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Date Posted: 20:34:47 04/12/05 Tue
Author: psi
Subject: Re: oh man i love this crap!
In reply to: Dio 's message, "Re: oh man i love this crap!" on 15:11:02 04/11/05 Mon

i love this crap = me talking about philosophy...nobody ever really likes to do it with me. It's not important enough to me to seek out other students (i'm still a student...and I'm not actually studying philosphy anymore...i think music now)...and in any case they're ALL men, boring, and socially a little inept. I know some women's studies majors and they're really fun to discuss things with because they get REALLY into their viewpoints, which are philosophical (with a political agenda usually). the "crap" refers to me not really caring about it that much anymore, and that I'm very confused about my own beliefs about reality, the world, and culture, even if I understand all these other philosophies and viewpoints. none of it really does it for me anymore. Most people have strong viewpoints without true understanding...I think I understand things pretty well but have lost my own views about what is true.

I generally don't think in terms of winning or losing a debate, to me it's about relating and trying to make someone else really really really understand your viewpoint, while trying to do the same for them. With some people I take the stance of "beating them" but only the ones with really lame views that don't hold up at all (even to them) once they start thinking about them...i have a friend who has all these stupid sexist viewpoints and thoughts about reality and linguistics that don't hold up worth a darn...i pretty much just ask him serious questions which he can't answer (cuz he doesn't think about them AT ALL).

Kant was racist, yep. People in his home town set their clocks by him because he walked around the town every morning at the exact same time...I mean his social life was pathetic, and I don't think he ever left his little region in germany.

"One part if you don't mind explaining better for me:
I say "If Kant claims that he can't know anything about the real world (the thing in itself) then how does he know the real world is there?"
Thank you."

Kant's idea of the "things in itself" is actually a flawed idea for many reasons, one of them being Schopenhauer's criticism of it from the perspective of time and space. but there are lengthy criticisms of it, I can't recall any right now though. Anyway, there have been some philosophers who have said that the phenomenal world is actually all that there is--in any case it's all that we can meaningfully say there is. or something, i'm confused and don't really have answer for you off hand. Let's think it through...

We do know that our own experience of reality exists because we are in the process of experiencing it (at least). We can't know anything about the real world, no...or at least what form it would take if it does indeed exists. Kant and Schopenhauer would say that the thing in itself would exist because reason and logic dictate that such a thing MUST be existent. Schopenhauer had a big thing with the "Principle of Sufficient Reason" which basiclaly states that there is a reason for everything to be the way it is, or that reality conforms with reason, or something (I can't really remember). That would be it...though I'm sure there is more.

That was actually my criticism of Schopenhauer when I was reading him however long ago that was: that once you get beyond the phenomenal world there is nothing to guarantee that the rest of reality conforms to any principles of logic or reason whatsoever. I don't really have a response to this..I think wittgenstein said something about language aand about how the objectification of reality conforms so easily to our own principles of logic and such that there is a layer of logic/language BENEATH human reason that might go farther than reason itself...but I don't really know the details of this argument.

oh and the tree molding your mind thing...there are actually a lot of problems with that (such as Berkeley's criticism...that one object can appear differently to different observers). If I were an inch tall and looked at a tree, I would see a skycraper tree. I look now: a sapling. Same tree. If the tree molds our minds then we should be able to see the same tree from any and all perspectives, because the tree is molding our minds in the exact same way all the time. But we don't--and can't. The truth is that our own perspective interprets and actually constrains most if not all of the sense data we receive through our minds...our minds, not the tree, are doing the work.

i think ;p

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