an emphasis on the shift in perspective, more so that a entirely new mode of investigation. — Manuel

If no one had ever thought to consider the problem as he describes, wouldn’t an investigation into it be a new mode of investigation?

“….It is extremely advantageous to be able to bring a number of investigations under the formula of a single problem. For in this manner, we not only facilitate our own labour, inasmuch as we define it clearly to ourselves, but also render it more easy for others to decide whether we have done justice to our undertaking. The proper problem of pure reason, then, is contained in the question: “How are synthetical judgements à priori possible?” That metaphysical science has hitherto remained in so vacillating a state of uncertainty and contradiction, is only to be attributed to the fact that this great problem, and perhaps even the difference between analytical and synthetical judgements, did not sooner suggest itself to philosophers. Upon the solution of this problem, or upon sufficient proof of the impossibility of synthetical knowledge à priori, depends the existence or downfall of the science of metaphysics.…”

I agree there was a shift in perspectives, in an effort to connect the empirical with the rational rather than keep them separate, but it would have been impossible to connect them into a useful system without a new mode of investigation.

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.

He also thinks he can’t just ignore it, because he regards it as an unavoidable product of the understanding. — Jamal

The idea that science can be purely empirical is still around. It's this vision of science that Kant and others killed, for philosophers anyway.

I once watched a discussion between Dennett and Krause in which Krause announces that he's an empiricist. Dennett tries to explain that he's not really, and Krause gets this quizzical look on his face. Krause is a scientist who thinks he's discovering the noumena. In other words, once you understand the concept of the noumena, then you can ignore it. Not before.

It depends on how you think about the systems of other figures, for Kant his system was radically new, for Cudworth, it was quite old (going back to Protagoras, Parmenides, and others).

Attempting to be concrete, Plotinus seems to me to be doing a (in some respects) rudimentary analysis based on a very similar idea, though his specific formulation includes different "categories".

Or Locke, he was already creating a basis within which we can think about nature differently, say primary qualities as opposed to secondary ones, one of them belonging to objects, the other not.

Kant's formulation, as quoted by you, applies more (it seems to me) to, say, certain aspects of systems of metaphysics, such as Leibniz, or Plato. Hume didn't really have an explicit metaphysics, which Kant said led him to crash on the shores of skepticism. To an extent, but Hume was not as radically skeptic as he is assumed to be.

Kant's explicit formulation of "synthetic a priori" judgements is probably his most novel formulation. And also making things in themselves different from phenomena, but in this latter respect, that idea was not entirely new, but arguably better articulated by him. His repeated emphasis on the range of human knowledge is excellent, but, found in Locke in a different formulation.

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. What Kant added with more clearness, it seems to me, was his clarity in identifying things in themselves and contrasting these with phenomena, and specifically his mentioning of synthetic a-priori judgements, how we can expand innate knowledge absent experience.

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

I've never thought of Descartes as proving that some of our knowledge of the world is a priori. Nor Leibniz. Could you expand on that?

It depends on how you think about the systems of other figures…… — Manuel

Do you think his predecessors constructed systems as complete as the three Citique’s entail?

Yeah, give me a minute, I have my damn quotations in paperback, makes it very hard to give quotes without typing too much.

"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.

Incidentally, I believe that Kant's ideas on a priori judgments is somewhat like this. He says that we can gain knowledge without an empirical component just by thinking something out, but I believe in all cases, some minimal external stimulus is needed to get the mind going, otherwise, not much will arise.

Do you think his predecessors had a system as complete as the three Citique’s entail? — Mww

Not at all.

He is one the great figures in philosophy no doubt, all I question is his own evaluation of his total uniqueness.

His completeness and exactitude in trying to build a systematic philosophical system has no parallels that I can think of.

And I am refusing to read Hegel. :)

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

Oh! I see what you're saying. This is the difference I'm seeing between Descartes and Kant: Descartes is sort of saying that our ideas of the world supervene on our experiences. It's the argument from anatomy. Descartes knew that there are "strings" that flow through the body back to the brain. He thought the world "plucks" these strings and the brain subsequently does something with those pluckings.

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.

Not at all. — Manuel

Cool.

And I am refusing to read Hegel. — Manuel

Way cool. I did “Science of Logic”, but my persuasions had already been set.

Close. External objects stimulate something in us that cause an idea to arise, but the idea has no resemblance to the external object at all, only a kind of causal connection. That's pretty radical, I think.

Yes, what Kant says about objects being spatial and temporal is unique to his formulation and very profound.

Hume's conclusions about causality are also pretty Copernican, I think. And Locke formulated the "hard problem" 400 years ago, so...

There are several Copernican ideas, some people have a larger amount of them (Kant has more than Descartes, in general) than others.

Basically, new additions and unique formulations of similar ideas. But that's merely how I see it.

I see what you're saying. I agree.

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.

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

The idea of an abstract object didn't exist back then. He was talking about things like cups and trees.

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

To imagine something perceptually--such as by visualization--there is needed both duration (time) and distance (space) to that thus imagined. Abstractions per se are by their very nature not perceptual but purely conceptual.

I'd be interested in counterexamples, but I so far greatly doubt that such can occur.

The idea of an abstract object didn't exist back then. — frank

Weren't they termed "concepts", also sometimes termed "ideas"?

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.) I guess the basic idea was around, but not analyzed out?

I don't think they distinguished between mental objects (what you're thinking about now) and abstract objects (things like numbers and propositions.) — 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.

I guess the basic idea was around, but not analyzed out? — frank

Without now doing research on the matter, that seems to be about right.

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

"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.

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

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?

"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

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.

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. — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_object_theory

At any rate, I agree that such a formalized metaphysical notion was not around in Kant's time (other than maybe via basic Platonism, which I'm sure Kant was familiar with.)

Gotcha. If imagine = visualize, it makes sense. Although I think it might make it sort of trivial in that it would seem to hold for the essential elements of all the senses. Can one imagine a sound without any volume or pitch? Can we imagine a smell without odor? It would seem not. But does this mean we don't learn about pitch through experience? And do smells necessarily have extension in space?

It seems to me like our imagining being unable to transcend the essential qualities of each sense could as well be taken as evidence that we must only learn about these things through experience, since we seem unable to fathom our way around the essential elements of each sense. Having never seen without our eyes or heard without our ears, we are stuck imagining only permutations of what has come before, bound by their limitations.

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. Aristotle actually gets at this in the Posterior Analytics and De Anima, but he doesn't do too much with it.

I have considered before if an even more process-centered approach might dissolve some of the issues that crop up in Kant. If the noumenal causes the phenomenal, and the phenomenal causes us to act in certain ways (thus affecting the noumenal), then it would seem like we really don't have two distinct processes at all. The two would be continually bleeding into one another. But if we begin with "things," then it does seem like we cannot have one sort of thing "turning into" another. Granted, this wouldn't really apply to readings of Kant as a full subjective idealist.

In fact, as I write this, I realize this is part of Hegel and Houlgate's critique of Kant. There is, on the one hand, the charge that the presupposition that experiences are of objects is dogmatic. But there also seems to also be an undercurrent of critique that the "things" presupposed are essentially things, as opposed to process as well.

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

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."

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

Kant showed that we're bound to think along certain lines. I call it the contours of the mind. We feel our way to those contours by logic and conceivability. When we discover the indubitable, we've found it.

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?

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

:grin: :up:

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

I think the concept of an abstract object comes from Frege.


:up:

And do smells necessarily have extension in space? — Count Timothy von Icarus

I've struggled with this. I've no decisive answer to give. But I think it noteworthy that lesser animals (or even humans) with a heightened sense of smell can - or at least seem able to - discern direction by it. If so, this would entail notions of space. Come to think of it, its what a snake's forked tongue is there for: directionality of smell. But any such spatial aspect of smell would seem to simultaneously require temporality.

I'm mainly antagonistic to the Cartesian take on "res extensa" being utterly severed from mind stuff due to the former having extension in space but not the latter.

To be honest, I toy seriously enough with the idea that noumenal thought - which I take to be in no way perceptual (hence, phenomenal in the Kantian sense) - holds spatial relations: For example, we all know that a paradigm is larger than any one idea it is composed of. This to me then signifying the very real possibility of non-perceptual spatial relations. Or, more difficultly, the concept of "dog" is closer to that of "cat" than to that of "rock". Here again, there to me seems to be all indications of non-perceptual spatial relations.

If so, then even non-perceptual thoughts would require some conceptual notions of space and spatial relations.

Critiques are of course welcomed.

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

I can very much relate to that.

I think the concept of an abstract object comes from Frege. — frank

Thanks. I'll look into it. :up:

When we discover the indubitable, we've found it. — frank

How do you see that idea expressed in Kant's project?

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

I hear the Tractatus as an anti-explanation. We want what we will never get. Sort of a weird parallel with Kant. But definitely not the same.

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

This is a key point. Immanence is within the limits of possible experience. It is opposed to transcendence, which would denote contact with something beyond, like God or monads or Forms or noumena. It’s debatable whether immanence is subjective or not. I think not necessarily, but in Kant it somewhat is. As @Fooloso4 said…

objectivity is universal subjectivity — Fooloso4

Which again looks Hegelian to me.

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

Yes indeed, that's the way I think about it, and I'm a bit puzzled why this point is not often made. I guess it's because in Husserl's scheme, there is no thing-in-itself, and the intersubjective is all there is. 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).

Talking of Husserl, in my Googling I noticed the following in a review of one of Dan Zahavi's books:

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

I think that might go some way to answering @Hanover's questions too. It's a description of Husserl's account but there's nothing in it that isn't also in Kant, though in the context of a different system and using different terminology. It's pretty much how I've been reading Kant, or trying to.

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

Yes, and the interesting thing is that even though the field of possible experience and cognition is immanent--lying within the bounds of sense and understanding--even so, within these bounds human knowledge always reaches towards the unknown, as if it is immanent but transcendently-inclined.

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

I also find this a promising direction. Has anyone ever written a piece called "Kant: The First Phenomenologist"? :smile: At any rate, it's proved impossible to do phenomenology without more or less constant reference back to Kant.

The question about the status of noumena is hard to resolve. Kant tells us, "Doubtless, indeed, there are intelligible entities [these would be the noumena] corresponding to the sensible entities; there may also be intelligible entities to which our sensible faculty of intuition has no relation whatsoever; but our concepts of understanding, being mere forms of thought for our sensible intuition, could not in the least apply to them" [B308-9]

In a way, you could argue that the whole history of Kantian interpretation turns on what he means by "corresponding." (I don't know German, so I don't know whether understanding the German word would help.) Does he mean "corresponding" in the way that a map corresponds to the territory -- a kind of picture? Does he mean "corresponding" in the sense of cause and effect -- the cause (noumenon) might not resemble the effect in the slightest, but still correspond one-to-one as cause and effect? Or is it the correspondence between "concept of understanding" and "Husserlian intentional object"? This latter type of correspondence is itself difficult to articulate, even if we imagine Husserl admitting noumena to his philosophy. But I mean something like the way a theorem creates reasons for assent to its truth, rather than "causing" us, ineluctably, to believe it.

Sorry, this may be shedding more shade than light. But the questions are endlessly interesting, and important. And your original point about not denigrating scientific or phenomenal knowledge on supposedly Kantian grounds is surely right.