On Sep 9, 8:08 pm, Scott H <zinites_p...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> Everyone is free to debate about this, but I won't discuss it with
> Michael Gordge if he chooses to use personal attacks.
>
> Kant gives us an example in an attempt to illustrate how we cannot
> know things in themselves.
>
> >From Critique of Pure Reason (A 48/B 65):
>
> "Take the proposition that three straight lines permit construction of
> a figure, and try ... to derive it from these mere concepts ... Now
> suppose that there did not lie within you a power to intuit a
> priori ... and that the object (the triangle) were something in
> itself ... If that were so, how could you say that what necessarily
> lies in [or belongs to] your subjective conditions for constructing a
> triangle must also belong necessarily to the triangle itself? For,
> after all, you could not add to your concepts (of three lines)
> anything new (the figure) that would therefore have to be met with
> necessarily in the object, since this object would be given prior to
> your cognition rather than through it. Hence you could not
> synthetically a priori establish anything whatsoever about external
> objects ..."
>
> The mathematical form of the statement is,
>
> (El)(Em)(En)(Line(l) & Line(m) & Line(n) & EnclosesATriangle(l, m,
> n)),
>
> stated in Euclidean geometry, where (Ex) means, "there exists an x
> such that ..."
>
> First of all, I consider three lines to be objects, not concepts.
> Second, it's not clear to me what he means when he says that "this
> object would be given prior to my cognition rather than through it."
Kant did not state that we cannot know things in themselves, only that
sensibility is limited to appearances. And sensibility is not a
faculty of knowledge. Things in themselves do however provide the
matter for sensibility, while sensibility provides the forms, the
synthesis of form and matter being called appearances.
You have concepts of objects, so I don't know where your objection
lies
about considering a straight line only as an object. If you didn't
have a
concept of a straight line you couldn't very well think about it.
Kant is saying that cognition lends the triangle its a priori
necessity. The
triangle itself, however, is given subjectively -- it is an imaginary
object,
constructed in imagination. (So I will give you the point that a
straight
line is an object in the imaginary sense.) If this triangle were not
presented through cognition (and yet you were of course aware of its
imagining), it would be presented only as imagining, possessing less
objective validity than a dream since even a dream seems real when one
is dreaming,
so dreams obviously have a formal manifold of their own. But this
particular
imaginary triangle is being represented, in Kant's example. outside of
any manifold, any form, thus any cognition.
Further on, Kant is arguing that, outside of any manifold (that is,
outside
of your ability to think about triangles) you couldn't very well add
the
straight lines which form the synthetic part of the theorem's proof.
The
imaginary triangle was not, in the example, formed by synthesis,
nothing
rational can thereafter be done with it, most particularly, you cannot
provide
proof of its objectivity.
That's kind of like Rand's Objectivismd: not formed through cognition,
or
reason, and thereafter nothing rational can be done with it, a fact
which Gouge
demonstrates for us so well.
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