C on Kant and Plato
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C. on Kant:
Whole point of CoPR is to take Phil and put the human perspective in.
Up until Kant, people just assumed “naive realism”, that we’re an object in the world, things we see int he world are objects.
Kant said, but we experience the world in a certain way, so we don’t really know what it’s like to be a chair, or even if they chair is real. so we don’t know.
What we do have access to is what’s in us. - Kant is after Descartes btw.
Hume was writing before Kant on prob of induction.
Kant wants to fix that to say that we can still get metaphysical knowledge, but only of whats inside us.
during medeival, metaphysics was like big big stuff, far from human experience. kant inverted that, and made the human the center of that, because we only have the human perspective.
there are categories of understanding.
faculties: sensibility and understanding.
sensibility is our passive faculty, how we think of it. something out there, we have a sensation. you can talk about appearances and your experience of things. that’s passive.
forms of intuition. space, and time.
understanding is our active faculty which takes our sensations and intuitions and forms concepts and does stuff with them. our conscious activity.
understanding and category.
Kant is interested in metaphysical truths that you can know apart from experience.
For Kant, you cannot form a proposition that does not fall into one of the categories: quantity, quality, relation, modality.
What phenomenologists would call the “structures of consciousness.” – this is psychology.
Andy Davis called it “transcendental psychology”, psychology from the first-person point of few.
Kant & Plato & Aristotle:
Most philosophers after Kant will say is what Plato & Aristotle were getting at is something like Kant was getting out but Kant inverted it and made it internal.
Plato A K & medievals: depending on how much I want to limit the scope. it may not be worth including Plato & Kant, because the language of classification might be called into question. it’s just different ways of talking about the same thing. “treeness” is in the category of forms, this particular tree is in the categories of things.
similarly Kant wasn’t coming with a classification system, rather he was talking about ways of doing things.
In Aristotle’s categories, he’s categorizing the ways of being, the ways something is, and this is almost exactly what Kant is doing, trying to get at the structures of experience. the skeleton of everything we experience.
Are ways of talking about things, classifications?
vs. is this really
…but someone might get fussy over the particulars, saying it’s not exactly a classification system.
Kant if classification requires class. of something: he’s not class’ing things or processes that objects in the world do, it’s …
Are concepts categories?
to Kant, his stuff underlies concepts. Concept is a technical term for Kant, something that we form with our understand. .
FOLLOW-UP the next morning:
Hey Dr. Hawley,
I want to correct my comment about categorization of “concepts” in Kant. I’m reading Kant and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy right now, and my claim that Kant was not categorizing concepts was 100% incorrect. In fact, Kant says, “[The idea of the totality of a priori knowledge] can furnish an exact classification of the concepts which compose that totality.” So yes, Kant was classifying concepts. He was categorizing concepts that are “pure” (i.e., that don’t refer to any sensation) and fundamental (i.e., not derivative of or composed by other concepts).
I sincerely apologize for the misdirection I gave when I said Kant’s categories were more basic than concepts (though they are a categorization of concepts that are, according to him, more basic than all other concepts). I think I got too excited and just wanted to talk about Kant, so I overshot by talking about the categories. Everything I said about sensibility, understanding, the forms of intuition, and the general goal of the Critique is accurate: I have actually read those parts of the work.
I’ll keep in mind the search for an example application of the categories as I read.
Best,
C.