Kant: A Complete Guide to Reason
Sep 16, 2022
00:00 – Immanuel Kant
02:53 – Kant & The Enlightenment
08:00 – Empiricism & The Chaos of the World
15:05 – The Critique of Pure Reason
21:16 – Time & Space (transcendental aesthetic)
27:47 – Ordering the World (the metaphysical deduction)
39:50 – The Transcendental (deduction)
53:57 – Metaphysics of Morals
59:47 – The Categorical Imperative
3:30 to lay out a cosmic idea of philosophy
3:50 Set out to study the human laws that governed our thinking
4:00 Three most important questions we can ask ourselves.
… What can I know.
… What should I do.
… What may I hope.
A thousand page critique of reason.
6:40 … “we need a compass that guides our thoughts, something that guides our sense of right and wrong.
7:15 “Key to Kant is that he’s asking how we create concepts? How we make our ideas of the world. What’s happening when we are doing this? When thinking about this we approach the peak of pure reason, because conceptualizing is what we do in every moment. It’s the foundation of thought itself. In finding what’s pure you can know what’s reliable, what to focus on to sharpen how we think.”
9:25 How do we know? How do we get a comprehensible picture out of all that chaos we perceive around us.
How do we our perceptions of all the stuff around us.
10:35 “It’s all content without a form.” {that’s a silly thought to roll around for a while, seems to me like it needs a metaphysical reality to make sense. I don’t buy it.}
10:45 First problem Organization. How we organize all of this…
10:55 How is objective knowledge possible?
12:00 No certain proof sun will rise tomorrow.
13:45 “We just know it from within.” {shrug and we moves on - this is the internal biological workings of our body become important to consider.}
.
“We constitute a cosmos within the chaos”
First critique - what does reason mean for Kant - the process of thinking.
16:00 “If we get everything from outside, then the very act of thinking makes little sense.”
Do we get the rules of thinking from outside of ourselves too?
A priori = independent of experience, before all thinking is done, the conditions for thought itself
19:40 Empiricists who say all knowledge comes from experience
and the Rationalists who say reason is the way to secure knowledge.
Kant carves a way that requires both.
Time & Space - the first part of our empirical tool kit
21:20 What is pure and necessary and fundamental and universal and a priori, to receiving any of that data from the environment? {There’s a flaw - suggesting our thinking is separate from environment}
“What’s the first part of our pre-empirical tool kit? Time and Space”
21:50 “Kant always asking: What must be the case for this to be true?”
“Space and time are the universal form of all intuitions”
“Space and time are the preconditions for all experience.”
22:13 “To even have sensations in the first place, we must have some kind of intuitive framework to receive them. (This idea is the first stone laid in Kants transcendental method.)”
22:50 “We must have pure intuition, a framework in space and time.
{That’s what your evolving body has been figuring out for hundreds of millions of years}
23:30 … {is spoken within the now, displaying no appreciation for the fact that our physical body is the product of countless generations learning to deal with “Time and Space” and the facts of physics upon this planet. It’s not something every new baby needs to acquire, its body has already acquired extensive learning that philosophers can’t imagine.}
{Building intellectual mountains out of physical trivia.}
24:31 {The before and after is assumed by every fiber of our biological body, that’s who.}
25:30 {The talk about pure intuition, a priori knowledge and all that happens within a framing that treats each person a some individual being popped into the world, that is not the case. The framing can only lead astray.}
{He doesn’t acknowledges that our physical body has been learning to deal with this Earth’s environment for hundreds of millions of years.
That makes an incredible difference to how we perceive the knowledge we possess - or better, what kind of relationship we have with the knowledge we gather and possess.}
25:50 “We must have an innate grasp of what is in side of us and what is outside, what is here and what is there. Or everything would be everywhere at once. And an innate sense of succession.”
{All Kant’s questions, challenges, mysteries would get refined and enriched with an explicit recognition for how our human consciousness faculties are an outgrowth, the cumulative product of the past hundreds of millions and even billions of years. This realization answers so many of the philosophical riddles Kant, this narrator, and so many others continue struggling with.
It’s a shame, an unnecessary impoverishment in this day and age, one worth complaining about.}
Ordering the World
28:10 “Space and time are pure forms of intuition through which we are connected to the objects of empirical experience, with this is still something passive, the common landscape of the universe”
Kant insists we bring something to the table. {Sure. The biological body’s we were born into.}
30:45 “What must be the case, for this, to be like this?”
34:08 - SLIDE -
35:30 Concepts
35:50 “Now the question becomes, what are the rules that govern this process?”
“All thinking is judging by applying the categories, like space and time the category are the conditions for having any understandable experiences at all.” {Can you explain what that’s about?}
{Philosophically understanding our cognition is as easy as appreciating that our human cognition developed out of animal cognition, and that cognition has been nature’s number one research and development project since the beginning. One that’s been constantly pruning the under performers, refining systems, and trying new tricks. The striving for life that infuses all biology, that will be an enduring mystery, and that’s cool. Why not.}
{Sure, we’re very special, but not that special, compare your insides with other mammals, as soon as you exclude size variation, the similarities are amazing.}
{All creatures on Earth needed bodies that could communicate with themselves. Body knowing what body is doing. Our brain is special, but that doesn’t make it any less a product of the same needs and accommodations that all living organisms learned to master, or they didn’t survive. }
{We underestimate the internal knowledge Evolution wove into our bodies.}
{An evolutionary bottom up biology respecting philosopher would be striving to incorporate that awareness and finally let go of the mankind is “God’s gift to the Earth” assumption - and all that Abrahamic thinking undercurrent.}