[HN Gopher] Immanuel Kant - What can we know?
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Immanuel Kant - What can we know?
Author : momirlan
Score : 48 points
Date : 2023-11-02 22:56 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (ralphammer.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (ralphammer.com)
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| Q. What is the difference between skepticism and stoicism
|
| A. I don't know and I don't care
| mykowebhn wrote:
| This is a nice try, but there are a lot of parts that made me
| wince.
|
| 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.
| woodruffw wrote:
| I don't think this was meant to be a scholarly explanation, and
| the author hints as much at the end of the post.
|
| 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.
| Merrill wrote:
| Does Kant focus this way on the individual's experience and
| reason?
|
| 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.
| woodruffw wrote:
| It's been a while, but I don't think Kant has much to say
| about individual experience vis a vis interpersonal
| consensus. But maybe there's something I'm not remembering.
| Notatheist wrote:
| You want an article that takes 5 minutes to read to define
| "truth"? The author even says they're just trying to get you
| hyped and in my opinion I think they did a great job.
| Loq wrote:
| If you want to understand Kant in the language of (self-
| supervised) machine learning, I can highly recommend this rather
| astonishing PhD thesis:
|
| https://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~re14/Evans-R-2020-PhD-Thesis.pdf
| julienmarie wrote:
| Just started reading this thesis. I am absolutely blown away by
| the clarity and beauty of its writing. This is rare.
| sovietswag wrote:
| Finally, an opportunity to share a series from one of my favorite
| lecturers :). This is a set of lectures on the Critique from
| Robert Paul Wolff:
| https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLC5GAeBZerO-RuKBI1IqHZz...
|
| 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.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I read Kant's _Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals_ in my
| undergraduate ethics class, and that was tough to read 200 years
| after it was written.
|
| 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.
| woodruffw wrote:
| > 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.
| cmehdy wrote:
| Science doesn't determine the rules of the universe, it
| generates models with predictive power within a domain of
| validity
| vivekd wrote:
| I think this is a good summary of Kant. For full context it's
| good to get a picture of the philosophical movement around him
| during his era which was attacking rationalism and promoting a
| sort of extereme form of empiricism.
|
| (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.
| User23 wrote:
| > there is an underlying reality apart from that which we can
| never know.
|
| 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?
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org//wiki/Hypotheses_non_fingo
| jonmc12 wrote:
| "Our mind shapes the world".. Kant's psychology was foundational
| to the thought lineage of predictive processing.
| https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnsys.2016.0007...
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