an emphasis on the shift in perspective, more so that a entirely new mode of investigation. — Manuel
He also thinks he can’t just ignore it, because he regards it as an unavoidable product of the understanding. — Jamal
Kant points out that aspects of the phenomenon are known to us prior to experience with the world. He lays out clear and persuasive arguments for this. What you do next with that information is up to you. — frank
Kant points out that aspects of the phenomenon are known to us prior to experience with the world. He lays out clear and persuasive arguments for this. What you do next with that information is up to you.
— frank
As does Descartes, Leibniz and Cudworth — Manuel
Do you think his predecessors had a system as complete as the three Citique’s entail? — Mww
Hence you will have reasons to conclude that there is no need to suppose that something material passes from objects to our eyes to make us see colors and light, or even that there is something in the objects, which resembles the ideas or sensations that we have of them. In just the same way, when a blind man feels bodies, nothing has to issue from the bodies and pass along his stick to his hand: and the resistance or movement of the bodies, which is the sole cause of the sensations he has of them, is nothing like the idea he forms of them."
In this case, objects stimulate an innate mechanism which leads us to form an idea of the world. Notice that the objects just stimulated the blind man with the stick, but his ideas were inside the whole time. Similar observations apply when Descartes mentions the following:
"But then if I look out of the window and see men crossing the square, as I just happen to have done, I normally say that I see the men themselves, just as I say that I see the wax. Yet do I see any more than hats and coats which could conceal automatons? I judge that they are men. And so something which I thought I was seeing with my eyes is in fact grasped solely by the faculty of judgement which is in my mind."
Leibniz, on the other hand, replying to Locke, points out:
"The reason why there is no name for the murder of an old man is that such a name would be of little use... ideas do not depend upon names [words with definitions, in this context] ... If a... writer did invent a name for that crime and devoted a chapter to 'Gerontophony', showing what we owe to the old and how monstrous it is to treat them ungently, he would not thereby be giving us a new idea."
We already know the meanings of words, prior to definitions. — Manuel
Kant points out in the Transcendental Aesthetic that we can't imagine an object that doesn't have spacial or temporal extension. He's borrowing the form of Hume's Bundle Theory argument. If you can't conceive of objects without spacial extension, this shows that you don't learn about space through experience. Knowledge of space and time are a priori. That actually is Copernican! To me, anyway.
Is this true though? I feel like I have a pretty easy time imagining abstract objects without having to attribute extension to them. I don't know if I buy theories that involve propositions as abstract, eternal objects, but I've never really had a problem of conceptualizing them. — Count Timothy von Icarus
Is this true though? I feel like I have a pretty easy time imagining abstract objects without having to attribute extension to them. — Count Timothy von Icarus
The idea of an abstract object didn't exist back then. — frank
The idea of an abstract object didn't exist back then.
— frank
Weren't they termed "concepts", also sometimes termed "ideas"? — javra
I don't think they distinguished between mental objects (what you're thinking about now) and abstract objects (things like numbers and propositions.) — frank
I guess the basic idea was around, but not analyzed out? — frank
Interesting. Its been a while sine I've read the likes of Lock, Hume, and Kant. Still, I so far take a visualized unicorn, for example, to be a "mental object" of one's awareness which is in some way perceptually concrete (i.e., has a specific shape, size, color, etc. when visualized), whereas abstract objects (quantities included) I take to be those mental objects of one's awareness whose delimitations are abstracted from - but do not include - concrete particulars. The concept of "animal" or "world" being two possible examples of the latter, among innumerable others. — javra
If you can't conceive of objects without spatial extension, this shows that you don't learn about space through experience. Knowledge of space and time are a priori. That actually is Copernican! To me, anyway. — frank
"Abstract object" has a specific meaning in philosophy of math. It's not a physical object, but it's still something that transcends the individual. So an abstract object (in this sense) is not a kind of mental object. — frank
Abstract object theory (AOT) is a branch of metaphysics regarding abstract objects.[1] Originally devised by metaphysician Edward Zalta in 1981,[2] the theory was an expansion of mathematical Platonism. — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_object_theory
In the Critique of Judgment Kant uses the term 'objective' to mean 'disinterested'. A valid judgment of taste is subjective, universal, and not based on concepts. To put it somewhat paradoxically, objectivity is universal subjectivity. — Fooloso4
In terms of the question of what Kant's view of the limits of empirical knowledge were, it seems to me to be a mistake to see that aligned to any theory of physics. How does one traverse the gap between space and time being posited as intuitions and having those concepts build a model of the world as it "truly" is? — Paine
Not at all surprising. Although, as a personal pet peeve, I do dislike the way mathematics-specific concepts sometimes overtake more mainstream philosophical concepts. Mistaking the purposive, hence teleological, notion of function for the mathematical notion of function comes to mind as one example of this. But be that as it may. — javra
To your knowledge, does the history of this particular mathematical concept of "abstract object" extend beyond this:
Abstract object theory (AOT) is a branch of metaphysics regarding abstract objects.[1] Originally devised by metaphysician Edward Zalta in 1981,[2] the theory was an expansion of mathematical Platonism. — javra
And do smells necessarily have extension in space? — Count Timothy von Icarus
The question of time being a necessary component of imagining is very interesting though. It gets to the inherently processual nature of experience, which, as a fan of process metaphysics, I find underappreciated — Count Timothy von Icarus
When we discover the indubitable, we've found it. — frank
But what does the way we're bound to think have to do with the way the world actually is? My answer is that Wittgenstein explains that in the Tractatus. What's your answer? — frank
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
objectivity is universal subjectivity — Fooloso4
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
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
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
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). — Jamal
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