What do you care about?
What philosophical question gets under your skin? Why does it get under your skin? What led you to the point where this question got under your skin? Or did it happen all at once? Do you think there's an answer to this question?
Comments (181)
"I pity you. You just don't get it at all. There isn't anything that I don't cherish." - Cloud.
The opposite of love and care is not hatred or disregard, but disinterest.
You know, I heard that many years ago and found it interesting but now I don't know if that statement makes any sense. Sure, one may argue that in society and human interactions, disinterest in many ways may be a more prevailing problem than hatred in the absence of love & care, but that's saying something else. The opposite of "disinterest" logically is "interest", which can just be positive or negative. And the opposite extreme of hatred is love. I find the suggestion to the contrary bizarre.
Hegel expands pretty good on Kant's notion of disinterest (which I'm alluding to), in his notions of the for itself, and the for us. I'm making a ridiculously absurd argument that in order to truly care about something, or see the beauty in it, it can't be about us. It can't be for anything specifically to do with us.
The disinterest is required to truly appreciate something for itself, and in its own light. Anything else is just "agreeableness", or useful.
I'm really just echoing Kant, because it seems right to me.
The mind-body problem is definitely one, but I can't say for sure whether it gets under my skin.
What sometimes gets under my skin is not a particular philosophical question, but the misuse of philosophical questions. For example, when the problem of demarcation in the philosophy of science is used as a means to get away with pseudo-science, fake news, mysticism, or other shady businesses that thrive on a mistrust of the intellect.
How reliable are my experiences, and if I have reason to doubt the veracity of my closest experiences (like the sense of free will) do I have even more reason to doubt that which is not as close-to-home, like scientific or moral or theological knowledge.
The claims of philosophy of language, which I think needs a complete revamp.
Similarly - how do various issues become fashionable, lgbtq rights/racial relations/ 99%/ war/ etc, even though the actual issue have been around for ages, they seem to come to prominence together with their own sets of new arguments which are repeated ad nausium. Then a few years later they seem to disappear once more. For example: I feel like leftys in Australia are less concerned with climate change that we were 5 years ago.
There are many things that influence our views which are not philosophical arguments. I get the feeling like philosophical arguments are often impotent.
I always come back to morality - what is the best way to think of morality.
Hear, hear.
Some things have to remain undisclosed. That's an aesthetic imperative in opposition to the will to know.
Without a doubt, what is the meaning of life.
I generally think now that philosophy doesn't have the tools to help people in life. My main philosophical interest now is sort of meta-philosophical, why people are so bad at reasoning, why they are generally intellectually dishonest, incapable of distinguishing fine-grained positions, convinced by bad arguments, drawn to implausible platitudes, etc. and why intelligence seems to be no help in guarding against any of these.
Topically, though, these days "the passions", or desire, or the emotions are a big focus of interest for me. It pretty much stems from my initial interest in ethics, itself an interest likely more due to personal history than anything.
But it's the sort of topic I've found to be self-reinforcing to study too. The more exposure I have to how people characterize the passions, the more I'm able to both understand others and myself, which is gratifying and not necessarily related to ethics.
I'm also interested in meta-philosophical questions -- where and when philosophy is proper, what counts as philosophy, what counts as good philosophy, and any sort of teleological considerations which we may attach to philosophy -- both descriptively and normatively. I think this is interesting because the reasons why people are drawn to philosophy are diverse and not necessarily the same as mine, one, and also because it gives a way of parsing the huge multifarious beast known as philosophy -- why one might reject a philosophical position or adopt it or expand it into other areas.
I suppose it's a natural sort of thing for someone whose just "into" philosophy to do after reading enough of it -- asking philosophical questions about what it is you've been putting your time into :D.
I second this. Pseudo-science, mysticism and anything New Age just turns me into:
Love and hate are exclusive of each other and disinterest is lack of both.
On the other hand, things that are divided in levels, like heat/cold, tall/short are questions of degree, defined in reference to thresholds. While, those that are inversely proportional to each other are defined by degree, like pride/humbleness. We define heat/cold in reference to our body tolerence, and pride/humbleness by the average threshold of the community. Warm weather for one person may be cool, and a person with a particular level of pride may be deemed proud in one culture and humble in another. But on a range of 1 to 10, you cannot have 5 pain and 2 pleasure at the same time from the same stimulus.
The ethical realtionship between belief, logic and evidence; which is to say the ethical relationship between both faith and reason, and reason and the empirical.
In other words given what we find we can believe; what ought to be the nature of our commitments (if any) regarding what we should or at least should try to believe?
True, but he got to talk to Lloyd. It was worth it.
Why bother, both with philosophy and life in general?
With philosophy, I do not think that there is any headway to be made. Outside of specific arguments and the occasional viewpoint being shown to be indefensible, and formal logic, it is highly questionable whether philosophy has made any progress at all. Every single development or new way of looking at things just opens up another can of worms of arguments, counter-arguments, and further developments and new ways of looking at things. At this point, philosophy is more like a game. There is no established criteria to determine whether we are right or wrong in any topic, so we just kind of throw arguments at one another. We can't actually take action regarding most of our arguments in the real world because they lack the epistemic weight in the sphere of public opinion. This, of course, assumes we could ever get over the psychological barriers and hurdles in ourselves and others. As such, there seems to be an absurdity to it all.
Life in general seems absurd. But I think that point has been discussed and everyone knows that song and dance.
Within philosophy proper:
1. I third the notion about psuedoscience and mysticism. It is rather annoying. As an extension to that:
2. Most of the time skepticism is brought up. It is appropriate in certain conversations, but it is annoying when people use it as a conversation stopper, especially when the arguments are no longer favoring them.
3. Compatibilism within free will and moral responsibility. I openly admit that my response is probably not as rational and justified on it, but I just do not like it.
Was? :-O
Should I start calling you Tony?
It's because we love ourselves so much.
Kind of both, or not really different. We know what things mean and imply for us. What things are good, and what things are wicked, and it is both in a sense of hating that we're not ideal in some sense, and loving ourselves so much that we're super protective of letting ourselves be harmed by things we see as possibly damaging to the things we care about, and want to see ourselves as.
Have you started a thread on this before? Because I think you're probably right. I've seen in myself and plenty of others, not just in online forums, but in general across the board.
Is it that we're too dumb, or that we're motivated by something other than being good philosophers? I can't recall which radio program it was, maybe Science Friday on NPR, but there was a show claiming that maybe reason isn't about finding the truth, but rather winning arguments.
If so, then humans are more interested in sophistry.
All of my engagements with philosophy are oriented towards these kinds of questions, even if they lead me very far from them. They stem from my early interest in history and politics, and subsequently looking for the philosophical basis that underlie them.
I don't think they can be answered definitively - in principle - but there are definitely answers which are better than others.
Humans are more interested in stories than either philosophy or debating.
And it doesn't seem practice or intelligence within the scope of what's normal for a human helps. Philosophers seem to become more closely acquainted with a body of literature, and get better heuristics for sorting through certain kinds of arguments. But they don't seem to become good reasoners. A lot of the most apparently profound suggestions people have made are just stupid.
How many philosophers have an uncritical naive realist view of perception coupled with an epistemology that makes it impossible to defend? How many believe in some quantifiable notion of utility? How many believe some version of 'we can't get outside of our conceptual schemes to check them against the world?' These I claim are all stupid things to think, but the finest minds think them.
I agree these are good questions, but IMO philosophy has nothing to say about them and generally serves as a propaganda arm for whatever the reigning political dogma is. People in philosophy just end up believing whatever lay people people, and for the same reasons. So it seems the discipline itself teaches nobody anything on the subject.
Everyone's the smartest one on the planet too. Unfortunately though, it's hard to see anything with our heads in the clouds.
I feel like saying that I've 'learned immeasurably' from any work of philosophy is serious hyperbole.
The political just happens to be the focus imaginarius of all of it, as it were.
That's certainly true.
"With respect to these questions in particular, among the lessons I've learned are precisely that both politics and democracy and incredibly misunderstood notions, not simply among 'lay people', but even - and perhaps especially - by those who count themselves as mainstream political theorists."
Or rather I think it's a feature of society for the political theorists to be particularly targeted to not know what democracy is.
http://highexistence.com/wonder-terror-propaganda-modern-governments-misuse-media-manipulate-bewildered-herd/
That looks about correct to me...
What that implies is that the world is equivalent to our conceptual schemes, which would seem to mean that science can't work.
But entire traditions are built around not recognizing this obvious fact. As someone who was in the thrall of the position before, seeing how stupid it is now, I can't really articulate why it was convincing to me. My only explanation is that people sort of hear platitudes and are convinced by them.
Maybe part of the problem was that Kant promoted fixed, fundamental categories of thought in response to Hume's radical empiricism instead of a more fluid model. Because it's quite clear that human categories of thought change quite a bit over time. Including our concepts of time and space.
Some of the neo-Kantians, as I understand it, introduced a kind of historicism into the transcendental machinery and allowed for their development. But unless one posits an infallible logic as to how this development occurs, which amounts to positing a higher-order faculty of faculties, the problems repeat, and in order to truly solve them one needs to abandon the Kantian presuppositions. It is an interesting question why anyone was ever convinced by Kant, or any other such philosopher who makes similar such claims. It could be that the notion of a set of 'rules' by which everything works, and into which everything must fit, is inherently attractive to the ordering mind, and the equation of these rules with the operation of the mind itself, to ensure a closed circle of inquiry, is the logical end-game of any totalizing project of thought. But whatever it may be, it looks like a symptom of people just not being very good at thinking. Kantianism 'solves' a number of arcane and pointless puzzles while making ordinary existence utterly inexplicable.
What is interesting, then, is to go back to those little sentences philosophers write and ask, 'really?' Anyone who asks 'really?' to the Kantian dictum that we can't get outside our faculties I think won't return with a positive answer.
Really? And what could it mean for us to "get outside our faculties"? I think it's far more likely that you are just confused about Kant, than that Kant was "simply stupid" and "not a very good thinker".
It could mean, for example, learning something you didn't know before. We constantly acclimate to new ways of thinking due to outside influences shaping our thoughts.
Things learned remain 'within our faculties, though, don't they? As far as I am aware, Kant never denies that there are "outside influences shaping our thoughts".
I can't see how the fact that we must think our faculties are affected by influences outside them, entails that we "get outside our faculties" in in order to compare them, as it were, side by side with the outside influences, and to be able to see precisely how the former is influenced by the latter. This would entail that we could get entirely outside our faculties which would seem to mean that we would be left with no faculties at all and yet be able to compare things, which seems an unthinkable contradiction.
This is why the outside influences are transcendental.We do know the in itself as the for us, and we have very good reason to believe that this is a real knowing and not illusory. Hegel 'corrects' Kant by pointing out that the in itself is only in itself for us. It is nothing in itself for itself, or if it is something in itself for itself we could never know it.
To get outside of your faculties doesn't mean to be left with none; it means to have changed. And my claim is that this is perfectly commonplace.
This is a form of transcendence; an immanent transcendence, where we constantly become what we were not (and hopefully more than we were) previously.
There's nothing 'immanent' about it. There's no super-facultiy 'inside of which' it takes place. Anyway, this is getting off topic.
Quoting John
I think Kant can be credited with creating a ground zero for epistemology. Ultimately we can't know the noumenal in any direct fashion, we can merely suppose. But then for pragmatism, that's fine. We can build up quite reasonably from that.
So Kant leaves us in the position where our only certainty is of some change or development in our state of conception. And then we can either attribute this change to "the world", or the alternative would be strict solipsistic idealism. And that doesn't seem a hard choice given that believing in the world results in a greater predictable regularity of our state of conception. It minimises the change, the confusing flux, that we experience (as in for example the contrast between dreaming and being awake).
So we get down to ground zero - in the end, all our impressions of a world could be a big dream. Yet the way to minimise the flux or uncertainty of our impressions is to believe in the fact that there is the noumenal out there acting as a some external set of constraints.
We can't transcend our capacities or faculties to sneak a direct peek. But it is completely reasonable to think that if we have worked to minimise the flux of our impressions in any way possible - such as principally by believing in "a world" - then by definition, that puts us in the best position to notice further "facts" about the world. With our created backdrop of stability, we are now in a position also to recognise what is a surprise or some new change "out there".
I wouldn't go overboard defending Kant (as my position is essentially Peircean here), but it might rather flip perspective on his great "failure" over non-euclidean geometry. Could we have imagined bendy space without having already fixed an idea of flat space? It took the Newtonian certainty about the one to fully sensitise us to the other as a now measureable "objective" surprise.
All change (at least what we can be aware of) occurs within our experience, doesn't it? To anticipate an objection, I am including all future change which is not within present experience but will be within experience taken as a whole, as well as change that we imagine must be going on that we are not experiencing, or cannot, due to physical constraints, experience.
We could in principle experience such changes, and we do in a way, by proxy, experience them by thinking about them. But all of this whether direct present experience, direct future experience or thought about possible experience, remains within the ambit of experience doesn't it? That's what I mean by immanent. What is transcendental is what the in itself is for itself; which may indeed be nothing at all, and certainly cannot be anything for us beyond a formal category. In any case it is the transcendental in principle, at least.
No.
Great...whatever. This is where it always seem to end up with you.
OK, I am not denying that we must think there is change outside of our experience, but it seems to remain the case that all the change we are aware of, or able to think about, remains within the sphere of our (possible, at least) experience. And to the extent that such change is only actual to us insofar as we directly experience it or experience thinking about, it remains within our actual experience also.
We may think there is even change outside of our possible experience, but by definition any such change would be completely unknowable to us; and it is arguable that the idea of something completely unknowable to us is not even coherent.
That is what I come up with when I ask, "Really?". (Presuming of course that you were referring to this sentence: "All change (at least what we can be aware of) occurs within our experience, doesn't it?").
If you were referring to this sentence: Quoting John
then the answer is "Affirmative".
Wouldn't' there be all sorts of things going on beyond our light cone that are completely unknowable to us? But astronomers are confident the universe is quite a bit larger than what we can see.
We don't even need to go that far. There are things going on in planets in the Andromeda galaxy that we will never know about.
Yes, but they are not unknowable in principle. It is not logically impossible (i.e. involves no contradiction) that we could somehow get there, and what we would know if we did get there could only be known within the limitations of our faculties.
And yet you haven't explained at all why it once did, and now doesn't.
I guess I do hold out hope that these things are a matter of giving good or bad answers to genuine questions that reason can help work out. So it's not that the imaginative play has bad taste in what it imagines, so much as I think that Kant et al. are literally reasoning badly, in the most ordinary way.
If we are talking about the reach of our viewpoint, what exactly are we talking about?
Kant treats it like we are asking about how knowledge is possible, but I think the question is pretty clearly about knowledge which is actual. Only in the context of the actual does "knowledge outside viewpoint" work, where it refers to stuff which may be known by is not actually present to a viewpoint. The limit of are viewpoint can only be actual because we are talking about a state of ourselves. We are making about where we end, not what we might know. Actual knowledge (and a viewpoint) is never a possibility.
The way Kant argues is sort of boxing at shadows of this own creation. Instead of calling out the nonsense of viewpointless knowledge in the first instance, he treats it like a coherent possibility to debunk. Kant's move against "viewpointless knowledge" was to overturn notion of the hidden "unknowable" realm which could affect ourselves. His split phenomena and noumenon is used to show this. If something we to affect our experience, it must be empirical, must be of our viewpoint and knowable to us. There no empirical force of another realm that's beyond the possibility of knowledge.
Only Kant actually sort of believes what he's attacking. His argument begins not with viewpoint, where the contraction is obvious (how could something be known without someone who knows?), but with the absence of viewpoint. Instead of talking about people who exist or do not exist with knowledge, his inquiry goes straight to where there are no viewpoints at all, to abstractions of possibility and logic, which he then treats like the rules which define how knowledge works.
The outcome is a philosophy which can't talk about knowledge as it exists. Knowledge is understood as a question of what abstracted rules make possible, rather than a feature of a living and existing viewpoint. It means the conception of things outside a viewpoint is lost. Anytime someone tries to talk about actual knowledge, and that there is more than a present viewpoint, the Kantian's will object it doesn't make sense and we must really be talking about the possibility of knowledge. Kant is ignorant of the existence (or actuality) of viewpoints and what that means.
The "reach of a viewpoint" is what it is possible to conceive from within the viewpoint. That is analogous to any actual situation where what it is possible to see from your viewpoint consists precisely in everything you are able to see.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
It seems to me it is in thinking that Kant is concerned with pointlessly debunking the idea of "viewpointless" knowledge that you are misunderstanding what he is about. If he is "shadowboxing" with anything, it is what he refers to as the "transcendental illusion", which is the idea that there is an actuality that exists "out there" like an all-encompassing 'image' that mirrors every possible viewpoint, that somehow "looks like" the world we see. Of course we must think there is a viewpointless actuality, but we cannot really imagine what it is like, because all imagining is from some viewpoint. Kant points out that noumenal actuality cannot be "like anything", because it is viewpointless, and everything we know is viewpointful.
In fact your admission that the idea of viewpointless knowledge is "nonsense" agrees completely with the point that we cannot "get outside" conceptual schemas altogether. I think there is some equivocating going on in this thread between that obviously correct idea and the false idea that we cannot (in principle at least) "get outside" any particular conceptual schema.
I think it is laughable how you blithely talk of what Kant is "ignorant" of. I doubt you have ever read his works much, and if you have, you certainly don't seem to have understood the genuine difficulty of the issues he is attempting to deal with..
You haven't explicated any authentic account of, or argument for, the ideas that you want to facilely denigrate. You rail against "intellectual dishonesty" and yet you don't want to, in good faith and charitability, identify your opponent's actual arguments and tackle them on their own terms. You should be able to give an account of Kant's actual key arguments, which should clearly reveal if and where you have misunderstood them, and if it turns out you have not misunderstood them then you should be able to mount a convincing counter-argument.
Otherwise you are just pointlessly mouthing off in accusing Kant of being "stupid".
But that's the problem with his approach. To the reach of a viewpoint, possibility is irrelevant. My viewpoint is what I do conceive, not what I might.
In terms of possibility, the argument is false. At any given point, a person might know anything. There is no instance of knowledge which is necessary to people or beyond their capacity. If I, for example, know my birthday and do not know your birthday, it is not the only possible outcome with respect to my present viewpoint. I could have know the reverse. I might have known both. I might of known neither. I just didn't.
The limits of my viewpoint don't define what I might know, not even in reference to itself. It's not the limit or what I'm able to know or see, but rather the limit of what I do know and see.
No, we don't. Not at all. We can begin by being exact and honest: a viewpointless actuality is impossible. Any actuality is a state of existence, a finite moment, a state with beginning and end. Any instance of actuality must be a viewpoint (including all instances of knowledge), whether it be of the empirical or noumenal.
To know means to be a viewpoint.
Noumenal knowledge is, therefore, impossible. Not just to us (as Kant claims), but anyone. Since any instance of knowledge amounts to a viewpoint, there cannot be knowledge which is beyond them, be they of ants, humans, gods or anything else.
Noumenal actuality is rendered incoherent because there cannot be knowledge (of any kind) without a viewpoint-- there is literally nothing to know, and so, in failing to know the noumenal and being unable to know it, a viewpoint isn't missing knowledge (or the capacity for knowledge) at all.
Here I disagree again. Your (current) viewpoint is what you (currently) conceive, and the reach of your viewpoint is what can be conceived within it.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
The limits of your viewpoint tell you what you can know (from within that particular viewpoint) but do not tell you what, in particular, you will know . It defines the kind of knowledge you can possess, not what actual knowledge of the appropriate kind you will possess.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
So, you want to claim that there can be no actuality where there is no view; no actuality, in other words, which is not currently being witnessed?
I can understand why you say an actuality must be an existence, and why it must be " a finite moment" or "a state with a beginning and end". I think you are equivocating actuality with an actuality. An actuality will begin and end, for sure. but actuality never ends. When I say 'viewpointless actuality', I am not speaking about an actuality, but about actuality itself.
So, in answer to my own question above; it might be said that there can be no particular actuality which is not currently being witnessed. But this amounts to saying that there is no tree there when no one is witnessing it. And this is where it becomes tricky, because realists want to say there is a tree there; but you obviously don't count yourself as a realist. I, on the other hand, say that in one sense (the empirical) there is a tree there, even when it is not being witnessed; but I would also that say this is actually a purely formal sense. In the other sense (the noumenal) there is no unwitnessed tree there, but there is actuality (not an actuality, mind) which will reliably appear as a tree should a witness appear.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
Of course noumenal knowledge is impossible, and I believe Kant would say that it is impossible for any finite percipient. He would say that this is something we can know a priori simply because of what it means to be a finite percipient.
The notion of an empirical actuality includes the idea that it must be knowable from viewpoints. The notion of noumenal actuality includes the idea that it is unknowable from any viewpoint. Kant is actually saying something quite similar to Spinoza, because the latter understands that God (infinite substance=noumenal actuality) is knowable only in the modes that express his attributes. Beyond that there is literally nothing to know.
In part because I want to know if the universe is, thermodynamically speaking, a zero-sum-game; but also because I wonder how much other sentient life is out there.
These questions aren't strictly philosophical, but since empirically finding answers to them is likely pretty far off, exploring the possibilities and their ramifications can only be done in thought and speculation.
Of late, one question which keeps recurring to me is this:
Assuming that the universe is filled with life, and that the technology required for long distance travel is sufficiently possible, and that distant civilizations could detect and travel to one-another, what is it about Earth and human civilization that would make us worth contacting?
Nothing... At least not yet...
Right now we're like a herd of wildebeests who move chaotically according to our irrational instincts and the changing slope of the terrain our movement tramples and destroys (beware cliffs). We cannot even manage to not fuck up a self-regulating planetary bio-sphere given our first taste of real technological power.
Technologically speaking, what could we offer to an alien race capable of inter-stellar travel? Maybe they don't know how to split atoms (unlikely I reckon) but why would they even need to if they could close the star gap without it? Nuclear technology is great for blowing shit up and irradiating it, and middle of the road when it comes to generating energy through mechanical turbines and radioactive steam, so it's worthless either way. Gravity is beyond us and our best method of getting into space is an economic disaster. Our computers are interesting, but data management is also not going to be an issue for anything capable of dealing with the complexities of inter-stellar travel. So what can we offer?
The more I think about it, the more I become convinced humans are currently about as interesting as a fly-ridden wildebeest. In the same way that the present day is many magnitudes more interesting than what was happening 1000 years ago, I regret having no access to the shit might be going on 1000 years from now. The more I wonder about the interesting possibilities of what is to come, the more I resent having no access to it, which gets under my skin.
Relax. It is quite empowering using what agitates you right back and against it: clearly you are conscious of the damage people are doing to the world, why not do something about it? Seriously, do it.
Do something about it !?
Like what, cryogenically freeze myself for millennia until the triviality of modern civilization has melted away? Only problem there is that humans 1k+ years from now would have no reason to wake me up in the same way that advanced aliens have no reason to presently contact us...
"Hey Bill! We got another popsicle douche on the docket. This one's old; whaddya think?"
"What year is it from?".
"2017...".
"Oh... The director says no more reanimating anyone from that early in the 21st, apparently they've already got enough mentally retarded ideologues to act in the new historical satire they're producing.".
"Oh...".
----------------------------
What bothers me isn't that the world is facing trivial problems, it's that what comes afterward is sure to be much more interesting and current climates are a source of delay. My contribution is to spread awareness of problems and possible solutions as I see them, and that's appropriate for my station, but no amount of hard work or dedication will get me to the other side of them. The only way there is through time.
Kant does not, so far as I can tell, have arguments for the position that we can't get outside of our faculties. To be sure that's something he says many times. That might be because of my unfamiliarity with, or lack of understanding of, the text. But I've read CPR, so if I'm too stupid even to find that there are arguments, I don't know what reading again would help me to do.
Kant's style is generally one of outlining and repetition – he's more like a world-builder than an arguer. He does provide a few arguments, such as the refutation of idealism, and some truncated syllogisms about why representations of things cannot be things in themselves. But the broad picture seems to be one of making a big frame, repeating it, and letting the reader acclimate themselves,.
Can't you see how this is the problem? Actuality is not actual. It never exists. Being infinite, it is a logical expression rather than a state of the world.
I'm not equivocating an actuality with actuality. My point is Kant does so at the base of his philosophy. Instead of talking about viewpoints and knowledge in terms of themselves, he takes an abstracted view , the "veiwpointlessness" of logic and actuality and treats them like an actual state-- producing this notion of the actual infinite viewpoint finite beings cannot access.
It is not only the actual, finite or empirical which must be known form a viewpoint. By the definition of knowledge (someone who knows something), the infinite must be known from a viewpoint too. This is the difference here between Kant and Spinoza.
Spinoza understands that God, actuality or Substance, is not actual. He knows it is infinite. It's not some "undefined mystery" at all. The question of "what does is mean to be infinite?" is recognised as incoherent because the infinite cannot be any "thing" at all-- it's simply not an actual state to be known. It never "bes" anything at all. The "mystery" Kant claims cannot be defined.
On the contrary, I do count myself as a realist. Perhaps more strongly than just about anyone else. The problem with opposition to realism, and Kant's philosophy, is it doesn't recognise the logical status of the actual. Forms (i.e. logical expression of actual states) are not only present to my mind. They are an expression of the-thing-itself. For any actual, it's significance in logic is its own.
Our viewpoint is not need to logically define the form of any object. By the-thing-itself, any actual state is it's own viewpoint. Not in the crass sense of someone's mind or experience (which is actually a different viewpoint altogether), but by the logic of the-thing-itself.
A state being actual no longer depends on a different viewpoint. Idealism and correlationism are not taken out by empirical proof, but by the logic of the thing-itself. Since any state is defined in-itself, is a finite viewpoint, it does not rely on any other for definition.
To the existence of any state, witnesses become irrelevant. In any case, it only takes the state itself. For the idealist or correlationist to say, "But it can't be without us (a different viewpoint), there to define its presence" is just blatantly false. They are confusing our viewpoint (in the sense of a finite state) with any other viewpoint. Selfhood means no state needs any other to be defined. Any state expresses its form without reference to any other viewpoint.
Thus, existing stars, planets tree, rocks, mountains, atoms, electrons, etc. without anyone experiencing the form.
If the actuality is "appearing as," it is a finite state. It is literally to argue the noumenal takes on an empire form (a tree) when witnessed. That's a contradiction. The noumenal can make no such appearance.
So Kant was saying that the God's eye view, or Nagel's view from nowhere can't be had by us, because we have to conceive of the world someway, and that someway cannot mirror the world as it is, because the world is not from any sort of conception or view.
Thus, the noumena.
This is simply wrong. Of course the infinite must be known, insofar as it can be known, from a viewpoint. I already said there is no viewpointless knowledge, and Kant says just the same; so your objections are based on misunderstanding.
What you are saying amounts, in Spinozistic terms, to saying that there can be no substance, but only modes. If you think that your are not a realist but a phenomenalist.
I'm not going to waste my time arguing against your empty assertions.
You're missing the point.
The problem is Kant suggesting there is something about the infinite which cannot be known. There is no "insofar" to speak of. The infinite is perfectly knowable in viewpoint.
His "mystery" is based on assigning the infinite something, actuality, it doesn't have.
No... it means Substance is not a mode. When a mode appears, it is not an appearance of Substance. If it were, it would mean Substance had sudden come into being, had been subject to change, rendering it finite.
I always found the idea that God's view is from nowhere problematic. God's view, if God has a view at all, would be from everywhere, not from nowhere. So Gods' view is from nowhere in particular, but not from nowhere, per se.
Likewise with the world; the world, understood as a whole, is from every point of view and conception, not from no point of view or conception.
If the infinite is perfectly knowable then it is all on its own, since nothing else is. If you think the infinite is perfectly knowable, then tell me exactly what you know about it, and how you know your knowledge of it is "perfect".
Right, I think Nagel's argument was that "nowhere" meant a view abstracted from human perception of colors, sounds, smells, etc.
Um... it's the infinite.
We know the knowledge is perfect because, if it were anything else, it would be a contradiction.
To suggest the infinite might be more or something other would mean defining it by finite terms. We would have to claim there was content to the noumenal, such there was someway it appeared other than "the infinite."
But would it also be abstracted from space. time, mass, shape, number, relation and so on? If it were to be abstracted from all categories of judgement whatsoever, it is hard to see how it could be counted as a view at all. If there is a God, and if He has a view, then it would seem that it must consist in the sum total of the views of all His creatures. This is the case also because his creatures must be modes of Himself, if it to be thought that they are not separate from Him, but have their existence "in Him".
If God is wholly transcendent (as opposed to being both immanent and transcendent) meaning wholly separate form His creation, and not 'inhabiting' it at all, then He could not know anything about it
That's not knowledge at all, it's merely a tautology.
The reason the view from nowhere is not abstracted from those things is because they're not subject to perceptual relativity or creature dependance, far as we can tell. They have an objective quality to them.
Thus, some people are hopeful that communication with aliens is possible, should we ever make contact, because they will have come to realize the same objective features of the world. In Sagan's Contact book (and the movie based on it), the detection of an alien signal is based on the prime number sequence from 2 to 101. And the main character expresses the view that math is the universal language.
All instances of knowledge rely on a tautology of self-defintion. I'll reverse the question to show you what I mean.
How do you know, for example, that the noumenal isn't present in front of our eyes? How it is that you know noumenal is not empirical? How do you (and Kant) know you have perfect knowledge of the noumenal such that you can be sure it isn't present empirically?
This sounds close to Berkeley's idealism. What I gather from your interpretation of Kant is that the following philosophical positions are wrong: Materialism, essentialism and realism qua universals.
If essentialism or real universals were the case, then we would have a way of matching our conceptions with the way the world is. If materialism were the case, then there would be a way to world was, independent of how we or any creature thinks about it or perceives it.
Come now, life is but a damp squib without a bit of action and surely cryogenics is merely an excuse you are using to not do something since it is clearly ridiculous. I'm not saying change the world; start small and influence the next generation and there are a multitude of ways anyone can do this. I get your pain, the world seems to be repeating itself and the repetition is pure idiocy. 99% of humanity is suffering incredibly and then you have a strange minority getting plastic surgery and mindless morons following the herd and you think that there is simply no hope. How do you get those morons to wake up? Using that fire within brings me joy because I HATE injustice, and I mean with a passion so fighting the good fight has brought some amazing changes in my community but also within me too.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
(Y) But it depends on how far your influence can reach and thus the arrow of time can easily be shortened. Never underestimate the power you have as a good and intelligent man with a strong voice. There have been many and in that passion have influenced huge changes, even if they come from very humble backgrounds. Don't get disillusioned.
I know I already mentioned it, kinda, but I think Kant's position makes perfect sense as a response to British Empiricism and Newtonian physics taken together. I don't think his reasoning is simply bad. I think it's solid reasoning, for a reason set down among the limited concepts and problems of a limited tradition.
Maybe that's another avenue to go down. If we, as a species, are bad at philosophy, that's in part because we have to work within a tradition. Even if we break with that tradition, we have to, at least in part, define ourselves in opposition to it.
(also worth nothing that Kant def thought we could get outside our faculties, that they could be severely disrupted, and that that would afford us novel and powerful insights and experience. But that's Critique of Judgment stuff, so it doesn't get as much attention. I think Kant, in works like CPR, simply wasn't tackling the things the exceed his philosophy, because his philosophy wasn't meant to deal with them, because it was meant simply to deal with newtonian objects. (& I personally think the noumena as limiting concept is still really powerful and good and probably right. It's still big, today, of course- it just morphed into 'Otherness' and got some new soil)
I don't think it is like Berkeley's idealism. Perhaps you could explain why you do.
I think materialism is wrong because materiality is applicable only to a restricted range of phenomena, not to substance itself (although we do talk about 'material substances' but that is a different sense). Some phenomena are mental for example. However I don't believe this implies substance dualism. I find Spinoza's picture the most convincing of the substance ontologies that I have come across (which is not say that I am convinced of the veracity of the notion of substance beyond its logical uses).
So, on Spinoza's view substance has infinite attributes (which he probably means in terms of both quantity and quality). Two of those attributes are thought and extension. The mode of extension is materiality. From this it certainly does not follow that substance is material; it has infinite attributes, remember. For the same reasons it obviously does not follow that substance is mental, either.
I don't see how essentialism or real universals being the case would enable us to match our experience directly with anything beyond it. Perhaps you could explain how that would work. How could we know that essentialism or real universal "are the case", for a start. I'm not sure what that could even mean.
There is a lot of apparent ambiguity in Kant. Whether that is due to the difficulty of the issues he is trying to address, or to his limitations as a writer; or to something else, I think that cultural context would be low down on the list of possible candidates.
There is a whole industry of Kant interpretation and much disagreement among scholars as to just what he wanted to say about the phenomenal/noumenal distinction. I have noticed that people who want to promote idealism for reasons to do with their own cultural or "spiritual" agendas frequently quote Kant as though what he meant is unambiguously in accordance with what they want him to have meant.
I do note that in your response to Marchesk you dropped the word "cultural" though.
In any case, I don't think I'm making that controversial a point. Kant's philosophy makes much more sense in the milieu of Newtonian physics, British empiricism & (I forgot to add) the (post-)cartesian rationalism to which that empricism responded (and with which it remained engaged ( Locke vs the 'innatists' etc) )
Wittgenstein makes much more sense if you're conversant with logical positivism. Heidegger makes more sense if you're versed in Husserlian phenomenology (which in turn makes more sense if you're versed in the psychologism debates of the time.)
Why are you skeptical of the importance of intellectual context?
Spinoza defended a form of neutral monism? Interesting.
Quoting John
Well, I suppose this all goes back to Plato and his realization that you need the forms for knowledge to make sense of the flux of the world. Empiricism focused on the flux, while Kant recast the forms as categories of thought.
It would seem that both trap us in a world of human perceptions and thoughts. And yet the world continues to surprise us.
I don't have a good answer for this right now. Maybe because I'm bad at philosophy. All of this seems to be elaboration on Man being the measure. Which definitely has it's selling points. But there are three things that always bothered me about it:
1. We might not be alone in the universe.
2. The world is much bigger and older than we are.
3. It sounds like the reverse of the Copernican revolution, which removed us from center of the universe. Everything in science has dethroned humans as being central to creation, and yet many philosophers would put us back at the center when it comes to knowledge.
But I don't think I actually believe it. Kant's comments, for example, on Locke and Berkeley seem to be outright misinformed – he either did not know, or was lying about, what Berkeley actually thought, and his case that he is doing something Locke has not with his notion of the thing-in-itself as opposed to Lockean substance is simply not convincing. The idea that the project of critiquing reason to find its limitations, and the panic over 'destroying metaphysics' in the process, etc. were things that Locke already accomplished, so far as I can tell. Maybe the German readership just wasn't familiar with these British developments? Locke's insistence that all things come form experience mirrors Kant's that all things begin in experience: and Locke's insistence on the shape of the mind forming the sorts of concepts one is capable of acquiring mirror Kant's discussion of the forms of intuition and thought. The thing-in-itself is then simply the Lockean 'I know not which,' which, well.
So my question is: if Kant seems on the face of it to be so ignorant of his own tradition, to which he is directly responding, why am I then to trust him to know what he's doing down the line? It may be of some use to treat such philosophers as if they were better reasoners than they actually were, to make the tradition less embarrassing. But whether they actually were good reasoners is another matter.
--
One way of thinking about what I'm saying is that your reading of philosophy may be more fruitful if you do not approach a text with the presupposition that its author is a genius, as we're generally taught.
"I think ... the Kantian system is a machine infernale of enormous dimensions and extremely intricate internal structure of innumerable elaborate gears, flywheels, sprockets, bell, and whistles. The system operates and gains plausibility by inviting the unwary in and exhibiting a truly fascinating internal structure so that one loses perspective on the project as a whole. To change the metaphor, if one tries to shake hands with the Kantian, one can easily find one has lost an arm. In my opinion one needs to see Kantianism at virtually infinite distance ... I also think that seeing it clearly in this way will make it difficult to find it plausible, although obviously not everyone will agree with me about this."
Do you think any philosophers you've read are geniuses, or at least, good at philosophy?
One of the problems is I think that you get the sense from writers like Kant that they're convinced they're smart – Kant thought he had solved all the problems of metaphysics in one book! If, contra this, Kant wasn't that smart, because people generally are bad at philosophy, this revises the way we think about doing philosophy, so that it can be done with a little patience and rigor instead. The questions are all real, just hard – too hard, maybe, but I think we can tell that certain arguments are bad.
I'm curious about your critique of Wittgenstein's main contention that language is the chief cause of philosophical problems. I take it you don't agree with this at all. That most long standing philosophical puzzles exist not because language has fooled us, but because they are genuine puzzles.
What is the error that led Wittgenstein to think this?
When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. He had a narrow philosophical upbringing, and those he learned from dealt with linguistic problems. He wasn't satisfied unless he had a tool to solve every problem, and the only tools he had were linguistic ones. Ergo, every problem must be a linguistic one (for if it weren't, I wouldn't be able to [dis]solve it).
The linguistic view of philosophy is stupid. Questions about the ocean are not questions about the word 'ocean' – why anyone would think this about knowledge, truth, and so on is something we should diagnose as a historical error in reasoning, not as a philosophical position we take seriously.
Here's why he did it in his own words:
"What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use."
Wittgenstein sort of culminates an analytical approach which removes the world. Everything is turned into a (language) game, where no philosophical problems bear upon the world or logic.
He's, of course, superficially correct: if anyone is fooled, it's in their language. They lacked the right way of speaking to avoid the problem. If only they had thought a different way, they wouldn't be haunted by a conundrum.
It just doesn't get to the substance of any philosophical problem. Yes, one can get themselves out of any problem by speaking the right language, but it's really just ignoring it. One hasn't really answered the question of what's right, wrong, coherent or incoherent, etc. They've just spoken a language in which the problem doesn't register.
What I'm trying to convey is that, in my understanding, CPR is dealing very specifically with the cognition of objects (and their relations.) It's about what is required to experience an object as an object, and about how we're led astray if we try to treat, as objects, things that don't lend themselves to that kind of treatment (the cosmos as a totality etc.) It makes sense that he's focusing on the experience of objects (especially the visual experience of objects) because that's what everyone else was focused on. That was the thing to figure out. I don't disagree that there are echoes of Locke, but I think it is very clearly wrong to say that Kant was accidentally re-doing Locke for an audience who didn't know him.(Do you really think this?)
But there all sorts of cracks in the harmonious machinery of the faculties and Kant himself makes those cracks features of his thought in other works. I don't think Kant is right on everything, and I agree that the facticity of the faculties is a big problem, but I am definitely skeptical of the idea that Kant was basically dumb and that people only find his thought worthwhile because they're told he's a genius by cultural arbiters.
We're always least kind to those positions we once held tenaciously but have come recently to disavow. It's a solipsistic kernel in Kant you're objecting to, right?
I guess I don't think he was that innocent. Kant seemed to be engaged in a project of permanently entrenching certain prejudices (religious, scientific, or otherwise), and was apparently under the delusion that metaphysics would remain unchanged after the CPR (there is no humor in the CPR, so apparently he was not kidding – what possible psychological circumstances result in such an assertion?). I think that is ultimately what he was interested in: stopping time and inquiry at him, who would figure everything (in metaphysics) out. There is even a kind of mastery of time itself, by insisting that the mechanisms proposed literally cannot be subject to time, since time is subject to them. You can speculate about why I think philosophers have the impulse to do this – I don't have much new or kind to say about it.
Quoting csalisbury
I think solipsism is a consequence of transcendentalism, and Kant is far from alone in this. But I think transcendentalism comes from a desire to have the entire universe under control. That desire already might contain the kernel of solipsism. In Kant's case, the fear that the world was too big to know manifests in a desire to close off the world to a subspace of it, and say that this was really the only thing that we had ever been concerned with anyway (and its structure guarantees a kind of certainty within it). But then you still need German Protestantism to be true, so you leave some room outside for spooky stuff (stuff that rather than compounding uncertainty leads to even greater certainty, of salvation and so on).
The Stanford entry on neutral monism suggests that, rather, his was double-aspect monism, and that's how I understand it. (Stanford entry)
I am not sceptical of intellectual context, or cultural context. I reject the idea that cultural context is a bar to the ability to understanding Kant is all. Of course understanding the context of the ideas and philosophies that he is working within and against will obviously help to understand the dialectical development of his ideas, that goes without saying.
The specific idea of Kant's that has been discussed in this thread apropos the question of the 'view from nowhere' and which relates to the other thread that Marchesk started entitled 'Can Humans Get Outside Their Conceptual Schemas' is an idea about human experience that purports to be universal; that all perception is also necessarily conception. So the question, in itself, is a general one, and has nothing specifically to do with cultural context or even intellectual context.
This idea of Kant's is echoed by Hegel: "the Rational is the Real", and arguably, in various ways, by all the other philosophers you mentioned, even Wittgenstein: "the world is the totality of facts".
I don't understand why the world of human perception and thought should be thought of as a trap. It seems to me it can better be thought about as part (perhaps not the greatest part, if there are other beings in the universe with greater perceptual and conceptual capacities than the human) of the process of the universe becoming aware of itself. Without percipients nothing at all would appear or be known; the universe would be utterly 'blind', there would be no world as Heidegger emphasizes, which would be a 'condition' that could be thought to be as good as being nothing at all.
I think the idea is that rational percipients are the measure, because it is only via rational percipients that the universe appears and becomes known. If there are rational percipients with perceptual and conceptual faculties that are superior to ours, then the most rational and perceptive of all would be the measure.
Heidegger draws a nice distinction between the universe and the world; which is arguably along similar lines as Kant's distinction between the noumenal and the empirical. Heidegger says that without human be-ing (Dasein) there is no world. The idea of a world is the idea of an encompassing totality; kind of like an overarching horizon of perception.
I always thought there was an odd kind of irony in referring to Kant's "Copernican Revolution". We know we are not central to the vast universe; we occupy a vanishingly tiny corner. And yet if we are the only rational percipients in the Universe, then the whole vast story is being featured only in our tiny local cinema. Elsewhere there is nothing at all currently showing.
But I also think Kantian thought makes sense, given what it responds to.
In broad strokes, I think the story is something like this:
- Descartes, through radical doubt, opens the possibility of utter solipsism. But he avoids it by bringing in a benevolent God who guarantees a harmony between mind and world.
-Cartesian thought, initially radical, becomes the new standard. This or that 'rationalist' may disagree with this or that cartesian point, but they accept the broad framework. So: it calcifies and what was once radical, begins to become dogmatic.
- The British empiricists react against this, the pendulum swings, and they emphasize experience and impressions. However, in giving up the god-mind-world system, they re-open the possibility of radical doubt that Descartes tried to foreclose.
- The gap is filled this time w/ habit and custom. Anything we know about the physical world (as opposed to relations of ideas) is utterly contingent.
- Yet here's Newton with his iron-clad physical laws that seem absolute, to hold for any rational observer whatsoever. There's something distinctly mathematical about them. They seem universal and necessary (any rational natural scientist would have to agree with them)
- Kant
I don't claim this story is original, but I think it's compelling. If the context is ignored, then its easy to miss that the motivation for for such protracted treatment of the synthetic a priori is largely one of explaining agreement, and the focus, ironically, becomes the image of an isolated self producing its own experience.
I can't even pronounce those places, and of course looked them up, but I knew he'd traveled some, and didn't like to be tied down by much, kind of big on autonomy.
Carry on...
I remember we stalled at CoJ because of life and stuff, plus it was incredibly difficult. But I remember there was a tension between the CoJ and CPR, that you have already mentioned. I'd definitely like to explore that tension more.
Also, I picked up the CPR again maybe 6 months ago and found myself disagreeing with it along the way. But very much in a notional sense -- just getting a sense of disagreement. So one particular question that interests me is, "What is the best way to disagree with these arguments?" -- or, even, just outlining a rational disagreement.
All notional at the moment, and I'm reading other things, but Kant exegesis has been a long-standing question for myself.
I'd say that's why he's silly. The British Empiricists already explained (or described) agreement-- people experience, share an idea, observe the same thing, etc.
Kant's philosophy is driven by the denial of people, as if it were not enough for agreement to be defined by existing. He wants agreement to somehow to be defined by something other than ourselves, as if the world and our understanding were defined by this outside viewpoint or standard.
In this respect, he's really a follower of Descartes. Instead of treating our (contingent) experiences as trustworthy, he doubts them. Rather than accept agreement and awareness of as a function of our experiences, he asserts we needs some necessary force for the outside to avoid the problem of doubt. Kant is motivated to explain agreement because he doesn't think we can do it by ourselves in the first place.
Spinoza is sort of both.
He's dual aspect becasue he holds the attributes of thought and extension. His philosophy is also a a sort of neutral monism because Substance is an infinite expression, which is neither the attribute thought and extension, so both the mental and physical are of the same realm.
This is not Kant's idea at all. The transcendental ego is not understood by Kant to be an "isolated self". That is sheer nonsense.
My apologies then, I misunderstood it as representing your own interpretation. In any case, reading what has been said about Kant's ideas in this thread, I certainly agree with you about many people's pictures being way off.
“in any special doctrine of nature there can be only as much proper science as there is mathematics therein”
So basically, the only requirement is quantifiability. That's pretty damn controversial, and all victorian or whatever.
He argues that psychology isn't science, for instance, as in the only quantifiable aspect of the inner sense is time, which isn't enough.
Not exactly.
I do think Hume externalises it inappropriately. Like Kant, he sort doesn't recognise that (our use of) concept and pure logic is a knowledge of our experience. That, in effect, any instance a priori knowledge or relation of an idea is, also posteriori or matter of fact.
Hume has an important difference though: he doesn't treat logical necessity as a requirement for coherency. States of the world are contingent and that works with meaning. It doesn't create any sort of problem defining how the world works or how people might agree. Universals aren't needed to define truths of the world.
While Hume doesn't quite get that any instance of knowledge is experience, he does get that the world doesn't have to follow some particular rule to be coherent-- hence it might be or do anything, even if its entirely absurd to how we understand the world.
Though, as TGW has noted in the somewhat recently, Hume, with his all scepticism, quickly becomes uninteresting. While he might be right about the world being contingent, it's also true that whatever exists at a moment has a particular meaning or significance. So obsessed with saying what might happen, Hume sort of doesn't acknowledge what does.
I personally think Kant's good on the conceptual nature of perception, and the broader idea that the relationship of the mind and the world involves a complex process of mediation.
I think the tension between the problem of induction and the necessity which we see in the world with Newtonian physics is what's at issue more than a foundation, per se. He intended to derive Newtonian physics from the categories eventually, but I think it's the implication of Newtonian physics -- that we will know where the cannon ball will land, that the sun will rise tomorrow, and we know these things partly based upon a priori knowledge -- more than asking after foundations is what's the goal. (or, goal? Maybe focus is better -- Hume's critique of causation vs. the fact that Newtonian physics shows we have knowledge of causation as the tension)
I have access to the Opum Postumum, but my eyes kind of glazed over when I tried it, to be honest. :D I was kind of "Kanted out" at the time. I do want to read it some day though.
I think the very notion of tension or conflict is the silliness.
In the face of radical contingency and the patterns of causality, the automatic assumption is there is some sort of problem. Why? How come we automatically assume these are inconsistent with each other. Why can't the world just do something, express a particular meaning, fit a particular rule, for as long as it does? What if there is nothing that needs reconciling between Hume and Newton in the first place?
Hume is right: anything might happen. Newtown is right: the behaviour of many states reflect his rules. The conflict only occurs if one tries to make Newton's laws function in terms of logical necessity, as if everything and anything must always follow them and there was never any other possible outcome.
Discard that assumption (which is antiscientific, as it tries to say what they world does without reference to observing it), and there is simply no conflict between Hume and Newton.
Edit: Or maybe not. The word "tension" stuck out.
I like David Stove's idea of a neo-positivism, where the philosophical tradition collects historical examples of bad reasoning to become slowly sharper in the sorts of arguments it makes. Kant allows us to understand the badness of a certain kind of transcendental argument, and why the impulse behind it is mistaken.
I was addressing the following and its relationship to the defence of Kant:
My point being this defence of Kant only works if you are already bringing his prejudice. Kant's silliness (and the silliness of many other philosophers) is the assumption of a conflict between radical contingency and the presence of meaningful existing states.
With nothing to reconcile between the two, Kant's question and subsequent reasoning isn't valid or difficult. It's just a laborious process of trying to work a way out of an empty conundrum of his own creation.
Conjunction leading to an association leading to the idea of cause and effect only works if the conjunction is constant. What are the chances? (Meillassoux, who is kinda like 21st century Hume, tries to explain that probability doesn't obtain here, because of set theory. But his explication of how this works is...limp. IIRC, it's something like the rules of probability doesn't work when the possible outcomes are infinite. Like: since there are infinite possible outcomes, it's less strange that the outcomes that do happen aren't distributed as you'd expect? It's not a very good line of thought. )
We're contingently, factically (sp?) in this, but 'this' follows certain rules.
But the Humean doesn't say "I don't know" really, does he? He explains it forthwith. Constant conjunction, habit, custom.
It's not bullshit though, for Hume didn't say the sun wouldn't rise. He said it might not. Such a possibility is perfectly coherent with a world in which the sunrises every single day!
Hume never denies there can be a world which always follows the same rule. If that's what the world does, then that's what happens. Just because anything and everything else is possible, it doesn't mean it happens.
Under Hume, the definition of what the world does moves from the idea (e.g. the rule which constrains possible to form what happens), to the world itself. The sun can always rise tomorrow, but it takes the existence of that state every morning, not a rule. Rules become expression of existing states (i.e. the behaviour of states), rather than constraints which limit what states could be-- even as the sun rises every morning, any other state was possible. Actuality doesn't undo the truth of possibility.
Conjunction doesn't need to be constant at all. In terms of a cause, it only needs to happen once. Let's I find this object. It's the only one of its kind. If I pick it up it will be destroyed and l result in the death of all life on Earth. Is there no causal relationship here? Well, no. There is one. If I refuse to pick up this object, the death of all life on Earth will be avoided.
"Rules" tend a little be different. In the above instance, for example, the rule of killing all life on Earth is only relevant for one brief moment. Unless, that relationship repeats in future times, there is no danger to picking up the object. While there is a "rule" to any instance of a cause, we don't talk about them in this sense because then we wouldn't have any use for them going forward.
So for our usual notion of causal "rules," we need repetition-- e.g. I know I will be alive tomorrow, and the sun will rise, so I can do X,Y,Z, plan my day, respond to how the world repeatedly affect me, etc.
We tend to confuse this repetition of conjunction with a constant. Instead of realising that the rules are only how the world is behaving at the moment, that it's a repetition which might never have been and could end in the next moment, we think they must necessitate what happens.
It's ourselves which are the primary concern here-- if a conjunction is constant, then we can't be wrong, the world will always turn out how we expect and, perhaps most importantly, we won't be dead. I mean just imagine what it would mean if we could just "pop" out of existence tomorrow: I might be dead and would have no way of preventing it!!
The desperation to deny radical contingency, to claim it doesn't make sense with a meaningful existence, is our pretence that we are not the sort of thing which could just cease tomorrow, which might be wiped out on whim. In saying, "But the sun MUST rise tomorrow," we really are telling ourselves the lie that we cannot die, that we are beyond the possibility of death or non-existence. We are simply too afraid to accept we might not be (which is quite silly when you think about it, for that one might not exist, does not mean that one will).
"What are the chances?" is an entirely irreverent notion in this context. Since radical contingency deals in logical possibility, rather than probability, there is no defined chance to anything. Possibility isn't causal. There is no means or standard to define what's going to happen or what's more likely to happen.
In fact, considering the world itself, we might say there is no chance at all. For given the casual states themselves, the is only one outcome: what exists. If we ask, for example, "Why does the sun rise rather than not. How come it the rules of the world didn't change to day?," there is no answer. That's just what happened. There is no chance this sun would do anything else, even though it could have.
So: the least Kantian of souls would recognize that one thing always leads to another, that whats going on now is tied to what happened before, and is leading to what will happen next. That's just how it goes, because that's how it goes.
A slightly more compromised soul, one exposed to ideas about "ideas", about decontextualized objects which press against the mind, might start to see experience as a series of these isolated impressions. It might seem like experience is built up of instances -perceptual freeze-frames of various objects and ideas -& that awareness is always awareness at an instant, utterly disconnected (or at least disconnectable) from other instances. So then: how do we connect them??
All of which is to say Hume is as steeped in artifice and inherited ideas as Kant, imho, but it doesn't seem like it because his prose is fun and avuncular.
If Hume isn't important for what he says he's doing but because he helps us see our own case from within, then, I mean, Kant just as easily can be someone who helps us see, from within, that we're always caught up in a causal series etc etc
I stopped reading here, because here it became very clear you either haven't read Hume or you've utterly forgotten what you've read.
I don't know where the idea that he was defending Newtonian physics comes from. Like most everything, he thought it was half-right, at best.
Kant's very thing is ultimately objecting to an objectivity or primacy of any perspective, but only of mathematical determination with respect to natural principles. Rather than imagining an absolute space, we rather need a universal constant, it would seem to me.
Or, maybe a better way to say it: a fact which is true, while Hume's critique of causation also seems true, and these two things cannot both be true.
So I don't know if I'd say he was out to defend Newton, or provide a foundation for him either, as I said before. Rather, Newton is given as a kind of evidence for our having knowledge of causation in spite of Hume's critique.
Here's the rejection in his words, and he actually thought that the law contradicted experience.
The idea that things cause each other is grounded in everyday experience. The idea that they do infallibly according to necessary principles isn't. Anyone can tell you life has regularities and inconsistencies. The Enlightenment philosopher just sort of denies the latter as a matter of principle, not based on any evidence (and where the evidence seems to be against it, future theory will resolve the apparent inconsistency).
Quoting csalisbury
I agree with this, and I'm not really sympathetic to Hume more than Kant. The point is just that when you have a problem, you can't bring in fantasies to solve it. Maybe we don't have Humean problems because Hume made some more basic mistake. For example, only if we have an impoverished view of perception are we tempted to think that we can't see one thing causing another.
Why did Hume think we couldn't perceive causation? Because we only see the constant conjunction and not the underlying cause? Hume assumed that if there is such thing as causation, it had to be something unperceived.
Was that because we're sometimes wrong in assuming that A necessitates B, when it was really C that necessitates B?
Seems like since Hume most people have taken it for granted that we don't perceive causation. Either it's a habit of mind (which is contradictory since habits are causal as pointed out by Csalisbury), or it's something real, but unperceivable, like universals or laws of nature, which aren't empirical.
But what if one took a different tract and argued that we do perceive causation?
Isn't causation a conceptual relationship--a mental construct, an explanatory model, a way of thinking about the world that has no actual independent existence outside the mind doing the thinking, the explaining, constructing the model?
Mental construction is causative. It's the same as saying that causation is a habit of thought.
I don't understand what you mean here. Can't tell if you're agreeing or challenging.
My point is that relationships (of any kind) cannot meaningfully be said to exist in any mind-independent sense. Thus, causation is entirely mental--in this case a built-in way our minds apprehend the world--as Kant says.
Or maybe, you know, I'm drawing out the notion of radical contingency Hume uses against the notion of a continuing causal force.
No doubt Hume begins with the notion of causal forces as constant and continuing, but he quickly rejects it in radical contingency. Since anything may happen at anytime, the idea there are causal forces which must continue falls. Causation is just a partcular correlation of states.
This is where radical contingency makes everyone so anxious. It turns all causal relationships into a coincidence. Yes, the sun was caused to rise this morning, but that was nothing more than the whim of correlated states.
Hume's main point is against "continuation" is causal forces, at least in the sense of an outside force beyond the flux of finite states. He rejects the idea of acting causal force which moves the pieces of the world. For Hume, any causal relationship is just a concurrence of particular states themsleves.
I'd argue he didn't. We can't perceive the "thing" of causation because it is not a seperate state or actor in the world.
If I drop a rock, for example, I see an opening hand and a falling rock, not a "causation (whatever that might supposed to be)." Hume is more or less pointing out there is not some seperate object of a "causal force." There's nothing more to a causal relationship than certian states which occur together. When we observe causality, it's these correlated states we are aware of.
Hume is not really putting causation beyond observation, but rather pointing out it's only ever states of the world which do it.
To observe a cause and effect is nothing more than being aware of states which bring each other about-- we observe the cause of an opening and and the effect of a falling rock. There is no seperate object, force or rule acting upon the hand and rock to make this causal event occur.
(so Hume is really in agreement with TGW: we see things causing other things all the time. It why we don't see "causation." Things themselves do it all on their own, so we see them as causes and effects, rather than observing "causation." )
One thing not being mentioned is that causation - out there in the world - is heavily contextual. Things happen in predictable fashion because the world is organised in some way that constrains what is possible. And that history accumulates over multiple spatiotemporal scales.
So the car crash couldn't have happened at that junction unless 100 years ago the road hadn't been built. Or if two seconds earlier, the driver hadn't been distracted by the phone ringing.
But physics of course is a reductionist modelling of causality that plays the useful trick of imagining timeless laws animated by instantaneous measurements. So when it comes to conceiving and perceiving the causes of events through this lens, it leads to the Humean situation where the perceived event seems to take up no time and thus have no causal history, nor future. We imagine the event to be punctate and contain no information apart from some number that gives it an instantaneous value - like a momentum or inertial velocity.
So everyone was reacting to Newtonian mechanics - a new metaphysics that broke the world apart in this particular fashion. And if you took it literally, perception became identified with acts of measurement. It was imagined that events had punctate value that could be abstracted away from all the surrounding context. Causality became bound up in a property like momentum that a mass possessed. These values could be plugged into rules - the equations - that were like Platonic ideas.
Thus causality was pushed out of sight. It either became hidden in timeless laws. Or it was concealed within the value assigned as the identity of some timeless event. Causation was reduced to correlation as an act of the abstracting scientific imagination. Real things got replaced by the numbers that stood for them within a new system of sign.
If that's the way we find best to model causation, then it makes it quite legitimate just to count events and treat a regularity of conjunction - a matching of theory and prediction - as "seeing causality at work". The damn thing - Newtonian mechanics - works. The philosophical error is then to pretend to be confused - to start claiming an epistemic crisis like Hume, and even Kant.
Logic itself is the same trick - the abstraction to the timelessness of a syntax of rules and variables. A system of pure sign that leaves its semantics outside of it as something to be determined in some other "informal" fashion. Someone has to decide the meaning of the words in a proposition, just as they have to decide what counts as properly measuring some event in the world with sufficient care.
So it should be clear to us - as the inventors - that we have developed a powerful modelling trick (one that takes modelling itself to its formal extremes). And the world "in itself" is exactly what had to be left out so that we could choose precisely what then to include back in as the abstracted elements of a formalised and timeless approach.
Hence events became perceived as contextless, memoryless and historyless as the way to assign them some punctate value (like some weight of motion in a direction). And from there it became difficult to see why one thing leads to another except that we have constructed some laws as an act of conception. The events themselves - due to the way we measure them - can no longer give us a necessary connection to some actual lived past that is the world "in itself". We no longer seem to see (at a scientifically modelled level) what we in fact do feel we see (at a regular biological Bayesian brain level) with our own eyes.
The animal brain is evolved to reason inductively. It works by taking a guess and predicting its future states, and that creates a context in which the suprising can stand out. The unexpected - the breaks with expectable causality - is what is being looked for. The lack of Humean continguity is the feature, not the bug, as it is the failures of causal reasoning which are the teachable moments for the critter.
But philosophy turns nature on its head with this new language-based trick of deductive thought. It flips us into the timeless view of the world where causes are eternal ideals - like laws - or essentialist properties, like the numbers assigned as the values of instantaneously measured events.
And now there is no connection that can be seen between one instant and the next. But that is just the way our formalisms operate - the timeless view we have imposed so as to make time itself an abstraction within the modelling.
Something very much like the argument I outlined is there -- but not Newton. So, my bad there. But, to go over the quotes I was thinking. . .
In the preface to the 2nd edition, at the end of Bx:
That's definitely the quote I was thinking of in saying Newton, though this in particular doesn't link physics to Newton (as K. was definitely interested in physics at large, and not just Newton), or how that might serve as a counter-example to Humean criticisms of causation.
Later, on B21 there is a footnote in the introduction to the second edition, 2 paragraphs after introducing the central question of the critique, to these lines:
And the footnote reads:
To this footnote the translator adds a footnote of his own, appended to the last sentence:
This is where I got the notion of him deriving Newtonian physics, but surely Newton is not mentioned here either. Nor is the notion of Newtonian physics serving as the counter-example against Humean skepticism.
Earlier in the introduction, under II. "We are in Possession of Certain A Priori Cognitions, And Even Common Understanding is Never without Them" at B5 Kant stated:
This is getting closer to how Kant is in disagreement with Hume, and highlighting a sort of principle which the common understanding uses (though, perhaps, this principle isn't something that Newton uses -- again, no support for that particular claim of mine).
Later we get closer to the language I used, albeit admittedly not with Newton referenced. I'll just note here I'm now uncertain why I thought Newton in particular to Hume. Kant certainly references Newtonian physics throughout the CPR, but I overstepped in stating that it was Newton who served as the counter to Humean skepticism, I believe, unless there's some reference I missed. However, even in that case I overstepped, because after reading this highlighted portion I'm pretty sure this is where I was getting everything I stated before. So even if the reference is there, I was in error because these were the sections I was thinking of anyways.
Mea culpa.
At B127, or in the section titled "Transition to the Transcendental Deduction of the Categories":
That last sentence, in particular, is pretty much what I was thinking of. I believe I must have basically interpreted "universal natural science" as equivalent to Newtonian physics, though by no means is that asserted here.
The facts, though, which are meant to stand as counter-examples to the Humean account of causation are the sciences of pure mathematics, and universal natural science.
EDIT: That was a really cool article. Just finished it now. Thanks for sharing it.
This is a pretty Newtonian declaration actually, insofar as Newton himself famously refrained from 'feigning any hypothesis ('hypothesis non fingo') regarding what force is. It could be said that Kant was just trying to carry though this declaration to it's end.
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Otherwise, the early modern debates over causality are actually really interesting. Christian Kerslake has a great book which covers alot of these 'contextual' issues, and one of his most important points I think is that the model of causality which we reflexively think of today (efficient causality) was, as he says, the least popular of all the available models of causality. Some excerpts:
"Both Hume and Leibniz are sensitive to the problems of justifying the concept of causality. This is in part due to the conjunction of available theories of causality in the eighteenth century: the notion that now strikes us as the most sensible approach to causality, that finite substances are responsible for the changes they cause in other substances (then called the theory of physical influx), was at the time the least popular. This was because the only way available to conceive the idea that a substance with a set of properties caused a change in another substance was through the explanation that there was a transmission of properties from the first to the second, which was held to be inconceivable. Therefore, the notions of occasionalism and pre-established harmony became popular among philosophers as elaborate avoidances of physical influx.
On Hume: "...Hume’s philosophy can also be seen to arise from the failure of the physical influx theory: he can find no evidence from the senses of any ‘transmission’ of properties, given that all the senses provide us with are distinct impressions. Given a lack of objective ground for the order found in the world, Hume turns to custom, and, ultimately ... to the notion of a pre-established harmony."
On Kant, "One of Kant’s most celebrated moves in the Critique of Pure Reason amounts to the construction of an abstract formalisation of the problem facing notions such as causality in the eighteenth century... . The concept of a causal relation must be synthetic: Leibniz, Kant and Hume all agree on this, if not in terminology. Furthermore, they agree in principle that the problem about causality concerns connections that should be, if they are to exist at all, a priori. Kant’s notion of the synthetic a priori simply names a problem faced by eighteenth-century philosophy – that of how to account for any possible nonlogical a priori connections. How is one to synthesise a priori two or more elements, whether they be Humean sensations, or Leibnizian perceptions?
...Kant will often address the situation functionally by simply saying that synthesis requires a 'third'. As Kant says in the Critique, ‘where is the third thing that is always requisite for a synthetic proposition in order to connect with each other concepts that have no logical (analytical) affinity?’ (CPR A259). Kant’s answer as to what this tertium quid is will vary enormously, but the ‘triangular’ structure of a priori cognition will remain constant. As we will see, in the early writings Kant seeks the third thing between God and world (cf. LM 15, Ak. 28:52), whereas later time (A155/B194) and experience in general (A157/B196) are said to be third things".
On Newton and Kant: "To explain the interaction of substances, Kant appeals to universal gravitation, and this will remain as the extralogical formal principle for the reciprocal action (succession and coexistence) of his system right up to the ‘Inaugural Dissertation’. Universal gravitation, as the sphere of nature, is the ‘phenomenal eternity of the general cause’ (TP 405; Ak. 2:410). Any determinate relation between substances thus depends on the status of the ‘world-whole’ ... The principle of real, as opposed to logical, determination has its final ground in the whole. ... Against Leibniz, Kant wants both to affirm physical interaction, and also, with Newton, to shift the ground for the determination of forces to the whole field of forces. As we will see shortly, this provides the rudiments for a scientific theory that resolves the physical influx controversies".
I wish I could quote the whole chapter, but the whole history is just so long and fascinating full of twists and turns - especially because, as Kerlsake points out, Kant actually changed his mind multiple times in the lead up to the CPR regarding the status of time, causality and force - all of which complicates his relation to Newton (quotes from Kerslake's Immanence and the Vertigo of Philosophy).
What I had more in mind were the laws of motion and our ability to predict the motion of matter with them, which we know and carries a kind of mathematical necessity with it which goes against the assertion that we can never know some effect through a cause but are merely habituated by repetition. Given such and such conditions, I can tell you where some bit of stuff will be in so much time, and I know this will be so -- I am not merely habituated to it.
But I think that was a bit of my own reading into the opening, there, to make sense of it. Natural science certainly doesn't have to be Newtonian -- it just seemed to make sense given its mathematical certainty and its relation to cause-and-effect. (and, of course, the frequent references to the three laws of motion, or at least formulations really similar to them)
I didn't say their arguments were identical. Leibniz's approach strikes me as closer to Einstein's. Einstein occasionally relies on the reasoning in Leibniz's Law.
Firstly, "inertia" is taken from "inert", and matter is manifestly not inert. Indeed, he thought some kind of interaction, communication, or transference of information is at play, as well as not just external inert forces are at work, but dynamic living ones, which this doesn't give an account of.
His view of something more relational sounds like a famous thought experiment about two people moving towards each other in a void to me... "if all changes of motion are reciprocal and equal (since one body cannot move closer to/farther away from another body without the second body moving closer to/farther away from the first body and by exactly the same amount)".
The most glaring anachronism to me, is that he clearly doesn't think of matter and energy as the same things in different forms, but distinct things.
Yes, I meant Leibniz, not Locke. They begin with the same letter!