake such grammatical observations for metaphysics or epistemics. — Banno

Metaphysical ideas can be negated; Kant's antinomies are based on metaphysical speculations. It's not merely a grammatical matter; the grammar reflects what is imaginable. Any speculative idea may be true or false, or at least so we might think. Scientific theories themselves are never proven; they can, and often do, turn out to be wrong.

Then presumably there is an idea that negates "every idea contains the seeds of its own negation"...? — Banno

Of course. Such would be the dogmatic ideas. Could not any of those be negated? Do you think it is possible that any idea exists which could not be negated? Isn't there always a 'no' to any 'yes?

Not sure what your point is here. My purpose was to point out that "progress" is an attitude rather than a fact, that Pinker's error is to treat it as a fact, an error that ↪Jamal
to some extent shares in his criticism of Pinker. — Banno

I wasn't concerned whether progress is a "fact". I was merely pointing out that there is a distinction between the defeatist attitude that it is impossible, the optimistic attitude that it is possible, and the complacent attitude that it is inevitable.

Regarding whether it is justifiable to think progress is a fact; I don't see how it could be since just what progress consists in is too open to interpretation to be unequivocal.

The kids who took it as a given that things would get worse had little motivation to try to make things better. It will be the kids who think things can improve who make a positive difference to what happens. So the myth of progress is methodological. — Banno

The "myth of progress" is that progress is inevitable. It's not the myth of progress which is methodically efficacious, but the attitude of openness that allows that progress is possible, but by no means inevitable. This is dialectically opposed to the attitude that "it [is] a given that things [will] get worse"; that progress is impossible.

Humans do this all the time, albeit not necessarily on the extreme scale shown in the antinomies, in that no matter what anybody says, from deities to theoretical physics, odds are that somebody else will find something wrong with it. — Mww

Yes, as per Hegel, every idea contains the seeds of its own negation, which is just what you would expect, given the dualistic nature of human thought.

What do you think?

By transcendental realism I understand 'the inquiry of how reality must be in order for scientific models to be possible'. — 180 Proof

That sounds about right to me. Even if we can't know that science gives a true representation of a mind-independent reality, we have nothing else remotely serviceable for such a task. Speculations about the nature of a mind-independent reality seem to be driven by three things apart from science: imagination, that is what just seems to intuitive feel right (we can see an example in Aristotle's understanding of gravity).

Then there is the conditioning factor of well entrenched traditional beliefs.

And finally there is wishful-thinking, or attachment to the idea that things should be just as we would wish them to be.

All of these seem far more unreliable than science, which is the paradigmatic self-correcting discipline, and calls for a willingness to remain unbiased in assessing whatever theoretical speculations we might be entertaining.

So, the central problem with the idea that the in itself is completely undifferentiated and unconditioned is explaining how a diverse world that can be understood in ways common to all suitable percipients could possibly arise out of such a lack of any structure.



I have friends staying with me for the next ten days, so I will have to try to come back to this.

Thanks, there's a lot there and I don't have much time today, so just one clarifying question:

Do you take 'transcendental' to mean beyond experience, unknowable?

And a response that hopefully will make my idea clearer:

As to why not transcendental realism, is the assignment of a mere conception alone to validate a physical object, and as we all know, conception alone is in no way sufficient for empirical knowledge. On the other hand, the fact of perception makes explicit the reality necessary for its cause, which makes the thing in itself a necessary antecedent condition, even if nothing can be known of it in itself, insofar as it is the representation only, of the thing in itself, that is. — Mww

Right, so we cannot be talking about empirical knowledge of the transcendental as it is in-itself. Empirical knowledge can only be knowledge of the in-itself as it is represented by us. Empirical knowledge is suffused with ideas; that's why I say it is ideal. We don't know whether how we represent what is given to us via the senses in any way reflects or corresponds to an independent reality, or what that could even mean.

All we know is that we think there must be such a reality, a transcendental (because unknowable-as-it-is-in-itself reality), but a reality nonetheless, so that is why I say transcendental realism seems to logically follow. But again that is not an empirically established conclusion (other than that our perceptual representations seems to be consistent enough for us to stay out of trouble most of the time, which suggests that our senses are representing the noumenal accurately enough for practical purposes). It is, rather, an inference to the best explanation.

This from the Chalmers paper seems to support my interpretation of Kant:

Kant’s transcendental idealism is not really a version of idealism in the metaphysical sense I am concerned with here. It is sometimes called a version of epistemological idealism: at most it is idealist about the knowable phenomenal realm but not the unknowable noumenal realm, so it is not idealist about reality in general.

I'm not an adherent, so not what I had in mind.

If #1…..not so sure a reality is a collective representation.
If #2…..real, and indeterminable.
If #3….that object which appears to us is determinable/knowable. The object in itself is the object as it doesn’t appear, hence is not determinable/knowable.
————- — Mww

#1: "The world (reality) is the totality of facts..." what is a fact if not a collective representation?

#2&3: You agree the object in itself is transcendental (to experience) and real...so why not Transcendental Realism...?

I'll try to "dig it out":

“…. The schema of reality is existence in a determined time….”
“…. For I can say only of a thing in itself that it exists without relation to the senses and experience….”
“…. we can have no cognition of an object, as a thing in itself, but only as an object of sensible intuition, that is, as phenomenon…”

Put them together, you get an affirmation that the thing in itself denotes an existence in a determined time. — Mww

If "the schema of reality is existence in a determined time" then that is referring to a reality for us; a collective representation, no?

If " a thing in itself [...] exists without relation to the senses and experience" then does it not follow that it is real and yet undetermined, or better, indeterminable?

If " we can have no cognition of an object, as a thing in itself, but only as an object of sensible intuition, that is, as phenomenon" then does it not follow that the object, or whatever it is that appears as an object, insofar as it exists "in itself" is real, even though unknown/ unknowable?

If there is no direct knowledge of the world, but only of its representations, there is no need for a dual world. There is one world affecting the senses, half of a dual aspect, and the system by which it is understood, the other half. — Mww

If there is just one world affecting the senses and the understanding, which are also part of that world, and yet "there is no direct knowledge of that world" where does that leave us?

If you want the most radical thesis on time check out The End of Time by Julian Barbour. I've been reading, and trying to understand, it, and it's doing my head in (in a good way).

Neutral monism seems to have something in common with Spinoza's metaphysics. For Spinoza extensa and cogitans were just two of the infinite attributes of the one substance.

IF Kant is an "empirical realist",

and if "empirical" denotes how something is experienced or appears to us

and if Kant's ding-an-sich, or "in itself", denotes reality,

THEN, for the "empirical realist", appearances (i.e. "phenomena") are reality – or only aspects of reality;

THEREFORE, "for us"-"in itself" is a distinction without a difference either epistemically or onticly.

My re-question:

Where does my thinking about (the implications of) Kant's "empirical realism" go wrong? :chin: — 180 Proof

I am getting to this a tad tardily, but anyhow...

It's an interesting question whether Kant's "in itself" denotes a reality. I think it must since it is thought as being what is in itself independently of the appearances it, whatever it is, gives rise to.

As I wrote in an earlier post:

I have sometimes thought that Kant has his characterization of his philosophy as empirical realist and transcendental idealist backwards. We know the empirical world only via ideas; as I like to say the empirical world is a collective representation and in that sense it is ideal. About the transcendental we have no idea, except that if it is at all it must be real.

When Kant says the in-itself is transcendentally ideal, he seems to mean that it is so for us, since we have no sensory access to its inherent nature, but only to the appearances it gives rise to. So, as you said earlier it is an epistemological perspective, not an ontological perspective. Thinking from our perspective we can say that the world of the senses is real, and the world of ideas, which the in itself can only inhabit for us, is ideal.

If we take an ontological standpoint it seems to me that is reversed, the empirical world, being a collective representation is ideal, although founded in the transcendentally real. We could say that the world of the senses is just an aspect of the real, which seems to be what you are saying, and I think that makes sense too, although we must also admit that it is mediated by ideas.

In Kant's own words (as translated): "Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind. The understanding can intuit nothing, the senses can think nothing. Only through their unison can knowledge arise.".

There is of course the basic dualistic character of Kant's philosophy in the sense of phenomena/ noumena or for us/ in itself, but that just reflects the ineliminably dualistic nature of all our thinking, and in no way entails substance dualism. — Janus

I read Kant's "dualistic thinking" as (an attempt at) 'ontologizing epistemology' (i.e. reify knowing) by designating "for us" the tip "phenomena" of the iceberg "in itself" above the water line "noumena". So on what grounds does Kant posit the "in itself" from which he then conjures-up the "for us" to 'retro-construct' with various "transcendental" sleights-of-mind? — 180 Proof

It certainly seems Kant can be read that way: as "ontologizing epistemology"; the question would be whether that was his intention or whether it is an unconscious or unacknowledged entailment of his ideas. It's a good question, and I have to say I'm not sure. If I recall correctly there is in the world of Kant scholarship a controversy as to whether Kant's emprical/ transcendental dichotomy should be interpreted as a "dual aspect" or a "dual world" proposition.

Hopefully @Mww (and informed others) might comment.

Without consciousness there would, practically speaking, be no world, for the world exists as such only in so far as it is consciously reflected and consciously expressed by a psyche. Consciousness is a precondition of being. — Carl Jung


My question was an attempt to spell out why Jung would say this. I was attempting to interpret the OP. As I asked already, does Jung mean by this that consciousness is a pre-condition for the existence of rocks? I think that it is clearly an absurd suggestion. — Wayfarer

I think what you say is clearly an absurd suggestion is precisely what Jung means. Without consciousness to disclose it, being would be "blind", hidden; nothing would appear. That's why he states the caveat "practically speaking".

I'm only repeating what are uncontroversial facts in the history of ideas, so my saying so has little to do with it.

The Great Chain of Being and Jacob's Ladder are analogous (although the former is reputedly of Greek origin (Plato and Aristotle), while the latter is Hebraic, so the metaphor is one of ascending, not of being chained up.

You should tell that to all those Buddhist activists who go around liberating caged animals. — Wayfarer

Liberating caged beings in order to eliminate their suffering is not the same as extinguishing sentience altogether which would be the ultimate elimination of suffering. But then you would have to find a way of extinguishing sentience which didn't involve any suffering I guess. :chin:

If you look at just about any dictionary, one of the definitions of "being" will be "a living thing." My point is not that Wayfarer is right in this instance, only that his use of the word "being" is not unreasonable. — T Clark

I agree that it is not unreasonable to use the word that way, but he could just add the word sentient and achieve exactly the same effect for his argument without drawing all the criticism for denying that any other usage is allowable.

On searching I found that most sources equate the meaning of 'being' with 'existence'. To be is to exist. So, whatever the historical common or philosophical usages might have been (and we are only talking about English usage here really, since translations from other languages are never precise), the logic of the synonymy between 'existence' and 'being' means that we can legitimately use the term 'a being' to refer to any existent.

Surely it is not an important issue anyway since the difference between sentient and insentient beings is not in question.

I've already agreed that being and existence are different concepts. — Jamal

They are different words, obviously. But in common usage the basic concepts to be and to exist seem to be more or less synonymous. 'To exist' does seem to carry the implicit notion of standing out, whereas "to be", perhaps not so much, but this has nothing to do with being, or existing as, a conscious entity, being or existent. :wink:

the word is being — Jamal

Case in point.

Don't know about that. See this. — Wayfarer

I am not familiar with the Black Notebooks or the "Rector's Address. If Heidegger did, and continued to, identify his project with antisemitism then I would say that was a personal failing that does not detract from his philosophy.

If there were an antisemitic painter for example, whose paintings had nothing to do with antisemitism, would that have any bearing on their value or lack of value as paintings? I would say not.

In any case, there is no fact of the matter as to whether his philosophy should be considered in that light or not; it is a matter of personal choice.

Sure. I accept that. I've never claimed any expertise in Heidegger, but 180 brought it up. I know that he placed humans in a priviledged position regarding Dasein and I think he would differentiate sentient beings from things. (I'm reading up on What Is a Thing but I must admit hesitancy about Heidegger due to his nazism.) — Wayfarer

I think his Nazism was a mistake that he soon recognized and he may have been too proud to acknowledge that it was a mistake. That said, his philosophy, being apolitical, is what it is is regardless of his politics.

Heidegger does think that being depends on Dasein, in the sense that it is we who see all things, both sentient and insentient, as be-ings. Note that Dasein means "being there" or "there being", and denotes, at least in Heidegger's usage, the awareness of be-ing, so Dasein is "the being for whom its being is an issue for it": a self-reflective being.

Oh, you are just after an etymology. It's just "in", from PIE "en", I think.

Hence my puzzling as to what is "in", when used in the context of idealism and realism. — Banno

Not so much an etymology as the origin of the concepts of being inside or outside. If the idea was first expressed in Proto-Indo-European that still would leave open the question of the origin of the concepts.

I think we can make sense of inside and outside in various philosophic contexts, whether realist or idealist. That wouldn't mean that there is only one way to make sense of them, even in the context of a specific metaphysical ideology.

That seems overly esoteric and philosophically sophisticated to me. I think the notions of external and internal would have likely had a much more pedestrian origin. Like inside or outside the cave, house, or body, or bucket, or the woods, or the village and so on. But we'll likely never know exactly where the idea originated, since it was probably of pre-literate origin.

What does not look right?

The "analogy" was not meant to indicate that internal always refers to things as being inside bodies, but as being inside some "container" or other, however that might be conceived. The liver is inside the body, the brain is inside the body: is the mind inside the body? If you are one of those who hold that the mind just is the brain, or even that the mind is a function of the brain, then you would have to, out of consistency, say "yes", no?

So idealism holds that everything is inside one's body, while realism holds that everything is outside one's body.

How odd. — Banno

How odd that you should think I was saying that. Perhaps if you read more closely you would have noticed the " analogously used", which I have now underlined for your benefit.

Also note that I have specifically said that I don't think idealism ( apart from solipsism) holds that everything is inside anything:

If idealism were true that would not change; the experience would remain exactly the same even if the understanding changed. Unless you are speaking of solipsism, If the world were thought to be fundamentally mind our minds would still be understood to be in that universal mind, and yet that whole mind (which would include, but would not be limited to, the minds of others) would not be understood to be in my mind, — Janus

Unless you believed that those beginnings implied influences that were deemed demonic afterwards. — Paine

:ok: Fair enough, although that would not seem to be a likely view of the modern materialist.

One of things I find interesting in Jung is that some portion of the 'scientific method' has a parent people are uncomfortable talking about. — Paine

Yes, astronomy may have begun as astrology, and chemistry as alchemy. But that would not seem to be surprising or anything to feel uncomfortable about.