Mal12345
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- Apr 19, 2011
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[MENTION=512]Nocapszy[/MENTION]
Very recently on this forum I have been ordered to leave (I assume) Typology Central based on a thread I created devoted to correcting incorrect Facebook memes. The thread was properly posted to the Fluff forum, so there is literally no rule being broken or any kind of forum faux pas being committed. And I happen to find the topic personally amusing.
But since that harmless fluff thread is somehow offense to apparently intellectually sensitive, highly intelligent, and extremely sensible individuals here, I decided to bump up the difficulty in the conversation.
I wish to discuss - seriously, without fluff or insults - the following statement from Robert Wolff, author of Kant's Theory of Mental Activity (1963) -
"It turned out that Kant had known exactly what he was doing all along, and that when he claimed to have answered Hume's sceptical doubts, he was perfectly correct. The Analytic could now be seen as a proof of the law of causality. It did not assume the existence of knowledge merely in order to explain how such knowledge was possible, as many commentators have supposed. Instead, it offered a demonstration that from the mere fact of my being conscious, I could infer the validity of the highest.principles of science."
There have indeed been many commentators who have accused Kant of circular argumentation in the Transcendental Analytic (see, Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason [1781,1787]), by his allegedly assuming that humans already have knowledge of causality, and the only issue is to show how such knowledge is possible.
There is some - albeit slight - cause to believe this was Kant's goal in the Transcendental Analytic. Kant did indeed concern himself with possibilities, not particular empirical possibilities such as the possibility that the moon shall some day completely exit its orbit with the Earth, but the possibility of empirical experience itself, in general and not in particular. Empirical experience is made possible via the existence of laws of reality (e.g., causality), without which humans would have no consciousness (experience) of either "appearances" or even of a self that experiences. Or as Kant would say, there would be as many experiences as there are things experienced, and consciousness would consist of a chaos of sensory impressions. The very fact that humans do not experience a chaos of sensory impressions proves that causality exists as a law of nature (or as Kant would put it, a law of experience).
Very recently on this forum I have been ordered to leave (I assume) Typology Central based on a thread I created devoted to correcting incorrect Facebook memes. The thread was properly posted to the Fluff forum, so there is literally no rule being broken or any kind of forum faux pas being committed. And I happen to find the topic personally amusing.
But since that harmless fluff thread is somehow offense to apparently intellectually sensitive, highly intelligent, and extremely sensible individuals here, I decided to bump up the difficulty in the conversation.
I wish to discuss - seriously, without fluff or insults - the following statement from Robert Wolff, author of Kant's Theory of Mental Activity (1963) -
"It turned out that Kant had known exactly what he was doing all along, and that when he claimed to have answered Hume's sceptical doubts, he was perfectly correct. The Analytic could now be seen as a proof of the law of causality. It did not assume the existence of knowledge merely in order to explain how such knowledge was possible, as many commentators have supposed. Instead, it offered a demonstration that from the mere fact of my being conscious, I could infer the validity of the highest.principles of science."
There have indeed been many commentators who have accused Kant of circular argumentation in the Transcendental Analytic (see, Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason [1781,1787]), by his allegedly assuming that humans already have knowledge of causality, and the only issue is to show how such knowledge is possible.
There is some - albeit slight - cause to believe this was Kant's goal in the Transcendental Analytic. Kant did indeed concern himself with possibilities, not particular empirical possibilities such as the possibility that the moon shall some day completely exit its orbit with the Earth, but the possibility of empirical experience itself, in general and not in particular. Empirical experience is made possible via the existence of laws of reality (e.g., causality), without which humans would have no consciousness (experience) of either "appearances" or even of a self that experiences. Or as Kant would say, there would be as many experiences as there are things experienced, and consciousness would consist of a chaos of sensory impressions. The very fact that humans do not experience a chaos of sensory impressions proves that causality exists as a law of nature (or as Kant would put it, a law of experience).