Immanuel Kant – What can we know?
ralphammer.com
ralphammer.com
(Ie science and the visible world being all that exist, and rational concepts like numbers or math is just an extrapolation from the material world.)
Kant sort of puts that idea to rest somewhat (although it remained popular well into the 20th century).
But the way he did so was unsettling. The conclusion we are left with after reading this is there is a sort of human perspective that shapes our understanding of reality and there is an underlying reality apart from that which we can never know.
I don't like it, I think when Einstein or Newton make statements they are making statements about reality and not just sense impressions. I don't like the idea that reality is something foreign and unknowable to humans.
Maybe time isn't real in the way we perceive it but I don't think the underlying nature of time is something undiscoverable.
What's my reasoning. I don't know I just don't like the idea I guess. Plus I don't think the attack on rationalism and reason was as warranted as it may have seemed to Kant in his time.
I'm surprised this is so unsettling for many. I feel like this life beats intellectual humility into anyone smart enough to notice it pretty much nonstop from the age of reason.
> I think when [...] Newton make statements they are making statements about reality and not just sense impressions.
That's not what Newton thought. Hypothesis non fingo[1].
> Maybe time isn't real in the way we perceive it but I don't think the underlying nature of time is something undiscoverable.
Time is an extension through something, but through what?
This is quite the religious notion if you think about it.
We know that everything we ever experience is something generated by our own brain (approximately).
We assume that our brain is generating our experience based on some sort of external reality, but that thing we can only assume exists because we’ll never be able to step outside our brain to experience it.
Yeah think about it
Why? Because it actually renders everything, anywhere, ultimately arbitrary.
Can you say there isn’t an underlying truth in the perspective of the anti-vaxxer?
Can you say there isn’t an underlying truth in the perspective of the pedophile?
Can you say there isn’t an underlying truth in the perspective of the flat earther?
According to Kant… well, you can’t completely. The logical consequences of this, if fully realized, would annihilate society.
It would seem in Kant’s view that Nobody, ultimately, has any right to pronounce objective truths on anything. Not even basic ones like “you shouldn’t kill the innocent.” That’s just a reflection of your own personal reality that has no inherent value over someone else’s reality.
Then you seem to think that everyone else should accept and agree with your judgement.
Because if people do not agree with your judgement, then everything is ultimately arbitrary and if fully realized, would annihilate society.
Now I can tell you that I do not care about how you judge a person. I will make up my own mind. So there you are, by your own definition society is annihilated.
Yet here we still are.
[You picked some bad examples on which to argue your point. You should though spend time to figure out good examples]
My point remains though that if Kant is correct, the moral high ground most people here feel over these groups is quite thin.
Edit: Polemics aside, I looked it up and of course people don't agree if Kant really meant it that way. https://doi.org/10.1515/agph-2021-0034
The reason is that having an illegitimate child in the eighteenth century was a source of dishonor that would see you effectively rejected from society. So out-of-wedlock mothers were in an impossible situation: kill the child or have their own lives destroyed.
See this article https://www.jstor.org/stable/20484950, which quotes Frederick the Great, among others, who pointed out this same quandry:
> A girl, only too easily fooled by the presence of a seducer, does she not find herself compelled by the very force of circumstances to choose between the loss of her honor and the elimination of the unhappy fruit that she has conceived? Is it not the fault of the laws to place a girl in such a desperate situation?
Second, calling biology constraining is a gross underestimation of our complex normative system which gives birth to the best and worst of humanity.
> The sooner we reconcile our differences and realize that society is only possible through tethered connections biologically programmed into us, the better we will all be. The alternative is groups of people feuding over "moral truths" that are IMPOSSIBLE to reconcile because "moral truths" are inaccessible.
Moral truths are not impossible to reconcile and they are not inaccessible. You just aren’t yet equipped with the discernment to distinguish between accurate ones and arbitrary ones.
Biology is constraining when you rely on it to dictate the path forward.
"Objective morals" are extremely religious, culty, hivemind-like because they are passed on as matter-of-fact truths that don't need to be examined, regardless of whether it comes from a region or your favorite insta influencer. They get repeated as mantras by many who cant back up their beliefs.
They are arbitrary though. You don’t like it because it forces you to admit everything you consider objective about the universe is little more than your cultural meta narrative.
It’s arbitrary, so I say you aren’t.
However exactly what I am in your own mind, that's not for me to say. At least, that's what your mind is saying.
My understanding is that Kant "simply" says that you cannot rely on yourself to know something objectively. That there's a limitation to perception and ... reason. Would you ask a cat what is right on the topics of vax, shape of earth, etc? No, because you know they are limited. Well, according to evolution we're just a bit more evolved but still have no claim to objectivity.
But that doesn't take away from morality. One way to look at religion is - it begins from the Kantian view that you can't just work out everything logically. That there's some great unknown and unknowable that is beyond you. And then enables you to engage with it in that world.
That's why religion anchors morality in "G-d said" because man certainly has no grounds to say "I've figured this out and it's right"
Put another way: Kant’s observation about the basic unknowability of things in themselves doesn’t somehow imply that we have to throw up our hands and accept moral relativity. The bulk of his moral philosophy is dedicated to explaining the necessary connection between our phenomenological existence and our moral duties.
What Kant is saying is basically that categories like cause, and concepts like substance, are fundamentally bound up with the structure of our mind. We cannot "get outside" our own minds to know anything else, but there must be something beyond our perceptions, which Kant variously calls noumena, things-in-themselves, or transcendental object=X (there are minor differences between these notions that I cannot recall). Here IIRC his language kind of unfortunately but necessarily breaks down into metaphor. He can't quite say that the noumena are the source of phenomena since that would imply a causal relationship, and he's just argued that cause is a structure of the human mind.
Considering the "perspectives" you mention, e.g. that of the flat earther - a perspective is not a perception, nor is it a judgement, and it is these that Kant is primarily concerned with in the 1st critique. I'd say a perspective is more like an agglomeration of more or less (but not necessarily) coherent and self-reinforcing beliefs, attitudes and probably even non-propositional content like dispositions. Kant didn't have much to say specifically about that in any of his major writings that I can recall (maybe in the lectures on anthropology).
But his entire life work was devoted to how we can provide a solid foundation for claims of knowledge, morality, and aesthetics, so to say that "Nobody, ultimately, has any right to pronounce objective truths on anything" would quite a misinterpretation. You could argue "well but it isn't objective knowledge since the noumena are the real objects" but that would be begging the question against him, his whole argument is that concepts like "object" are part of the structure of our mind. Objective knowledge and the human mind go hand in hand.
Statements like "the Earth is spherical" or "this vaccine has 90% effectivity" fall fully in the phenomenological realm, i.e., the things that we experience through our senses and we can know. Since we have consistent sensory experiences (also aided by technology) that point to the Earth being spherical, Kant would say that we can be confident that it is spherical as a phenomenon - which is what actually matters, and the same with vaccines: dying and getting sick are experiences that we can perceive as a phenomenon, so antivaxxers will find no excuse in Kant's philosophy.
In this example, some aspects of the noumenon (what we cannot know) are for example: OK, but what actually is dying from COVID? Maybe we reincarnate? Maybe we go to heaven? Maybe we are just bits in a simulation? Maybe dying is an illusion? We cannot know. But this doesn't affect the usefulness of taking the vaccine (someone could choose not to take it because they think death is an illusion or they will reincarnate or something like that, but then that's their beliefs' fault, not Kant's, and they would still have to admit that taking the vaccine makes sense for people who don't want to die because they don't share those beliefs).
I think it's hard to find these ideas unsettling, as they actually have become so ingrained to seem like common sense for most rational-minded people. The core idea is just separation between scientific knowledge and metaphysics/religion (but it's of course compatible with atheistic/materialistic views, because one doesn't need to assume that the noumenon contains anything of practical importance -like heaven, immortal souls or stuff like that-, it could be basically irrelevant for all practical purposes).
Einstein in particular made huge strides by thinking in terms of sense impressions, e.g. by using his imagination to take on the perspective of an observer falling off a roof:
> I got the happiest thought of my life in the following form:…for an observer in free-fall from the roof of a house there is…no gravitational field. Namely, if the observer lets go of any bodies, they remain relative to him, in a state of rest or uniform motion, independent of their special chemical or physical nature. The observer, therefore, is justified in interpreting his state as being "at rest."
The emphasis on sense impressions over an appeal to an external reality is something he owes to Mach: https://blog.superb-owl.link/p/church-of-reality-ernst-mach-...
> The belief in an external world independent of the observing subject lies at the foundation of all natural science. However, since sense-perceptions only inform us about this external world, or physical reality, indirectly, it is only in a speculative way that it can be grasped by us. Consequently our conceptions of physical reality can never be final. We must always be ready to change these conceptions, i.e. the axiomatic basis of physics, in order to do justice to the facts of observation in the most complete way that is logically possible. In actual fact, a glance at the development of physics shows that this axiomatic basis has met with radical changes from time to time.
https://d-meeus.be/physique/Maxwell-Einstein-en.html
It's a little disappointing that his best known quotation is the out-of-context "God does not play dice".
Your eyes move about constantly but you dont see it, and the brain removes things, and the brain adds things, you smell, you listen, you feel, you end up with a construct you perceive, that you know is inaccurate.
You will only ever know the inside of your own head, your own consciousness.
To the extent that everything could be all inside your head, everything.
Some people like to think about this world being a simulation being run by some sort of beings for fun. They could again be simulations, recursively, until perhaps there could be a non-simulation at the top.
and it might be that the "simulation" they are running is only calculating and modelling a single brain and they plant things inside of it.
From that perspective nothing that you will ever perceive is real.
Things exist outside your experience. Things exist outside my experience. The only way to get to the perspective you describe is to discard or devalue the experience of everyone else.
If you encounter a large carnivore in the wild and it knocks you out, the animal doesn’t disappear.
To seriously hold that all of what you have known was created for your experience is an extreme exercise of narcissism that enables some fairly incredible behaviors. But it is not closer to truth.
Furthermore, a rational solipist does not avoid any of the questions faced by non-solipsists: wherever the latter asks "why is it that... and not something else?", the rational solipsist has the question "why does it seem that... and not something else?" Saying "it was designed that way" is no more of an explanation than "it is that way", and the rational solipsist will realize that this is so.
Perhaps you are thinking of brains-in-vats or simulations in their own simulated universe? If such an entity supposed that it was a brain-in-a-vat or a simulation, however, it would not be a rational solipsist, as these hypotheses presume a reality beyond their experiences (in any such case, of course, the non-solipsist brain-in-a-vat or simulation would be mistaken about what reality lies beyond its experiences, but nevertheless, there would be such a reality.)
A brain in a vat hallucinating a universe, is the same thing as just hallucinating a universe with no further reality, is the same thing as being in a particularly vivid dream, is the same a being a simulation.
The idea that a brain must exist somewhere in a vat to present this reality to you, came from your mind. If some of the rules of your reality are entirely disconnected with your senses, why not all?
In this regard, the inability to disprove solipsism is not sufficient to be a justification for believing it; if it were, the mirror argument would equally justify not-solipsism, and so a rational person should regard both arguments as inconclusive.
I only mentioned brains-in-vats and simulations because I wondered whether mypalmike had them in mind, and only to say that I don't think it matters whether or not the putative solipsist is either of these things.
Rather than continue in this vein, I will point you to an article which concludes with the section "The Incoherence of Solipsism":
One might even say, solipsism is necessarily foundationless, for to make an appeal to logical rules or empirical evidence the solipsist would implicitly have to affirm the very thing that he purportedly refuses to believe: the reality of intersubjectively valid criteria and a public, extra-mental world. There is a temptation to say that solipsism is a false philosophical theory, but this is not quite strong or accurate enough. As a theory, it is incoherent. What makes it incoherent, above all else, is that the solipsist requires a language (that is, a sign-system) to think or to affirm his solipsistic thoughts at all.
Designed for you by whom? And when? That is the problem.
But given that we exist, then perhaps things have always existed, before the apparent beginning of the universe that we can apparently observe? But if things have existed for so long, why are we in such a state of ignorance and imperfection? Surely given all this infinite time, something better would have been created by now?
But consciousness doesn't seem to be a "thing" with a physical presence in the real universe. It seems to be an emergent phenomenon created by the brain apparently because it's useful in some way. Like a web browser running on a computer. Go to sleep and the web browser shuts down, wake up the next day and a new one is instantiated. Then there's no continuity of consciousness, it only lasts for a few hours, and we can return to wondering why I feel like I exist in a here and now, one moment in a possibly infinite timeline.
People need to be more careful about that word "useful". Saying something is useful, is always implying a who it is useful for. Saying it's useful, but it's not useful for anyone, is as meaningless as saying something is useful, but it's not useful for anything.
(This was, as I recall, one of Kant's "categories of reason").
So by saying the brain creates something for a purpose, you're already assuming that the brain is a thing, and it's a thing that wants things. I'm not saying that's wrong, but given how hard it seems to not make circular arguments with it, maybe it isn't actually an empirical question.
I don’t buy into that idea, but any question about consciousness that will never be answered during my lifetime is always something fun to dabble with.
It was in fact one of Kant's three "necessary postulates". He asserted that the question of subjective death was not empirical, and thus impossible to know or even gain confidence about one way or another, but he thought it was (for other reasons, related to his moral theory) necessary to assume that you would not subjectively die.
Whether it's possible for this body you currently seem to be experiencing the world through to be ripped apart by a wild animal, though, that IS a highly empirical question.
If empirical is defined as applying only to a thing an individual can assess then science cannot function.
> [Not] everything that I [can't] [disprove] should be taken seriously.
I tried to come up with a good story, and was then going to say "you can't prove it wrong ;-)", but my imagination failed me...
I don't think there's a solpsistic component to the idea that we have our own subjective realities. For one thing, it's about as true as we seem to be able to tell. For another, accepting it doesn't mean we have to be self-centered. Even our experiences of other people aren't objective; someone giving a speech can give very different vibes depending on who's listening. I read what you wrote, but do I really understand what you mean? In this case I have a pretty good idea, but there's no way I can be certain that we're on the same page. Our consciousnesses, our intelligences, are separate. We aren't in some hive mind; we are self-contained agents that interact with each other and gain our own experiences.
The solipsism is the second half of parent’s comment where they state that everything exists only within their reality. Subjectivities are subsets of our existence. Arguing that an entire universe exists for one human awareness is solipsism.
Here is the definition of solipsism: Solipsism (/ˈsɒlɪpsɪzəm/ ⓘ SOLL-ip-siz-əm; from Latin solus 'alone', and ipse 'self')[1] is the philosophical idea that only one's mind is sure to exist. As an epistemological position, solipsism holds that knowledge of anything outside one's own mind is unsure; the external world and other minds cannot be known and might not exist outside the mind.
One reason why not would be for some necessary avoidance of disclosure to you, which would have had to have been architected by something that is not you, otherwise you would have known about the thing you couldn’t disclose. If something exists that is not you, then solipsism fails.
I'm not saying everything is made up in my mind like some sci-fi movie plot. I'm saying that we're confined to the limits of our perception and beliefs in a very real way. Maybe it's all in my mind, but that's somewhat different.
How about this: people's memories have been shown to be somewhat malleable. Framing a question with subtly different wording or prompting with an intentional nudge (police officers do this) can warp the witness' perception. There may well be some objective truth about the incident and maybe someone knows it, but for that witness, their world has diverged.
In the extreme case, someone who is very deluded can't process the truth that the rest of us can see. But do we really see the truth, or is it that we brand what we each see as the truth? Maybe the deluded person is right. Even assuming you are your own person entirely, I don't seem to be able to connect with your world with absolute clarity. Maybe technology can change that. If you are a figment of my imagination, well, I can't tell.
As you’ve said, perception has been demonstrated to be subjective, even controllable by others. There are layers of this including individual (introspection and observation) and collective (cultural relativism, emic and etic perspectives), etc. I agree this is something that is very helpful to understand.
Truth, likewise, is a murkier concept than many people realize or want to think about, and the relative contexts literally determine what is true and not. I also agree this is helpful to understand.
Your last sentence is the only problematic bit. In a limited effort, it is easy to casually say that you can’t prove anything beyond your own perception. But this statement is much less likely to be functionally true (and things like evolution only act on function). This statement, taken seriously, and extended, unlike everything you’ve said prior, can be very damaging, because it presumes not only are we each different, but that you are the only real one, and thus your own perspective is literally the only one that matters. It isn’t hard to see why this is not a good perspective to hold in the large majority of cases.
I don't believe only my perspective matters, and I don't think anyone should. I use the term "subjective reality" so heavily because it is scoped to each person and it is their reality. I can't truly know if everything is in my head. That also means that, for things I perceive as not in my head, they are functionally external to myself. The fact that I have these boundaries of whether I genuinely and completely think something is in my head prevents my subsumption of other perspectives as my own. In this HN thread, I have no choice but to engage you as one human to another, because if I've already thought out your responses and this is just a dream of sorts, I can't tell.
Religion is, by design, unverifiable. It can't be used to predict the future. If it were, its predictions would be easy to check, which is not allowed. So all religious teachings evolved to avoid making any hard predictions about the future. The Messiah WILL come - but nobody will tell you the date. You WILL go to Heaven if you behave - but nobody came back to report.
Consider --- if you use traditional physics to completely calculate the orbit of all the planets around the solar system, everything falls out pretty much perfectly --- except for the orbit of Mercury --- it is elliptical and gradually rotates around the sun:
- ~5,030 arc seconds of this rotation are from the gravity of the sun
- ~530 arc seconds from the other planets
- ~43 arc seconds cannot be accounted for by the classic laws of physics, but are perfectly explained by general relativity
Chapter 1 of the Tao te Ching has a long track record of quite accurately (not the best word?) but very vaguely predicts future human behavior: constant ignorance of the truth contained within the scripture, the consequences of which we continue to suffer.
Technically incorrect. Standard abstraction, decomposition, ontology, etc can achieve it as well, sometimes even without people getting their feelings hurt.
> To seriously hold that all of what you have known was created for your experience is an extreme exercise of narcissism that enables some fairly incredible behaviors. But it is not closer to truth.
As a self-diagnosed narcissist, this seems more like delusion or normative cognition (on your behalf).
Narcissism is very useful for certain forms of analysis though.
How do you explain forms of socially facilitated learning if your mind is the only thing that exists?
The burden of proof is yours, not mine.
> How do you explain forms of socially facilitated learning if your mind is the only thing that exists?
I don't because I'm not a solipsist, but I see no reason why that couldn't be imagined. If anything, most people have a problem with not imagining reality.
That’s not how this works — you have to say that before you say it’s incorrect otherwise it becomes your burden. But I’ll answer anyway.
If I am the one mind, then how could anyone make an argument that any other mind (which must only be an apparent mind, created in some way to serve my experience) could be my equivalent?
The truth of my statement is inherent in the structure of solipsism.
> The truth of my statement is inherent in the structure of solipsism.
For efficiency: are you describing map or territory?
If I introduce map and territory with any integrity to the terms now there must be an ontological truth that I can’t access but must have an idea of. If I have an idea of it then it means I am assessing something else. But we are talking about a monolithic reality. The map is the territory in solipsism.
Clearly we can use reason to learn things about the inaccuracies of our sensory perception.
By taking measurements from machines, who are devoid of such flaws.
> I totally agree that it is our duty to identify and account for our biases and inaccuracies, but I don’t think we could ever reach any meaningful certainty about the topic.
What in the world? That's literally what science has been attempting to do for over 1000 years. With varying degrees of success, true, but it's the best way we have so far to be able to approximate 'reality' without relying on our senses.
Kinda. We still need to know how the machine works, which of course involves making observations of the machine which are themselves error-prone.
Re:machines; machines might be better engineered and tested, but they're never perfect - they could be broken, or (much more commonly) they could be designed to measure the wrong thing, in other words using their measurements to justify invalid conclusions. That's what the writing above is getting at and I'm mangling it a bit, but I hope you see my perspective on why I would never say I'm "100%" certain that any scientific fact is true.
I think there are enough posts on this subject thread to make me think that this is not clear to everyone. It’s not clear to me either.
An amazing percentage of human conversation is like this, including discussions between genuine (on a relative basis, which is how our culture "measures" such things) rational and scientific people.
This is a different kind of "the world as it is" vs. "the world as you experience it" difference, as I understand Kant: You can always make more sophisticated interpretations of your direct experiences that accounts for such things as visual or even temporal illusions, but there are things you can never know for sure - for instance, whether time is your consciousness moving through a series of immutable states, like frames on a film reel, or whether it's the reel that is moving.
We are constrained from the basic structure of our reasoning from finding answers to such questions. That is very different from illusions we can correct for through better physics theories.
My take is: humans are just another living thing. Most (all?) living things don’t know everything about the underlaying “reality“ (e.g., my dog doesn’t know about electromagnetism). Hence, most likely, humans cannot be sure that what they know IS the underlaying reality (unless, of course, we think we are somehow special).
(That doesn’t mean he’s right, but I think it’s worthwhile to point out in an exegetical context.)
So far, those models seem to work reasonably well, but we don't really know how far they are from actual reality.
We have become used to science explaining the universe in ever increasing detail. The expectation that it will continue to do so indefinitely, or that eventually we will reach some sort of "final answer", is more a wish than a certainty.
Maybe we will just arrive at a point where we can't go any further and a million questions remain forever unanswered.
The universe doesn't care about our narratives.
We can define the 'underlying reality" as the intersection of all people's beliefs, and what weight we give to each such belief.
I don't know what it means to say something "is the underlying reality" or not. But we can give a definition to the term "underlying reality" and then talk about it.
Every image is taken from a specific point. Every image that you ever see, every image that will be, is all taken from a specific point. There is currently no image that is taken *not* from a specific point. Even 3d images.
The question of the thing in itself is like asking, "How would this pencil look like if not seen from a specific point? There should be some way to answer this, after all, why would a description of something needs something else in its specification?"
But then you start to realize how utterly impossible it is to imagine how something truly looks, when its not viewed from any specific point.
Cause we just never ever seen such an object ( a true image ).
Our world may be knowable but only within sloppy boundaries.
If you find this interesting, I'd very highly recommend reading Hegel. In my mind, he expands upon Kant to a new level. With Hegel, there isn't a world "out there, out of human reach". Rather, reality is always shaped by interactions of my impressions. There is no "real rock" that I am barred from experiencing in itself. There is no essence behind the form.
"Essence accordingly is not something beyond or behind appearance, but — just because it is the essence which exists — the existence is Appearance (Forth-shining). [...] Essence is the Concept as posited Concept. In Essence the determinations are only relational, not yet as reflected strictly within themselves; that is why the Concept is not yet for-itself. Essence– as Being that mediates itself with itself through its own negativity [relation to otherness]– is relation to itself only by being relation to another" https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2006/12/13/hegels-conce...
applies
Worth repeating:
> just happens to be able to solve these IQ tasks “out of the box”.
Will read further...
> 1.1.1 AI has something to learn from Kant
etc.
He takes it as axiomatic that we cannot use empiricism to determine universal rules, which is something that seemed pretty well established as false by the time between when it was written and when I read it.
I don't think this is true, at least with respect to the last ~80 years of the philosophy of science: the current "central dogma" of scientific inquiry is that all inferences must be falsifiable in order to be scientific.
In other words: good science generates inductive and parsimonious explanations, not universal rules. To be universal would be to discharge falsifiability.
Edit: For what it's worth, I think Kant's contemporaries also found him ponderous and difficult to read.
(And there's the underlying complexity of his thought, of course.)
we indeed cannot do this and Feynman illustrated this frequently using the analogy of chess (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1dgrvlWML4).
As Kant argues we can never observe the rules of the physical world as things in themselves, just as we can't directly look at the rules of chess by observing games. We can only get individual hints that we piece together into models of the world in ways we can understand.
A. I don't know and I don't care
I am now very interested in the idea of the thing itself that I built using the story I read.
It was reassuring that even the guy who wrote the translation of Critique o f Pure Reason that we were using in the class thought that Kant wrote in an incredibly obtuse way. What stuck with me even more is the idea that sometimes, "simple" ideas explored in such depth could be extremely valuable. I've been fascinated by Kant ever since, but lack the time or energy to read more of what he wrote. I would like to at some point.
Strange and interesting, makes me humanize and think about him in a different context.
Kant actually said very little about epistemology that Hume didn't say better. They were both cool, but since everyone wants to hype the beef, Hume -- who never got a chance to defend himself against this "rationalist vs empiricist" false dichotomy -- was cooler. I would encourage anyone and everyone to read his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.
I like Kant.
I recommend Wittgenstein.
And Hobbes.
But in general I believe the opposite of a good idea is often another good idea.
(I believe in Mythos, Logos and Ethos. Ask me about metamodernism.)
> Is that also a progression of insights in a similar way?
Yes: Western philosophy is a "tradition" in the sense that it has a clear (branching and twisting) lineage from pre-Socratic thought to contemporary philosophy. There are lots of commonly recommended "history of philosophy" books that can provide that overview; Russel's "A History of Western Philosophy" is a commonly recommended one.
I’d also be wary of separating scientific insights from philosophical/religious culture. Most famous scientists historically believed themselves to be looking for a divinely-organized system, and it’s unclear to me if they would have even looked in the first place without that underlying belief structure. You could go back even further and say all scientific inquiry basically rests on a conceptual distinction between Self and World, which is very much a trait of Monotheism.
I think philosophical insights could roughly be described as a mix of human biological realities (which haven’t really changed, ever) interacting with historical and technological events - and progressing over time in response to those events. Kant, for example, is mostly talking about things that are essentially fundamental to the human experience, even if he was in dialogue with the ideas that were popular in his time. People have argued against Kant, but I don’t think we can really “surpass” the kind of problem he’s investigating in the way you might think we have surpassed an outdated theory of physics.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Re...
He jokes that he keeps a copy of the Critique on his nightstand and reads it before bed to relax lol.
He also has series on Marx, Freud, and ideological critique.
It's useful to read philosophy as we're exposed to the thought process of that specific author/philosopher. A lot of times, the conclusion you arrive at is influenced heavily by the lens through which you view the presuppositions.
It's useful to be exposed to different viewpoints and conclusions. You often read something that gives you pause, and you think, "I never thought of it that way."
I don't know if every brain can come to the realization that its inherently limited in what it can perceive of truth, especially since these limitations themselves are obscured from us.
You think you could?
Anyway, the work of others is a good way to get higher-level concepts into your head to toy around with.
Also analytical philosophy is the direct precursor to computer science and a huge influence on math as we know it.
I often think it's a little unfair that history and knowledge are (obviously) biased towards people who thought enough of themselves to write their thoughts down.
I'm sure there are a lot of people who could make strong claims on the invention of certain thoughts or theories, but the bar happened to be too noisy for anyone to hear them.
Why stand on the ground when there are a multitude of giant's shoulders to stand on?
In the Kantian paradigm (and this is taken from Descartes), space is external and time is internal. You can feel time without an external perception, and space can exist outside even if you’re not there.
Space and time are conditions of human experience and hence human knowledge is limited to only phenomena in time and space.
And morals. We get a priori knowledge of morals. And that’s the important thing for Kant.
Except instead of kaleidoscope of 6 emotions, you have a circle of affect - how pleasant/unpleasant and how aroused/tranquil do you feel in the moment affects your perception of the world and what kind of thoughts do you think.
1. The essay starts off with "If you are interested in truth..." without ever defining what exactly they mean by "truth".
2. What is with this "inside" and "outside"? I don't think Kant ever used such philosophically imprecise terminology. They define rationalists as understanding the world "from the inside" and empiricists as understanding it "from the outside". By framing it in such terms, they have already put a metaphysical stake in the ground. And really, how do empiricists understand the world "from the outside"? Do they mean that the thinking is done from the outside, or that they receive sensory input from the outside and then understand it..."from the outside"? This is so ridiculous it makes me wince. Also, rationalists understand the world "from the inside" why? Because their sensory input comes from the inside? When they frame it this way--as inside versus outside--it really amounts to do the same thing, doesn't it? Kant is weeping in his grave.
3. It's too bad they didn't mention Kant's Copernican turn. Mentioning that would have been quite revealing.
4. This may have been too complex for such a short summary, but Kant's Synthetic Unity of Apperception is extremely important.
Kant was my main focus (now some time ago), and I thought this was a reasonable explainer for an audience that probably hasn't read much metaphysics.
It seems to me that we only reach some provisional truth when communicating minds agree on their experiences and how they are reduced by reason to concepts.
Only by formal processes for reaching agreement with past and candidate truths by multiple individuals do we avoid error, delusion and fantasy.
What happened to HN?
you were used to find cool new tech stuff here...
If I want to get depressed about live I will go on Reddit... ohhh I see.