If he’d made it just another few years, he might have been the one to notice tossing an object out the window of his railcar didn’t appear anywhere near the same to him as it did to his manservant watching him ride away. The guy was a peer-reviewed scientist after all, even if his legacy is philosophy. — Mww
saying that reality must have cause is very western, thomistic, Kantian,.and wrong. — Gregory
Isn't the problem with this, at least on the Kantian view anyway, that concepts such as "to produce", which are causal in nature, only make sense in the realm of phenomena and so to think that noumena produce phenomena in any circumstances is incoherent. I know Kant tries to make sense of the idea of noumenal causation to deal make room for freedom of will, but not entirely successfully.If we give up any notion of noumenal properties besides a persistent propensity to produce particular kinds of phenomena to particular kinds of observers in particular contexts, then this whole problem goes away
How do you figure that? — Mww
Isn't the problem with this, at least on the Kantian view anyway, that concepts such as "to produce", which are causal in nature, only make sense in the realm of phenomena and so to think that noumena produce phenomena in any circumstances is incoherent. I know Kant tries to make sense of the idea of noumenal causation to deal make room for freedom of will, but not entirely successfully. — jkg20
In a theistic universe or a Humean one, regularities are not guaranteed — Gregory
Perhaps stop talking about noumena and "really real" things?"To produce" is at best a loose way of saying what I'm trying to say, but all our language is causal and temporal so what else can I do
Reference? — Mww
If you want to define "noumena" as "whatever grounds appearances" go ahead, but it is completely topic neutral since even appearances can ground appearances.The “grounding” of appearances is exactly what noumena are supposed to be for. All I’m suggesting is that we don’t need to suppose there is anything about noumena other than that they ground such appearances
cannot have, the slightest reason for believing them to be actual. Does that sound right to you? — jkg20
Excellent observation. Both Plato & Aristotle were doing Science in 500BC, but walking the tightrope without a net of technology-enhanced empirical evidence. And both saw a necessary distinction between physical Nature (Real) and metaphysical Theories (Ideal). So, Kant was merely updating that ancient science, with almost 1800 years of empirical & theoretical knowledge. Descartes' Discourse on Method had already boiled it down to the basics : the Observer, the "I" whose existence cannot be doubted, is the foundation of all other knowledge.I'll argue this way (and Kant is no way responsible for my errors). Kant's was about knowledge. His gold standard for knowledge was science - then as now understood to be the science of nature. "But," he asked himself, "how does that work? what grounds it?" — tim wood
Kant's Transcendental distinction was between "out there" empirical things and "in here" mental ideas about things. Hence, our knowledge of Nature consists of sensory appearances (haecceity), and rationally-inferred essences (quiddities). So, we don't know those ideal essences directly, but only by inferences from observations. And Hume had already noted a problem with Induction of general principles from limited observations of instances. As you noted, Kant proposed a synthesis of Ideal essences and Real appearances : the unobservable ding an sich, which we must accept as an unobtainable Ideal that we only approximate in our ideas & theories. :nerd:He noted that one theory was that nature was all "out there." But how if it's all out there can we move beyond mere observation - this being Hume's question? Alternatively, it's all a creation of the mind - but how then do we know anything of what we call nature? His resolution was through a synthesis of the two. — tim wood
I think the thread is, maybe I rephrase a bit, that *appearances* have a cause. Kant discusses this notion. The logic is that 'appearance' is what things look like or seem to be rather than what they actually are. — Dan Langlois
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