As far as subjectivism is concerned, Kant was indeed concerned to avoid the charge of “subjective idealism,” but that’s why the Critique insists that the forms of sensibility and categories of understanding are not personal idiosyncrasies but universal structures of human cognition. — Wayfarer
Kant allows things in themselves, which Schopenhauer takes him to task for, because it is inconsistent with his claim that space and time are only forms of intuition and have no other existence, and you can't have things without differentiation, space and time. Schopenhauer then posits that there can only be a 'thing in itself', and that this is a consequence of Kant's own contentions. — Janus
the point at issue is whether it follows logically from the accepted fact that differentiation is required for perception to occur, that there is no differentiation absent perception. — Janus
I want to hear an actual argument for why space, time, differentiation, form, matter and all the rest cannot exist beyond the context of perception. And I should note, I acknowledge that if there is space, time, differentiation, things in general outside the context of perception, we should not expect them to be just as we experience and understand them. That would be naive realism, and I'm not arguing for that. I have in mind something along the lines of Ontic Structural Realism. — Janus
As I said, I simply want any kind of argument clearly laid out that demonstrates that space, time, differentiation etc. must be confined to the world as cognized. — Janus
we cannot be certain that space and time and differentiation exist in the in itself, but nor can we be certain that they do not. There is no such thing as any definitive "misuse of concepts". That is purely stipulative. There are no "concept police"―we each decide for ourselves what makes most sense to us. It is just here that I see dogma creeping in―in notions of "philosophy proper" and "misusing concepts" and "cannot be applied beyond them". — Janus
When Kant says “there must be something corresponding to sensibility as receptivity,” he isn’t smuggling in a cause; he’s pointing out that appearances can’t be appearances of nothing — but beyond that, no determinate claim is possible.
What Kant is pointing to are the universal structures that make a shared, law-governed world possible in the first place — space, time, and the categories of the understanding
From all this one sees that rational psychology has its origin in a mere misunderstanding. The unity of consciousness, which grounds the categories, is here taken for an intuition of the subject as an object, and the category of substance is applied to it. But this unity is only the unity of thinking, through which no object is given; and thus the category of substance, which always presupposes a given intuition, cannot be applied to it, and hence this subject cannot be cognized at all. Thus the subject of the categories cannot, by thinking them, obtain a concept of itself as an object of the categories; for in order to think them, it must take its pure self-consciousness, which is just what is to be explained, as its ground. Likewise, the subject, in which the representation of time originally has its ground, cannot thereby determine its own existence in time, and if the latter cannot be, then the former as a determination of itself (as a thinking being in general) through categories can also not take place. *
* The "I think" is, as has already been said, an empirical proposition, and contains within itself the proposition "I exist." But I cannot say "Everything that thinks, exists"; for then the property of thinking would make all beings possessing it into necessary beings. Hence my existence also cannot be regarded as inferred from the proposition "I think," as Descartes held (for otherwise the major premise, "Everything that thinks, exists" would have to precede it), but rather it is identical with it. It expresses an indeterminate empirical intuition, i.e., a perception (hence it proves that sensation, which consequently belongs to sensibility, grounds this existential proposition), but it precedes the experience that is to determine the object of perception through the category in regard to time; and here existence is not yet a category, which is not related to an indeterminately given object, but rather to an object of which one has a concept, and about which one wants to know whether or not it is posited outside this concept. An indeterminate perception here signifies only something real, which was given, and indeed only to thinking in general, thus not as appearance, and also not as a thing in itself (a noumenon), but rather as something that in fact exists and is indicated as an existing thing in the proposition "I think." For it is to be noted that if I have called the proposition "I think" an empirical proposition, I would not say by this that the I in this proposition is an empirical representation; for it is rather purely intellectual, because it belongs to thinking in general. Only without any empirical representation, which provides the material for thinking, the act I think would not take place, and the empirical is only the condition of the application, or use, of the pure intellectual faculty. — CPR, Kant, B421
What is the evidence that supports that they (phenomena) are appearances? — Count Timothy von Icarus
Kant's introduced the concept of the “thing in itself” to refer to reality as it is independent of our experience of it and unstructured by our cognitive constitution. The concept was harshly criticized in his own time and has been lambasted by generations of critics since. A standard objection to the notion is that Kant has no business positing it given his insistence that we can only know what lies within the limits of possible experience. But a more sympathetic reading is to see the concept of the “thing in itself” as a sort of placeholder in Kant's system; it both marks the limits of what we can know and expresses a sense of mystery that cannot be dissolved, the sense of mystery that underlies our unanswerable questions. Through both of these functions it serves to keep us humble. — The Continuing Relevance of Immanuel Kant
Kant, by his own admission, knows absolutely nothing about other people in-themselves. Any appeal to shared biology or culture is an appeal to the phenomenal to explain a noumenal connection by which discrete phenomenal perspectives are the same. — Count Timothy von Icarus
Pace Kant, this is not what past metaphysicians thought they had. The category is itself modern. — Count Timothy von Icarus
I've even seen Kant read as Shankara or Nagarjuna. But these seem like a stretch to me. Doctrines like emptiness would suggest that the things-in-themselves are simply a sort of error (but of course, readings of Kant do dispense with noumena, I just don't think he does). — Count Timothy von Icarus
Differentiation need not be spatial nor temporal. We have differentiation of meaning, intention and value. — Metaphysician Undercover
we can conclude that differentiation is prior to perception. — Metaphysician Undercover
If you refuse to uphold a proper definition of "differentiation", as an act which requires selection, just so that you may equivocate, then you make philosophical discourse impossible. — Metaphysician Undercover
Well, putting religion and spirituality to one side, no. But is there a good reason not to? — Punshhh
I don’t see what belief has got to do with this, surely if something is cogent, it’s not a question of belief. — Punshhh
the world of experience is constituted through the mind’s forms and categories, not simply received as a mirror of things-in-themselves. — Wayfarer
Strictly speaking, Kant is saying that the "I" cannot be experienced as "real" the way other things in life can be. — Paine
The ‘I think’ must be able to accompany all my representations; for otherwise something would be represented in me that could not be thought at all. That representation that can be given prior to all thought is called intuition. All manifold of intuition has, therefore, a necessary relation to the ‘I think’ in the same subject in which this manifold is found. — (B132)
The unity of consciousness, which grounds the categories, is here taken for an intuition of the subject as an object, and the category of substance is applied to it. But this unity is only the unity of thinking, through which no object is given — CPR, Kant, B421
Which permits the thinking about the soul excluded in your previous argument. — Paine
Now you are contradicting what you said earlier. Differentiation just refers to the existence of more than one thing. So "selection" on our part is not logically required for there to be more than one thing. — Janus
If differentiation is literally just things existing aside from one another (at all), then our perception does logically require selection into categories of those things — AmadeusD
Imagine that all life has vanished from the universe, but everything else is undisturbed. Matter is scattered about in space in the same way as it is now, there is sunlight, there are stars, planets and galaxies — but all of it is unseen. There is no human or animal eye to cast a glance at objects, hence nothing is discerned, recognized or even noticed. Objects in the unobserved universe have no shape, color or individual appearance, because shape and appearance are created by minds. Nor do they have features, because features correspond to categories of animal sensation. This is the way the early universe was before the emergence of life — and the way the present universe is outside the view of any observer.
Pinter goes on to argue that what the observer brings to the picture is ‘the picture’. He says that when we gaze out at our surroundings, we don’t see featureless space. Instead, our perception registers distinct entities, arrayed in spatial relationship with each other. We recognize these entities, can identify and name them. This act of apperception interprets the world as a collection of distinct items. Without the instinctive ability to make these distinctions, comprehension would be impossible and we couldn’t think or act.
I am not arguing that it (the essay) means that ‘the world is all in the mind’. It’s rather that, whatever judgements are made about the world, the mind provides the framework within which such judgements are meaningful. So though we know that prior to the evolution of life there must have been a Universe with no intelligent beings in it, or that there are empty rooms with no inhabitants, or objects unseen by any eye — the existence of all such supposedly unseen realities still relies on an implicit perspective. What their existence might be outside of any perspective is meaningless and unintelligible, as a matter of both fact and principle.
Do we know of any meaning, intention and value outside the context of this spatiotemporal existence? — Janus
Now you are contradicting what you said earlier. Differentiation just refers to the existence of more than one thing. So "selection" on our part is not logically required for there to be more than one thing. — Janus
So "selection" on our part is not logically required for there to be more than one thing. — Janus
Hence there is no need for me to deny that the Universe is real independently of your mind or mine, or of any specific, individual mind. Put another way, it is empirically true that the Universe exists independently of any particular mind.
Yes, I told you, "order" itself. It is value not restricted by spatiotemporal context. It provides the foundation for mathematics upon which spatial temporal concepts are constructed. — Metaphysician Undercover
Selection on someone's part is required for there to be more than one thing.
— Metaphysician Undercover
This too. — AmadeusD
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