"To the things themselves" they said but those things were "phenomena", hence the name of the movement. This dualism was enabled by the influence of Kant on latter philosophy. Phenomena is not understood by the immediate sensations anyway, hence the mere fact that I know the moon is there when everybody closes their eyes — Gregory

From my books on Kant, they all seem to agree in saying that Kant's main point for writing CPR was to draw a boundary on the power of human reason i.e. reason can only operate within the limits of our senses. What is not entered in the sense are not legitimate objects of human knowledge making Metaphysics as invalid form of knowledge.

I don't agree with those views in the books, because Kant made clear himself, that he loves Metaphysics. Kant wanted to establish Metaphysics a subject which is different from Science in methodology and domain. Not invalid form of knowledge.

In doing so, he had to create the concept of the thing-in-itself as an object of an unknown world, and the upshot is the 2 different type world i.e. noumenon and phenomenon which looks like a typical dualism. But whether it was a real dualism as such would be subject for debate. My view is that it wasn't a dualism, but was just a way of drawing boundary between what human reason can do reliably, and not.

This sounds like Plato. Kant has a different "feel" to his work but that may be from the historical distance between them. Is it possible Kant was just a Platonist? — Gregory

I thought about Kant as a Platonic dualist too at one point, but as @Wayfarer pointed out, there are clear differences between Kant and Plato.  In Plato, the world of ideas was the real world.  The phenomenon world is a transit temporary and shadowy world. 

That view was coherently supportive of the Christianity doctrines and had been adopted by the apologists from the ancient through the medieval times and even today. Platonic realism is the universals are the part of the reality in the world of idea, which is the true universe.  I don't think Kant would have agreed on that.

Cool. Will have a look at the video, and get back to you later in due course. :ok:

Kant didn't understand metaphysics at all. — Astrophel

Pitiful, ain’t it? Just as ol’ Henry didn’t understand production efficiency. Landry didn’t understand football. Gandhi didn’t understand civil rights. Wright didn’t understand buildings. Just what we of the vulgar understanding didn’t realize we always needed, huh? Another fool coming along, disrupting the status quo, knocking us from our collective intellectual comfort zone.
————

That introduces the further complication of the 'ding an sich' (thing in itself) and the vexed question of whether that is the same as, or different to, the noumenal. — Wayfarer

You know what it’s like? It’s like….dog food and house paint both come from a can, therefore dog food is the same as house paint. As my ol buddy Forrest would say….that’s all I’m gonna say about that.

'what two-dimensional surface do you think the purportedly two-dimensional image of our visual field is projected onto"? — Janus

When we look at the world, we initially see a two-dimensional image. I am not aware of any two-dimensional surface that this two-dimensional image is projected onto.

In any event, it seems wrong to say that language would be the limit of our world. — Count Timothy von Icarus

:up:

By this I mean not that there must be some premises that are forever unrevisable but, rather, that in any process of reasoning or argument there must be some thoughts that one simply thinks from the inside--rather than thinking of them as biologically programmed dispositions. — Thomas Nagel

I don’t want to overlook this important quotation. Nagel is telling us that, as @Wayfarer says, the epistemological buck stops with what Nagel calls “thinking from the inside” -- that is, from within rationality rather than from an alleged viewpoint that claims to somehow evaluate rationality from outside. In order to claim, for instance, that reasoning is a biologically or evolutionarily programmed activity, you would still need reasons for the claim, which can only be discovered by, once again, thinking from within rationality, because that’s the only place you can find reasons.

However, I think there’s an equally important insight here that can get overlooked: Nagel’s claim is an epistemological one, not a metaphysical one. He’s not saying that “there must be some premises that are forever unrevisable,” that is, metaphysical discoveries that are incorrigible and which can be used as foundational premises. That would be a misunderstanding. I’ve read a lot of Nagel and I think he’s agnostic on the question of basic ontology. But he firmly argues that the only way to approach the question is from within rationality.

From my books on Kant, they all seem to agree in saying that Kant's main point for writing CPR was to draw a boundary on the power of human reason….. — Corvus

Not quite right, in that reason alone does not account for PURE reason, right there is the title of the book.
“…This attempt to introduce a complete revolution in the procedure of metaphysics (…) constitutes the aim of the Critique of Pure Reason….”

The boundary on the power of pure reason merely follows necessarily from the revolution in its procedure.

…..i.e. reason can only operate within the limits of our senses. — Corvus

Close, but still not accounting for Pure reason.
“…. Reason must approach nature with the view, indeed, of receiving information from it, not, however, in the character of a pupil, who listens to all that his master chooses to tell him**, but in that of a judge, who compels the witnesses to reply to those questions which he himself thinks fit to propose***….”

**operating within the limits;
***operating no matter the limits.

The revolution in metaphysical procedure extended reason into that which has nothing to do with the senses, but establishes the possibility and validity of pure a priori conditions, which had always either been unacknowledged, or when acknowledged then outright denied. You know….“consign it to the flames” kinda nonsense.

The main point in CPR ended up being, pure reason can only operate, with justice, within the limits of, not experience, which just is practical reason, but possible experience, and that is its proper boundary, transcendental philosophy, then, being that which sets the boundaries as to that of which the justice consists. That is, that which is otherwise is illusion. Junk knowledge.

Except for the quotes, a personal interpretation of the original view, whatever it’s worth. Still, if reason were limited to the senses, it’d be pretty hard to not only justify, but to even come up with, some modern scientific theories.

A "judge who compels the witnesses to reply to those questions which he himself thinks fit to propose". He takes this further in the Critique of Judgment where we fill the world with purpose that is not in the phenomena and which we do not know exists in the noumena. Plato thought the world was a reflection of the forms. Kant said we can know nothing at all about noumena. I see that now. He divorced the shadows from the forms such that we cannot know what a form even is. Agree?

Pitiful, ain’t it? Just as ol’ Henry didn’t understand production efficiency. Landry didn’t understand football. Gandhi didn’t understand civil rights. Wright didn’t understand buildings. Just what we of the vulgar understanding didn’t realize we always needed, huh? Another fool coming along, disrupting the status quo, knocking us from our collective intellectual comfort zone. — Mww

I love irony, but spell it out for this fool. The question is, why am I saying Kant didn't understand metaphysics? I also insist Kant knew nothing of the essence of ethics. Indeed, he had no understanding of the generational basis for ethics at all. His position rests on unexamined presuppositions. This as well can be discussed.

My issue with his transcendental idealism is that it entirely fails to grasp the Wittgenstieniam point that if someting is affirmed to be true, then we have to be able to make sense of it not being true. This is why he refused to discuss ethics and metaphysics in terms of value and "the world." Their denial makes no sense. This is another way of saying they are not contingent terms, but absolutes, that is, simply givens int he world. Kant didn't understand that what is transcendental is what is right before one's perceptions IN the empirical phenomenon. His exposition on synthetic judgments was important, of course, but he didn't ask why it is that one simply must postulate noumena; he didn't face the requirement that given that all we ever experience is phenomena, the term must have its grounding IN phenomena.

This is borne out in post Husserlian thinkers like Michel Henry. Husserl posited that the object, this candle in front of me, stands, without the intentional epistemic cord to constitute a relationship, as a transcendental object, which simply means it is there and away from me and transcends me. Kant's world had the Real noumenal X entirely beyond recognition. Husserl starts with what is clearly there, in the phenomenal event that is originally given, and the candle is not questioned for its distance "over there". Fink called Husserl's method the completion of Kant's Copernican Revolution. See the way he opens his SIxth Meditation:

.....the phenomenological reduction, brought us into the d imension in which we stand before the problem-field of philosophy. Instead of inquiring into the being of the world, as does traditional "philosophy" dominated by the dogmatism of the natural attitude, or, where inquiry is not satisfied with that, instead of soaring up over the world "speculatively," we, in a truly "Copernican revolution," have broken through the confinement of the natural attitude, as the horizon of all our human possibilities for acting and theorizing, and have thrust forward into the dimension of origin for all being,

The ineffability that inspires the transcendental positing is an actual threshold for Fink, where analysis can go and reveal. You see here here Fink talks in dramatic terms like "the dimension of origin for all being." Analytic philosophers rolls their eyes skyward at something like this. But then, that is all they do, because they simply cannot and will not deal with the world. They only deal with arguments.

….we fill the world with purpose that is not in the phenomena…. — Gregory

Yep. Purpose relates to how the subject feels about a thing, regulated by aesthetic judgement. Phenomena relate to what a subject knows about a thing, regulated by discursive judgement.

He divorced the shadows from the forms such that we cannot know what a form even is. Agree? — Gregory

Ehhhh….he doesn’t give us much to work with here. Forms “….exist a priori in the mind…”. Supposedly, any instance of a form, form of this, form of that, is meant to be that which exists a priori in the mind as the possibility for whatever this or that is.

Kant says we can know nothing at all about noumena, but….why? Therein lay the solution to the nonsense.

….if someting is affirmed to be true, then we have to be able to make sense of it not being true. — Astrophel

If a thing is affirmed to be true, the sense of its falsity must already be given. If we know it is this, we must already know why it is not that.

How is this not covered end to end in Aristotle?
———-

Kant didn't understand that what is transcendental is what is right before one's perceptions IN the empirical phenomenon. — Astrophel

There’s a ton of references to just that. He did understand it, in his own way. Just because someone understands it differently only indicates they approach from a different direction, and doesn’t negate the antecedent.

It wasn't that this distinction was lost on him, but that in his philosophy, the terms signify different aspects of the world. He uses pheomena in the standard sense as 'what appears'. Noumena is a different matter and a source of both controversy and confusion. First, etymology - 'noumenal' means 'an object of nous', which is usually translated as 'intellect' albeit with different connotations to the modern equivalent. The Oxford Companion to Philosophy says "Platonic Ideas and Forms are noumena, and phenomena are things displaying themselves to the senses... This dichotomy is the most characteristic feature of Plato's dualism; that noumena and the noumenal world are objects of the highest knowledge, truths, and values is Plato's principal legacy to philosophy." — Wayfarer

Definitions of terms I don't hold with any great value. Heidegger went to the Greeks because he found something closer to the phenomenological account he was trying to put together which was intended to distance philosophy from traditional metaphysics. But to him, Plato's metaphysics was the first step away from the "primordial" world of what lies originally before one prior to philosophy. I am interested in this primordiality and not in other realms of possibility. To me the theory of forms places the grounding of what is real in this world "elsewhere". Take a look at that infamous Third Man Argument, the one about a form including itself, ad infinitum: This is close to Wittgenstein's objection to logic being able conceive of itself: in order to understand what logic is as logic, one would have to assume a perspective apart from logic; but then, to understand this, one would have to assume yet another perspective, and so on. This is the kind of thing that a rationalist metaphysics will produce. It is nonsense to think.

Plato is entertaining to read, but little help for understanding the world. And historical definitions only muddle things: concepts are open, not closed affairs, and this is radically true for concepts like noumena and phenomena. One must ask about the context Kant was in when postulating noumena. Talk about pure forms of the categories of pure reason as the ultimate grounding for reality is a flat out dismissal of experience as we know it, and this "as we know it" is all there is from which a metaphysics can be determined. The noumena/phenomena distinction he discusses has to be abandoned, as do all such talk of an impossibly distant metaphysics.

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.

I have come across a lot of such things and they all miss the direction of metaphysics in the givenness of phenomena. One has to put aside tradition suggested by this passage altogether. You are in the history of philosophy, this puts the discussion in a context of academic interest, like writing a paper about who said what and how things are different, arguing one way or the other.

What is needed is a method, not an argument. Of course, one has to argue for the method, but this insists on a descriptive approach to the world, and Kant is useful for this. He just left out the part about the world, as Schopenhauer alludes. However, the direction Kant took is now basic to responsible thinking in philosophy: ontology follows on epistemology. And for this, one has to be descriptively responsible, like a scientist, committed to the evidence that lies before one, and no more or less, for knowing is an integral part of what there, in the phenomenon. This does harken back to Plato, no? See Theaetetus where we get the ancient equation for knowledge as justified true belief. The reason those absurd Gettier problem analytic philosophers obsessed about (still do?) is because they simply refused to admit that there is no P in S knows P, independent of justification. We are bound to P and P to us in the construction of P.

Consider this from Michel Henry's Essence of Manifestation:

Phenomenology is the science of phenomena. This means that it is a
description anterior to all theory and independent of all presuppositions,
of everything that presents itself to us as existant, regardless of order
or domain. Understood as a description, phenomenology inrplies the
rejection of all hypotheses, of all principles having some unifying
value, whether real or supposed, with regard to some area of knowledge,
and finally, the rejection of a sector of reality which would contain
in it a rule of intelligibility as a necessary condition for its existence

I offer this only as an indication of the way I think philosophy must move forward. Henry jumps directly to Husserl's reduction. This reduction is, as I see it, the only way OUT of philosophical inertia. How so? The drive is toward, well, the thing itself! The terminal point where indeterminacy falls away.

This, I argue, is exactly what being Buddhist is all about. And I hasten to add that this idea finds agreement in the literature, in the Buddhist philosophical tradition, only to the extent that is it has its justification in the clear exposition of phenomena. A term like noumena is simply absorbed in the discovery. This is not about an historical thesis or a paper on Kant.

This kind of thinking suggests a kind of meta-science, as if science were on the cusp of metaphysical discovery, making speculative science the cutting edge of metaphysical disclosure. — Astrophel

Not my kind of thinking. Instead, I view Metaphysics as literally beyond the scope of reductive materialistic Science. You can atomize matter down to evanescent Quarks, but you still won't find any evidence of Mind or Consciousness or Being.

For me, Metaphysics is the role of Philosophy, which synthesizes particular evidence into general principles. In that sense, Einstein was a philosopher. His "speculative science" was indeed on the cusp of "metaphysical disclosure" : Relativity is a general metaphysical principle, not an observed physical fact.

Metaphysics makes its appearance not in the laboratory or on the white board of equations and their speculative "interpolation" where paradigms leave off, but in the simple relation between me and this cup on the table in the inquiry that brackets or suspends all superfluous and implicit assumptions that construct the knowledge relationship. — Astrophel

Yes! Metaphysics and Philosophy are all about Holistic inter-relationships not about Reductive isolated objects.

Transcendental idealism? It is right before your eyes. Drop the term 'idealism'. Better: transcendental phenomenology. — Astrophel

Yes, again! Phenomenology is about things & events "out there", But Transcendental Phenomenology would be focused on the ideal mental representations and interpretations of those real physical things. Traditional Idealism tended to reject reality as an illusion. And Materialism rejected ideality as an illusion. Perhaps your term will rise above those either/or worldviews, to accept that our world is both Mental and Material.

Phenomenology :
1.the science of phenomena as distinct from that of the nature of being.
2. an approach that concentrates on the study of consciousness and the objects of direct experience. ___Oxford dictionary

What do you guys think of the statement that Kant forced the limits of reason on us so that we would discover faith in the Designer? I believe Nietsche thought Kant to be Christian apologist

Kant wasn't a Christian apologist but he was a Christian, and not just in name. His ethical philosophy is impossible to understand without including his view of Heaven as a "Kingdom of Grace" in which our "highest good may be attained." (from the CPR, A812/B840). This was, in his opinion, the only successful theodicy.

Kant didn’t force anything, is what I think. There is a truth buried in there but doesn’t have anything to do with force. Or Nietsche.

When we look at the world, we initially see a two-dimensional image. I am not aware of any two-dimensional surface that this two-dimensional image is projected onto. — RussellA

On what basis do you say we initially see a two-dimensional image? I don't, and don't recall ever, seeing a two-dimensional image.

Logically grounded theories in the metaphysical discipline necessarily justify, or validate if you’d rather, whatever is the case given by the course of the argument.

It never was that “metaphysics sets out the background against which the world is ordered”, but sets the background by which the subject orders himself, such that the science by which the world is ordered, by and for him, becomes possible. — Mww

I'm not sure what you mean to refer to by "logically grounded theories". Are not all consistent and coherent theories logically grounded?

Also, I see metaphysics as positing imaginable models of world ordering, and phenomenology as describing the ways in which we, on reflection, find our experience, perception and undertsnding to be invariably ordered.

I am making use of Daniel Bonevac's Video Kant's Categories.

Reason doesn't create logic, rather, what we reason has been determined by the prior logical structure of the brain — RussellA

A good video for the topic. Thanks. :up: However, I never said that reason creates logic. :D
When you say reason doesn't create logic (whoever said reason creates logic - NOT ME), it sounds like reason is some kind of a biological or living entity itself as a lump of substance. That would be Sci-Fi, not Philosophy.

Reason is a way our thoughts work. Logic has had many definitions since Aristotle's invention. In Kant, logic is the way reason works along with the Categories. Categorical items are not something that operate themselves. They are schema, i.e. form with the a priori concepts to be applied to the objects in the senses.  How does it work? It works according to the logic.

I was thinking about what reason would be in general terms, and also looked for its dictionary definition.  It is a rational basis for one's action and judgement.  It is a really abstract concept.  You cannot tell anything about reason without its content i.e. what it was about, i.e. some description on your motive for your action, or your argument or proposition on something.  Without this content, it doesn't make sense in talking about reason.  And of course you can talk about reason as a property of mind just like in CPR.

The brain must have a physical structure that is logically ordered in order to make logical sense of its experiences of the world. — RussellA

Kant is in effect saying that Chomsky's Innatism is a more sensible approach than Skinner's Behaviourism. — RussellA

Reason cannot be located in the brain. Again this is the hard problem on mind and body connection issue you brought up. Kant never said a word about the brain in all his works as far as I am aware. Maybe he did. I am not sure. I doubt it very much. He would have really nothing much to say about it even if he did. Talking about Brain and TI in the context of its location or connection would be a categorical mistake.

Chomsky's Enactivism sounds like a type of SocioBiology subject. I am sure it has nothing to do with Kant's transcendental Idealism. Neither Skinner's Behaviourism.

Are not all consistent and coherent theories logically grounded? — Janus

I had in mind that empirical science theories are grounded in observation. For some of those there is precedent where syllogistic logical coherence has been set aside, or at least fought over, as in the uproar ca 1920-25, even if mathematical logical coherence holds.

Not quite right, in that reason alone does not account for PURE reason, right there is the title of the book.
“…This attempt to introduce a complete revolution in the procedure of metaphysics (…) constitutes the aim of the Critique of Pure Reason….” — Mww

I have 4 different versions of CPR. They are ones translated by,
JMD Meiklejohn,
NK Smith,
Max Muller,
Paul Guyer and Allen Wood

None of them seems using "pure reason" in the PREFACE apart from the JMD MeikleJohn version. They all use "reason" to denote "pure reason".
So I am under impression "pure reason" and "reason" are being used as the same term in CPR.

I had in mind that empirical science theories are grounded in observation. — Mww

Maybe we are looking from different angles. I think of empirical science theories as grounded in models of causation, and causation as not being observed, but inferred. Certainly, the entities, except perhaps those posited as fundamental, that are understood to be causally acting and acted upon are observable.

Except for the quotes, a personal interpretation of the original view, whatever it’s worth. Still, if reason were limited to the senses, it’d be pretty hard to not only justify, but to even come up with, some modern scientific theories. — Mww

Sure. A good point. :up:

I was just commenting on the main point for writing CPR.

But now that you mention it, why do you suppose he devoted everything after A293/B350 to PURE reason, practically two thirds of the whole work, in Kemp Smith pg, 293 to pg.669, if reason and pure reason where so interchangeable.

I think the key is in pure, rather than reason.

I think of empirical science theories as grounded in models of causation, and causation as not being observed, but inferred. — Janus

Sure, the causes may be inferred, but wouldn’t models of causation be predicated on observable effects following from them? Working backwards kinda thing, donchaknow.

In any event, it seems wrong to say that language would be the limit of our world. — Count Timothy von Icarus

To be sure, that's not what Wittgenstein said; it was “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world" (“Die Grenzen meiner Sprache bedeuten die Grenzen meiner Welt”). These are perhaps his most misunderstood words. In context, it's not placing a limit on our capacity to make sense of the world. We expand our language, and in so doing, our understanding.

why do you suppose he devoted everything after A293/B350 to PURE reason, practically two thirds of the whole work, in Kemp Smith pg, 293 to pg.669, if reason and pure reason where so interchangeable.

I think the key is in pure, rather than reason. — Mww

Yes, this is actually excellent point. I haven't read CPR that far yet, but looked it up now. Indeed you are right. Thanks for pointing it out. :100:

I was reading this today: https://iep.utm.edu/presocra/#SH6c

I found it so interesting. We assume that how we experience reality is the noumena in our practical lives. But according to Kant time itself is part of our mind, and space too at that! So objects (noumena) are hidden below the scheme we project on reality from the mind. Philosophy has a way of saying that same thing in different ways. Mellisus (and of course Kant) remind me of the block universe of Einstein, a man who stood on the shoulders of giants.

Yes, I think the inference is based on the constant conjunction of events as pointed out by Hume. But we also now have a massive coherent body of understanding based on forces, which are thought to be the efficient lawlike agents of change.

On what basis do you say we initially see a two-dimensional image? I don't, and don't recall ever, seeing a two-dimensional image. — Janus

Depends whether you are using the word "see" metaphorically or literally.

Are you not seeing a two-dimensional image on the screen of your computer/laptop/smartphone at this moment in time as you read these words?