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was contradiction a necessary part of logic and/or reality in the worldview of Kant? — Gregory

No.

If we can only see two sides of an idea, how do we know they unite at a highet level?

Kant's use of the antinomies was to demonstrate that we do not know such things -- we can rationally argue for both the assertion and the negation, and both will appeal to reason, and they can be put side-by-side and end up in contradiction. For Kant this shows a limitation on reason's ability to answer some questions.

Ideas having a two-sidedness is very much a Hegel move and not a Kant move.

was contradiction a necessary part of logic and/or reality in the worldview of Kant? — Gregory

What said, except I rather think contradiction is certainly a necessary part of logic. Or, maybe, if not a necessary part, then at least the fundamental ground for the validity of logical constructs.

Kant's use of the antinomies was to demonstrate that we do not know such things -- we can rationally argue for both the assertion and the negation, and both will appeal to reason, and they can be put side-by-side and end up in contradiction. For Kant this shows a limitation on reason's ability to answer some questions.

Ideas having a two-sidedness is very much a Hegel move and not a Kant move — Moliere

But each antinomy has for its subject matter everything we experience in the now: past and future, space and matter, spirituality vs materialism. Could it be said that Kant was not Hegelian, but was he an absurdist? If objects and our identity have paradox, how can we say all ideas we have have only one side to them?

Heh, if Kant was anything he was not an absurdist, in my view. More the opposite -- that everything which can be understood can be understood in logical form. "One side", again, is a Hegelian philosophical concept. Kant does not subscribe to Hegel's notion of concepts having sides at all. "sides" would be, were I to take a guess, part of the categories in some fashion. Cartesian coordinates come to mind as a conjunct of the qualitative and quantitative super-categories. And the Ideas, in Kant, are things like God, Freedom, and Immortality -- there is no anti-God which defines God, or anti-Freedom which defines freedom (or whatever the contrary we'd decide to pick for the concepts).

The big difference between Kant and Hegel is that Kant set out to create a static philosophy that could be referenced in the future in resolving problems, much like Copernicus' science. His question is the possibility of treating philosophy, especially metaphysics, in terms of the sciences like Newton and Leibniz, but with a reflection to the problems of empiricism due to Hume. And Hegel incorporated the notion of history which moves rather than a static logic.

Hegel's notion of "one-sided" is basically his critique of Kant -- to be able to name an antinomy you have to be able to stand on both sides of it.

I disagree with Hegel's argument, for what it's worth -- I can point to a mountain without climbing over it, for instance.

except I rather think contradiction is certainly a necessary part of logic. Or, maybe, if not a necessary part, then at least the fundamental ground for the validity of logical constructs. — Mww

Good point.

"contradiction" is part of the logic, but in Kantian terms I'd say he'd deny that contradiction is ever true in the transcendental logic.

Kant avoids history and history making perhaps because his noumena is always haunting his phenomena. Without knowledge of what is real except "i think therefore i am" all he has is faith, which makes him more a sceptic than anything else so it would seem. Many scpetics in the Enlightenment (Pierre Gassendi e.g) used sceptical arguments to let themselves forget about reason and leave all behind except faith. This was already done. So what exactly does transcendental philosophy add to this tradition of fideism? What is Kant's one great idea? Hegel, for one, has his historical dialectic

What is Kant's one great idea? — Gregory

According to Bertrand Russell it was the transcendental aesthetic, in the CPR.

I'd say it's his introduction to the CPR, though. A and B editions make different arguments, but the distinctions he's exploring in each just by way of formulating his question is amazing and great.

He had more than one, however ;)

In relation to Hegel I'd say his distinction between "Logic as such" (formal logic) and "Transcendental Logic" is similar in height to Hegels historical dialectic.

****

But really I think the two thinkers are different -- as a historicist might say :)

Schopenhauer invokes the antinomies of reason in respect of evolution:

the law of causality and the treatment and investigation of nature which is based upon it, lead us necessarily to the conclusion that, in time, each more highly organised state of matter has succeeded a cruder state: so that the lower animals existed before men, fishes before land animals, plants before fishes, and the unorganised before all that is organised; that, consequently, the original mass had to pass through a long series of changes before the first eye could be opened. And yet, the existence of this whole world remains ever dependent upon the first eye that opened, even if it were that of an insect. For such an eye is a necessary condition of the possibility of knowledge, and the whole world exists only in and for knowledge, and without it is not even thinkable. The world is entirely idea, and as such demands the knowing subject as the supporter of its existence. This long course of time itself, filled with innumerable changes, through which matter rose from form to form till at last the first percipient creature appeared —this whole time itself is only thinkable in the identity of a consciousness whose succession of ideas, whose form of knowing it is, and apart from which, it loses all meaning and is nothing at all.

Thus we see, on the one hand, the existence of the whole world necessarily dependent upon the first conscious being, however undeveloped it may be; on the other hand, this conscious being just as necessarily entirely dependent upon a long chain of causes and effects which have preceded it, and in which it itself appears as a small link. These two contradictory points of view, to each of which we are led with the same necessity, we might again call an antinomy in our faculty of knowledge… The necessary contradiction which at last presents itself to us here, finds its solution in the fact that, to use Kant’s phraseology, time, space, and causality do not belong to the thing-in-itself, but only to its phenomena, of which they are the form; which in my language means this: The objective world, the world as idea, is not the only side of the world, but merely its outward side; and it has an entirely different side—the side of its inmost nature—its kernel—the thing-in-itself… But the world as idea… only appears with the opening of the first eye. Without this medium of knowledge it cannot be, and therefore it was not before it. But without that eye, that is to say, outside of knowledge, there was also no before, no time. Thus time has no beginning, but all beginning is in time. — How Schopenhauer's Idealism Began with the First Eye Opening

Bolds added

Kant's great idea: that science is the science of appearances, and that appearance always entails the subject for whom it is appearance.

On the distinction between the noumenal and the in-itself. They are distinguished, but the distinction is subtle.

Ding an sich (Thing-in-itself): This refers to 'the object' (or: world) as it would exist independently of or outside perception. We can never know things-in-themselves directly because our knowledge is constructed on the basis of space, time, and the categories of understanding. As the 'in itself' has not by definition been made subject to those, then we can't know of it.

Noumenon: This is a more abstract term, referring to an object as it would be known if we had a kind of intellectual intuition beyond sensory experience. The original meaning is 'object of nous' (where 'nous' is translated as 'intellect'). So the noumenon is a purely intelligible object that does not appear in sensory experience. But as knowledge is bound to depend on sensible experience ('concepts without percepts are empty') then the noumenal is not an object of knowledge. Kant allows noumenon as a limiting concept (negative noumenon), marking the boundary of the known, but denies that the noumenal can be known positively.

Even though it's a subtle distinction, it's significant.

I can see when i ponder billions of years before me that the mind can despair and say "without the warm of a knowing mind, what does it even mean for material objects to exist". And yet i know this rock here has existence if no one looks at it. What exactly phenomena is needs to be explored further it seems.

The world without mind is called sometimes "pure potential", "emptiness", "randomness", even "freedom", ect. There has to be some rationality that lets the intellectual difficulties fall into place after having shown themselves in the past to be unsolvable. If the world is will, will at least has to have imagination in order to be a functioning faculty, right?

I know this rock here has existence — Gregory

All due respect, if you wish to study philosophy, this is something that you will need to be able to question. It seems obvious, but then an important part of philosophy is questioning what seems obvious.

So my question is: was contradiction a necessary part of logic and/or reality in the worldview of Kant? — Gregory

Antinomies are not the same as contradictions. The point of the antinomies of reason is to demonstrate Kant's maxim that 'reason is drawn to posit ideas beyond what it can establish'. Reason provides the ability to ask questions like: does the world have a beginning in time or not? But Kant is saying that even though such questions appear rational, they may be beyond the scope of reason to address. (And notice that even with the huge advances in cosmology since Kant's day, whether the Universe has a beginning or not is still an open question.) Reason has limits, and while we might think we can see beyond it, such claims might turn out to be illusory. He says in the Introduction:

Human reason, in one sphere of its cognition, is called upon to consider questions which it cannot decline, as they are presented by its own nature, but which it cannot answer, as they transcend every faculty of the mind. It falls into this perplexity without any fault of its own. It begins with principles which it has no choice but to employ in the course of experience, and is thus encouraged to extend them beyond all limits of experience. But it soon becomes aware that, by this means, its enterprise is drawing it into darkness and contradictions from which it can never escape. The battlefield of these endless controversies is called "metaphysics."

and later in the text:

We have now not only traversed the region of the pure understanding and carefully surveyed every part of it, but we have also measured it, and assigned to everything therein its proper place. But this land is an island, and enclosed by nature herself within unchangeable limits. It is the land of truth (an attractive word), surrounded by a wide and stormy ocean, the region of illusion, where many a fog-bank, many an iceberg, seems to the mariner, on his voyage of discovery, a new country, and, while constantly deluding him with vain hopes, engages him in dangerous adventures, from which he never can desist, and which yet he never can bring to a termination.

What is Kant's one great idea? — Gregory

I think it was his effort to cure the then contemporary understanding of science of certain flaws in its foundations. In succeeding he made surprising discoveries, the consequences and implications of which he followed out at length. And while it is fashionably modern to be dismissive of many of his ideas, at close look, they still hold!

Human reason, in one sphere of its cognition, is called upon to consider questions which it cannot decline, as they are presented by its own nature, but which it cannot answer, as they transcend every faculty of the mind. It falls into this perplexity without any fault of its own. It begins with principles which it has no choice but to employ in the course of experience, and is thus encouraged to extend them beyond all limits of experience. But it soon becomes aware that, by this means, its enterprise is drawing it into darkness and contradictions from which it can never escape. The battlefield of these endless controversies is called "metaphysics."

and later in the text:

We have now not only traversed the region of the pure understanding and carefully surveyed every part of it, but we have also measured it, and assigned to everything therein its proper place. But this land is an island, and enclosed by nature herself within unchangeable limits. It is the land of truth (an attractive word), surrounded by a wide and stormy ocean, the region of illusion, where many a fog-bank, many an iceberg, seems to the mariner, on his voyage of discovery, a new country, and, while constantly deluding him with vain hopes, engages him in dangerous adventures, from which he never can desist, and which yet he never can bring to a termination — Wayfarer

Do you agree with these passages? Can reason never know full truth? Did Kant fail by going to far into doubt?

Oh right, the Construction of Nature book. I had forgotten about it. We did discuss it way back when. I had a thread 'what is phenomena' way back when, but i haven't those old posts since then

https://www.amazon.com/Kants-Construction-Nature-Metaphysical-Foundations/dp/0521198399

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphysical_Foundations_of_Natural_Science

I read the first part of the former but i never felt like it really clicked with me

If you haven't already, consider Schopenhauer's critique ...

Kant's use of the antinomies was to demonstrate that we do not know such things -- we can rationally argue for both the assertion and the negation, and both will appeal to reason, and they can be put side-by-side and end up in contradiction. For Kant this shows a limitation on reason's ability to answer some questions. — Moliere

Yes, Kant's antimonies are (it seems to me) a modern reformulation of classical equipollence (re: Pyrrho / Sextus Empiricus ... no doubt inspied by, or derived from, Socrates' elenchus (esp. early Platonic dialogues)).

I rather think contradiction is certainly a necessary part of logic. Or, maybe, if not a necessary part, then at least the fundamental ground for the validity of logical constructs [reason] . — Mww

:100: (re: LNC)

:up: :up:

Kant's great idea: that science is the science of appearances, and that appearance always entails the subject for whom it is appearance. — Wayfarer

Given that "subject" is also an "appearance", this so-called "great idea" amounts to a tautology. :smirk:

And while it is fashionably modern to be dismissive of many of his [Kant's] ideas, at close look, they still hold! — tim wood

Such as? :chin:

Can reason never know full truth? — Gregory

I would ask you, what about the human faculties do you think enables them to arrive at an understanding of the true nature of reality? I think the hallmark of Kant is actually his intellectual humility. He is one who dares question what most take for granted.

And while it is fashionably modern to be dismissive of many of his (Kant's) ideas, at close look, they still hold!
— tim wood
Such as? :chin: — 180 Proof

That knowledge-of is a construct of mind.

It calls to mind an observation I think from Carl Sagan, but I am not able to verify, "Astronomers study telescopes and cosmologists study the minds of astronomers." I take this to be true, although not practically useful. Just as regarding knowledge-of in a Kantian way is true, but not-so-useful.

I would ask you, what about the human faculties do you think enables them to arrive at an understanding of the true nature of reality? I think the hallmark of Kant is actually his intellectual humility. He is one who dares question what most take for granted — Wayfarer

What of truth for it's own sake? Why is desire for a knowledge wrong? What if we spent less thoughts on doubts and more on constructing what we can know. Truth is always seen. It's not always recogized

So this discussions seems to boil down the idea that we experience the world but can't truly understand it.

People who enter my room experience a different room then the one i call my own space. Every object is understand by each person just as people are understood differently by different people.

What of truth for it's own sake? Why is desire for a knowledge wrong? — Gregory

I think - and I think Kant also thought, although he was not explicit about it - that knowing the truth has a spiritual dimension. There is an insight which generally speaking we ordinarily lack. Whereas today we have access to vast troves of knowledge but whether that imparts or conveys insight is another matter altogether.

Kant never lost sight of the fact that while modern science is one of humanity's most impressive achievements, we are not just knowers: we are also agents who make choices and hold ourselves responsible for our actions. In addition, we have a peculiar capacity to be affected by beauty, and a strange inextinguishable sense of wonder about the world we find ourselves in. Feelings of awe, an appreciation of beauty, and an ability to make moral choices on the basis of rational deliberation do not constitute knowledge, but this doesn't mean they lack value. On the contrary. But a danger carried by the scientific understanding of the world is that its power... may lead us to undervalue those things that don't count as science. — Emrys Westacott

I often wonder whether there should be such a thing as 'scientific truth'. I question that there is. There are scientific theories, scientifically-validated insights, to be sure. But truth has a quality of aliveness to it, which can't be captured by propositional knowledge.

Truth is always seen. — Gregory

I doubt this statement is true.

It's not always reco[gn]ized

No doubt.

That knowledge-of is a construct of mind. — tim wood

For different reasons, e.g. Democritus (re: sensory conventions, limitless divisibility of things) and e.g. Parmenides/Plato (re: change/appearances aka "the many") proposed the idea of (subjective) "construct of mind" millennia ago. Kant just 'a prioritized' this with arbitrarily complex – convoluted – schema; of no use, as you acknowledge, pragmatically or in cognitive scientific terms.

[W]e experience the world but can't truly understand it. — Gregory

However, we can approximately – defeasibly – "understand it" and sufficiently enough for us to adapt and thrive in the world (i.e. nature) with which a priori we are entangled (pace Descartes, pace Berkeley).

What about this rock question however: are there rocks in existence when they are never seen? But what if they are heard, or tasted or smelled. Suppose there was one conscious being in the universe and his only sense was smell. If he smelled a "rock", does the rock exist? It seems individuation is on the part of the object presenting itself to me. Maybe truth i the reverse of science

Truth is seen in that ignorance clouds the eyes of the mind that are, nonethless, seeing. Plato learned this from Socratea. There is a common stream running from Persia (Zorastrianism) to the Gnostics, neo-Platonists, and the followes of Mythra (largely Roman soldiers) which whispers of release from ideas that only know particular things as just that. Intuition is sometimes called the third eye... I was going to say something about Eckhart, but i have to go back and see my sources

that knowing the truth has a spiritual dimension. There is an insight — Wayfarer

I use intuitiom and insight interchangeably. These leads to true knowledge though. Otherwise all is will. That knowledge is different from scientific knowledge. Will and reason are both necessary, so Schopenhauer and Hegel may have both been right

What about this rock question however: are there rocks in existence when they are never seen? — Gregory

Kant was an empirical realist, from which perspective he would say, 'of course'. But he was also a transcendental idealist, so he would ask you 'what do you mean by "in existence"'? And that's a very difficult question.

If I think of the Big Bang for example, since there was no consciousness in the space-time reality at that time, to even think about it is to declare that a subjectless object existed once. People are very attached to being one with the past, as in evolution and cosmology (we are stardust?). It sems odd to take your own body thougy as phenomena instead of the intergal thing-in-itself, thrown through the chaotees of history.. Kant would have learned a lot from Hegel ii think, had he only lived longer

If I think of the Big Bang for example, since there was no consciousness in the space-time reality at that time, to even think about it is to declare that a subjectless object existed once. — Gregory

Yes, such declarations are made, and are supported by empirical evidence.

But my senses only feel in my visiom of sense. It takes abstract thought coupled withe imagination to think of something or someone not before you in their presence. We know each oher as humans, so then should we treat the body as phenomena or the thing in itself

That knowledge-of is a construct of mind. — tim wood

Just as regarding knowledge-of in a Kantian way is true, but not-so-useful. — tim wood

Right, that knowledge is had only by minds is a vacuous truism, and hance "not so useful".

What about this rock question however: are there rocks in existence when they are never seen? — Gregory

Why wouldn't they be? As to Kant, he didn't question their existence, what he questioned was our ability to know what they are "in themselves". Kant acknowledged that they are something in themselves (that is they exist in themselves) but he said we could not know what that existence in itself is. But this is true by mere stipulation, is therefore true by definition, a mere tautology.

It's "not so useful".