VoyForums
[ Show ]
Support VoyForums
[ Shrink ]
VoyForums Announcement: Programming and providing support for this service has been a labor of love since 1997. We are one of the few services online who values our users' privacy, and have never sold your information. We have even fought hard to defend your privacy in legal cases; however, we've done it with almost no financial support -- paying out of pocket to continue providing the service. Due to the issues imposed on us by advertisers, we also stopped hosting most ads on the forums many years ago. We hope you appreciate our efforts.

Show your support by donating any amount. (Note: We are still technically a for-profit company, so your contribution is not tax-deductible.) PayPal Acct: Feedback:

Donate to VoyForums (PayPal):

[ Login ] [ Contact Forum Admin ] [ Main index ] [ Post a new message ] [ Search | Check update time | Archives: 1, 2, [3], 4, 5 ]

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]

Date Posted: 13:50:39 04/08/05 Fri
Author: psi
Subject: oh man i love this crap!
In reply to: and Dio opens his mouth.... 's message, "Immanuel Kant chat....." on 16:29:22 04/07/05 Thu

this is correct, pretty much. another way of looking at it is that the world from our perspective is always divided into subject and object, we being the observing subjects and the objects being that which we observe. Kant's insight was that the observer presupposes the structure of everything we experience onto the object. We see a tree through the structure of how our minds interpret reality--through time, space and our senses. Think about it, coming after Berkeley, there's no way to know absolute distances...if I am the size of an ant then to a tree would be a skyscraper...if I'm the size of me and a tree was a size of a skyscraper then how could I tell the difference between the two trees? The basic foundation of everything we experience is structured through our minds (and is subjective)--a tree wouldnt even be a "tree" if I weren't looking at it--it would energy, protons, molecules, everything but a what we would call a tree (because we would have to strip all human sense-data away from it, and even the noun "tree" because we presuppose objects and definition just through our interaction with language and the world). And what Kant is saying, basically, is that there is absolutely no way to know what a tree fundamentally is without filtering it through the structure of our experience of reality. Schopenhauer came after Kant and went a step further and included time and space in his forms of our experience (which Kant didn't do), and thus we would have to strip away time and space from the "thing-in-itself"...which means in short that there is only one "thing-in-itself"--except there's not even "one" thing it itself: there's only an undifferentiated thing-in-itself, as time and space are needed to give basic definition to objects.

Schopenhauer said that energy was the closest we could come to the thing-in-itself as it appears in the phenomenal world, and if you think about it, it's true: energy is undifferentiated and is actually the thing that everything is reducible to at bottom.


"Why is it that the average joe or book reader like myself doesn't doubt what he sees with his own 2 eyes, but supposedly brilliant philosophers do?"

I don't think most of them doubt what they see, they just want to know what it is that they're actually seeing, and what they can say definatively about it. After Kant it seems to me that philosophy isn't so much as discovering what reality "is" but rather just putting restrictions on what we can say about it.


"I don't like Kant also cause he convinces ppl that there is an unbridgeable barrier between you and the real world.
There is no way you can any reliable knowledge about what the world is really like."

There is an unbridgeable barrier between what we can know about the real world and the real world as it exists in itself. This is a very natural thing to say. Did you know that there are possibly 11 dimensions according to string theory? how would you suppose we get reliable knowledge about reality as it exists if there is no way for us to experience these things? ...it's not so much that we don't know the world, it's just that we know the world subjectively, through the forms of our subjective experiences (time, space--which are both subjective, senses, thoughts, concepts). We know the world, but only through these things (which are ultimately human and only human)--and there's no way around this. You can't peek behind the curtain with your eleventh dimension eye and see what that tree really fuckin looks like. unless you're on drugs, in which case...well...in any case...

"Kant, I believe violates the "Law of Noncontradiction" !!
He contradicts his own premise by saying that "no one can know" the real world while "he claims to know" something about it. The real world in unknowable..yet he knows it? Kant also says..the truth about the real world is that there are "no truths" about the real world"?
It is a self-defeating statement. There is no truth? Then I say...is this true? blahhh."

No one can know the real world as it exists without observers, but we can know some things about it by reflecting on the relationship between our own experience of it (which we DO know!) and what this relationship logically means. We don't know the real world, but we do know our experience of it. I don't think there's a contradiction there.

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]

Replies:

[ Contact Forum Admin ]

Forum timezone: GMT-5
VF Version: 3.00b, ConfDB:
Before posting please read our privacy policy.
VoyForums(tm) is a Free Service from Voyager Info-Systems.
Copyright © 1998-2019 Voyager Info-Systems. All Rights Reserved.