Leo, why don’t you like Kant as a philosopher?

[Thought Art]

Hi Leo, why don’t you like Kant? 
 

 

[UnbornTao]

Didn't he basically put an end to philosophy? He stated that perception can't be a direct knowledge of reality, and that perception and the mind can't be trusted as the ultimate "proof" for claims of existential truth.

Edited May 18, 2023 by UnbornTao

[Leo Gura]

What is there to like? Kant is grossly overrated.

You can study him for years and you will have no better understanding of reality. In fact, your understanding will worsen.

Edited April 28, 2023 by Leo Gura

[Thought Art]

@Leo Gura I don’t think I’d study him for years. But, just the principles of his philosophy. I’m sure I can do a simple reading and then congrats with your teachings. Think for myself here.

[DanTheLurker]

I'm a philosophy major. Can confirm that he's grossly overrated (like all more modern philosophers). It's seriously a waste of life if you study him seriously.

I had brilliant university professors (in terms of intelligence and apptitude) that made it their whole career to dissect and analyze Kant's work. Such wasted potential and intelligence in my opinion.

Ancient philosophers were better (again in my opinion) because they lived what they preached and had no epistemic foundations for reality. We take that as a given (and truth) today. They were living in a groundless universe with no one to ask what's actually going on.

They deserve much more credit than Kant.

[Yimpa]

[Thought Art]

I asked Leo before I really dove into it for a refresher  

[UnbornTao]

He revolutionized philosophical thought at the time. I think he may even have had enlightenment experiences that allowed him to make those breakthroughs.

Edited May 6, 2023 by UnbornTao

[Yimpa]

5 minutes ago, UnbornTao said:

He may have had enlightenment experiences.

Probably explains why some believe enlightenment is bullshit.

[UnbornTao]

3 hours ago, Yimpa said:

Probably explains why some believe enlightenment is bullshit.

what do you mean?

[Yimpa]

10 hours ago, UnbornTao said:

what do you mean?

God isn’t limited to enlightenment. 

God is also Peter Ralston. 

And beyond.

God is also bullshit, but my lawyers said not to say that… oops.

Edited May 2, 2023 by Yimpa

[Thought Art]

8 hours ago, Yimpa said:

 

God is also bullshit, but my lawyers said not to say that… oops.

God might sue for defamation.

Edited May 2, 2023 by Thought Art

[Yimpa]

13 minutes ago, Thought Art said:

God might sue for defamation.

Defecation you mean? 

Alright, I can’t with these puns anymore.

[DocWatts]

Thing is about Kant, and also for the other Enlightenment era philosophers, is that relative to thier particular culture and era many of thier ideas were quite insightful and forward thinking (and this is coming from someone who's quite critical of how Enlightenment era philosophy is used by modern people).

As a stepping stone to other less partial forms of philosophy, Kant is perfectly adequate. The problem comes in taking Kant's ideas about ethics or metaphysics as the final word on either of these subjects.

For the culture that Kant was writing in, his transcendental idealism was an admirable attempt to reconcile the types of epistemologies that he had access to. In that way, Kant was a good philosopher for his era.

But someone today thinking that a guy from two and a half centuries ago who never ventured from his hometown was the one to finally 'crack' epistemology and metaphysics is just silly.

Edited May 3, 2023 by DocWatts

[UnbornTao]

On 5/3/2023 at 2:44 PM, DocWatts said:

Thing is about Kant, and also for the other Enlightenment era philosophers, is that relative to thier particular culture and era many of thier ideas were quite insightful and forward thinking (and this is coming from someone who's quite critical of how Enlightenment era philosophy is used by modern people).

As a stepping stone to other less partial forms of philosophy, Kant is perfectly adequate. The problem comes in taking Kant's ideas about ethics or metaphysics as the final word on either of these subjects.

For the culture that Kant was writing in, his transcendental idealism was an admirable attempt to reconcile the types of epistemologies that he had access to. In that way, Kant was a good philosopher for his era.

But someone today thinking that a guy from two and a half centuries ago who never ventured from his hometown was the one to finally 'crack' epistemology and metaphysics is just silly.

A student posed a problem to Kant which he couldn't solve so he decided to isolate himself for eleven years in order to solve it. If anything, he was a committed guy! Besides, apparently his IQ was very high.

Who has grasped what he was intending to get across in Critique of Pure Reason? Probably a couple of people.

Edited May 18, 2023 by UnbornTao

[Leo Gura]

If you want to read philosophy, read Ken Wilber or Peter Ralston. It will be a 100x better use of your time.

Edited May 4, 2023 by Leo Gura

[Thought Art]

@Leo Gura just ordered Book of Not Knowing and Zen Body Being. Been reading his news book on mastery last 2 weeks. 
 

Very very tasty ? 

Edited May 4, 2023 by Thought Art

[Reciprocality]

Kant had his own way of saying most of what I believe this forum is about, that what you call reality is an extension of yourself.

His method were simple, he did not begin with definitions, he began with exposing the justification itself for the existence of particular concepts, this is a remarkable way of thinking, it is also the only viable way of doing philosophy, the difference between most true philosophers and Kant is that he actually knew this and did everything in his power to succeed at it.

If you think he started with axioms and definitions like the rationalists of his home country that influenced him such as Wolff and Leibniz and virtually every academic philosopher today then you really have got something terribly wrong.

 

What he is attempting is to bridge the gap between

    1. representation of the concrete world, I call these ideas, such as a chair, a house, a man etc. 

            - Abstracted from the world through repeated exposure to the senses and geometric patterns.

    2. the conceptual realm which can not represent the concrete world like the things above can.

            - Abstracted from reason through exposure to dialogue and contradiction.

                         There is a complex domain of abstractions which exists somewhere in between these two categories of things, these are most often systems that contain a plurality of ideas the contradictions of which do not yet exist because there is no AIM to which the contradiction is an insufficient means, this goes into how ideals are absolutely necessary for humans to create concepts, but I wont go into it unless asked.

You can call the former (1.)  a direct representation and the latter (2.) an indirect representation, I do no wish to language police these things to a novice of Kants work, when you finally grasp what the difference between what is meant with 1. an idea and 2. a concept then the language you use to signify either of them can vary from situation to situation without the possibility to step in any trap.

How do we aquire concepts that though they refer to something in the world could not be acquired from the world to which they refer?  

This is Kants question, I wont introduce his jargon here and fail my hopes of being understood, but it truly is mysterious (at first) the mechanism by which we come to realise the difference between for instance in and out, up and down, dependent and independent, variability and invariance, explication and implication, accident vs essence, I believe that the way in which dichotomies (which is a characteristic of of all possible concepts) are acquired is through nothing more than the affinity for contradiction, that this affinity is itself never payed attention to, and thusly renders the origin of concepts mysterious to us, is because it is the means itself by which we pay attention.

We can analogise between this particular means above and the means of typing on a keyboard such to understand clearly what the thing is that they have in common, I have written hundreds of words in this comment but if I close my eyes and try to remember the feeling of my fingers of any given typing combination I will fail miserably, I wont go into the reasons why I wont remember anything but hope to have demonstrated that the time and place of the means themselves by which we do anything is susceptible to being forgotten.

 

That upwards and downwards becomes a duality is possible only if contradictions arises among our mere ideas WITHOUT the duality, to exemplify this statement consider that you wished to tell someone that you have a staircase in your house but they were unfamiliar with two-story houses, to actually communicate intelligibly the purpose and thusly the meaning of a staircase you would have to communicate the concept of upwards because without this concept the purpose would be unthinkable for the person you speak with and thus would there arise contradictions among the elements of your house in the person you communicate with´s imagination of your house.

I would consider the idea of a second floor as an accident in the substance of upwards, and use substance theory (without actual metaphysical baggage, only substance in form) to convey the possibility itself for the two people to have a conversation in the first place, though in reality concepts are the least substantial thing, which is also why mystics are the only correct metaphysicians. 

 

Kant intellectualised the existence of something he could not describe/predicate, Kant put brakes on speculative philosophy by showing us for instance that we could not prove through logic the existence of god or the soul and that it were absurd to expect material evidence for something the concept of which were immaterial yet contained a materially derived essence such as power in the instance of god.

Kant is an ACTUAL sceptic. He lived most of his life skeptical to the independent existence of the objects of his own perceptions and created a dualism out of one of several possible solutions to the problem one is prone to find therefrom. The dualism between a. Mind, which he argues is indispensable and b. that which hides behind the appearances of the mind, his argumentation for this in the Critique of Pure Reason is a direct consequence of what I referred to in the beginning of this comment, he exposed the NEED for the concepts he used by finding contradictions that occur computationally without those concepts and then refrained from saying anything about these concepts except that they had their rightful place IN THE MIND; wherein only they had any subject for predication, this is TRUE SKEPTICISM, this is the likes of David Hume and Matt Dillahunty on steroids. An inconsistency in Kants philosophy do occur when he both says about the things-in-themselves that they are the cause for the thing-for-us while saying about causation that it is itself only something-for-us or of the mind, to argue for a solution to this problem would probably be necessary to be a respected Kantian Metaphysician today, of which there are very few.

In any case, Kants dualism varies from non-dualism as a teacup varies between tuesday and wednesday, he is all aboard with saying that you are identical with the objects that surrounds you, in fact he creates the only possible conceptual duality for a person to think that he is one with the objects of its surroundings without actually becoming one with their surroundings. 

 

Is existence possible without unification? Or alternatively, is unification possible without self? Kants thing in itself or noumena tries to answer this in the affirmative, this question is out of fashion, but I have no doubt it will come back to haunt us in hundreds new ways for the (hopefully) thousands of years to come where the dogmas which were present as much today as when the Critique were written is considered as just that.

And lastly, I can guarantee you that there is nothing in non-dualism that rejects the possibility of an independent existence of things themselves, it simply remains neutral to that very sensible question.

If it matters for anyone then Ill tell you that during 2022 I spent probably 400 hours reading Kants Critique, and far more thinking about what I read, he is the biggest man in European Philosophy after Descartes with good reason, I can see the shadows of this weirdly brilliant man in pretty much every philosophy that came after him in the European and American tradition, whether its Postmodernism, Process-Philosophy, Existentialism, Phenomenology, Idealism, Absurdism and even Physicalistic thought. Analytic philosophy is not philosophy, it is a mere explication of the relation itself between premises and their conclusions, so that Kant had virtually no influence here doesn't matter in that sense. 

Edited May 28, 2023 by Reciprocality