Top posting just to say - great post.
Lots for someone like me to study, there. Thanks.
A.
"Immortalist" <reanimater_2000@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message
news:1187061383.877290.230660@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> On Aug 13, 5:37 am, Michael Gordge <mikegor...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>> Being objective.
>>
>> Space, time, area, duration, nothing, something, distance and weight
>> are but a minute fraction of the number of concepts used by man to
>> help construct his knowledge and to communicate facts of matter
>> existence and events etc clearly with other humans.
>>
>> A concept is a trigger word and words are just man made recognition
>> symbols used to link and explain / communicate existence.
>>
>> Concepts are used to trigger in man's mind a mental image, i.e. an
>> abstraction of existence including matter object/s and or a sensory
>> event or events etc etc.
>>
>
> ...nothing intuited in space is a thing in itself, that space is not a
> form inhering in things in themselves as their intrinsic property,
> that objects in themselves are quite unknown to us, and that what we
> call outer objects are nothing but mere representations of our
> sensibility, the form of which is space. The true correlate of
> sensibility, the thing in itself, is not known, and cannot be known,
> through these representations; and in experience no question is ever
> asked in regard to it.
>
> Critique of Pure Reason Page 73
> http://humanum.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/Philosophy/Kant/cpr/
>
> Kant: Appearances and Things in Themselves ...what Kant understands by
> 'empirical idealism' is basically Berkeley's view (as well as the view
> of the others mentioned above) - i.e., the claim that the mind has
> immediate access only to its own ideas or representations.
> 'Transcendental realism,' by contrast, is the view that "mere
> representations" are "things in themselves" (A490-1/B518-19), i.e.,
> that things are as our sensibility maintains them to be.
>
> In Kant's view of the history of philosophy, these two views are
> frequently associated. If the mind knows only its own ideas, and
> things are just what they seem to be, then Berkeley's conclusions seem
> unavoidable: things are the ideas in our own minds. Total skepticism
> is avoided only by identifying the "real" with the immediate objects
> of consciousness.
>
> The distinction between appearances and things in themselves occurs in
> both empirical and transcendental forms, and Kant thinks it crucial to
> keep from running these two sets of distinctions together.
>
> Suppose I say, in a given context, that "The stick looks straight to
> me." Typically, I would say that it "looks" this way to distinguish my
> perception of it - the appearance of the stick to me ("appearance" in
> the empirical sense, or my "idea" of it, as the empiricists would say)
> - from how it might appear to you or someone else. (We ordinarily
> would not say that the stick merely "looks" straight unless there was
> some reason to doubt it's straightness, e.g. if you had just claimed
> it to be curved.) But suppose I'm right about the stick. Then its
> straightness is a property of the stick-in-itself, but here the "in-
> itself" is purely empirical. In this way, the empirical appearance/
> thing-in-itself distinction corresponds to the difference between
> mental states and the physical or material thing. This holds,
> however, only in the ordinary language of experience (which includes
> both common sense and science).
>
> In a transcendental sense, however, the situation is quite different.
> Here, to say that something is an "appearance" (or "mere
> representation" - the thing as it appears to us) is to say that its
> properties are reflective of the necessary and universal conditions of
> human cognition in general (the synthetic a priori). (Qua appearance
> in this sense, the stick is spatially extended and exists through
> time, for example.) To call it an "appearance" is principally the
> acknowledgement that we cannot claim to know things independently of
> the nature of human cognition itself, which would amount to having a
> knowledge gained by "stepping outside of ourselves," so to speak, an
> impossibility. But this is not to say, crucially, that appearances
> are mere ideas. To do so would be to confuse appearances in the
> transcendental sense with appearances in the empirical sense. It
> would be tantamount to denying that external objects are spatial,
> something Kant thought obviously absurd.
>
> Another way to put the point is that for Kant, empirical idealism,
> transcendental realism, and the tempting association between them
> involve a confusion or equivocation about what it means for something
> to be "outer" (Kant's ausser or ausser uns) In the transcendental
> sense, something is "outer" if its properties are completely
> independent of the nature of human cognition (the synthetic a
> priori). In the empirical sense, for something to be "outer" is just
> for it to independent of this or that person's thoughts - e.g., for
> the table to be in the room, and not in my mind. The key mistake that
> results in empirical idealism and transcendental realism is a sort of
> slide: I conceive the table to be in space and time and to continue
> existing independently of myself, and hence as "outer" in the
> empirical sense. The temptation is then to suppose the table can be
> known to exist in space and time independent of all conditions of
> human cognition. But if this the way we expect to be able to know the
> table, then either the skepticism of Descartes results (we don't know
> it at all), or skepticism is avoided only by restricting our knowledge
> to the idea of the table in our minds (Berkeley). Kant suggests in
> one place that Berkeleyanism is not unreasonable as a response to
> Newton's view of the absolute (transcendentally real) nature of space
> and time. (Given Newton's view of "two infinite things, which are not
> substances, nor anything actually inhering in substances, [yet must]
> have existence, nay, must be the necessary condition of the existence
> of all things, and moreover, must continue to exist, even although all
> existing things be removed, - we cannot blame the good Berkeley for
> degrading bodies to mere illusion." CPR B70-71 Newton's problem, to
> Kant's way of thinking, is that he mistook the transcendentally ideal
> and empirically real nature of space and time for its transcendental
> reality. In different terms, he mistook an epistemological necessity
> for an ontological one.)
>
> Here's the succinct way Graham Bird puts it: consider two claims, a)
> that there are external objects of which we have knowledge, and b)
> that we are immediately aware only of our ideas, representations or of
> appearances. For Kant, the first claim is transcendentally false, but
> empirically true; the second claim is transcendentally true, but
> empirically false.[1] For Berkeley, though, the former is
> (empirically) false (unless we allow Berkeley to understand 'external'
> in his own strange way), and for this reason Kant calls him an
> empirical idealist. Berkeley would say the latter is (empirically)
> true, and this is the source of his idealism. For Kant, tables,
> sticks, etc. are transcendentally ideal (their a priori necessary
> features can be asserted only relative to our mode of knowledge), but
> empirically real (in space and time outside our minds). Or to put it
> more positively, Kant is a transcendental idealist because our
> knowledge of such objects is not limited to ideas in the empiricists'
> sense.(Since the synthetic a priori extends our knowledge beyond the
> data given by the senses.) Hence, Kant and Berkeley disagree
> fundamentally.
>
> A different way to make some of these points comes courtesy of Henry
> Allison.[2] To Kant's thinking, his predecessors in modern philosophy
> had a theocentric model of knowledge. (Theocentrism here is the
> strategy of analyzing human knowledge in terms of its conformity, or
> lack thereof, to the standard of cognition achievable by an "absolute"
> or "infinite intellect," i.e. God. And God, of course, knows things
> "as they are in themselves.") Spinoza's theocentrism is pretty
> obvious, since the goal of human knowledge is to know things sub
> specie aeternitatis ("under the aspect of eternity"). But Leibniz too
> was theocentric. He thought that in God's mind, one finds "the
> pattern of the ideas and truths which are engraved in our souls." (New
> Essays 4.2.14) Leibniz of course did not claim that we know all that
> God knows; much of the latter is for us only "confused" and limited.
> But this is a difference of degree, not kind. Consider also Leibniz's
> containment theory of truth, which makes all truths analytic. God
> knows them all, and knows them in their analyticity, since He has an
> intuitive grasp of the infinite and can thus grasp the infinite number
> of steps of analysis required to "demonstrate" the contingent truths
> (reduce them to a simple identity, x = x). We can't, but it's as
> though our failures here are more the result of our lack of cognitive
> horsepower rather than a fundamental divide in the way we know things,
> as compared to God. What we do know, though, is as God knows it - as
> it is in itself. Hence, Kant complains that Leibniz "took the
> appearances for things in themselves" and "intellectualized
> appearances." He overlooked the essentially sensible (spatiotem****al)
> aspects of our knowledge.
>
> On the empiricist side, Berkeley's theocentrism is pretty obvious, but
> Locke also stands accused. One passage where it comes out is in
> Locke's attempt to distinguish real and nominal essences. (The
> nominal essence, recall, is the basis on which we classify something,
> e.g. gold - it's weight, color, malleability, fusibility, etc. The
> real essence is the "constitution of the insensible parts of that
> body, on which those qualities and all other properties of gold
> depend." Consider the following passage, which occurs after Locke has
> discussed the nominal essence of man:
>
> The foundation of all those qualities which are the ingredients of our
> complex idea, is something quite different: and had we such a
> knowledge of that constitution of man, from which his faculties of
> moving, sensation, and reasoning, and other powers flow, and on which
> his so regular shape depends, as it is possible angels have, and it is
> certain his Maker has, we should have a quite other idea of his
> essence than what now is contained in our definition of that species,
> but it what it will: and our idea of any individual man would be as
> far different from what it is now, as is his who knows all the springs
> and wheels and other contrivances within the famous clock at
> Strasburg, from that which a gazing countryman has of it, who barely
> sees the motion of the hand, and hears the clock strike, and observes
> only some of the outward appearances. (Essay)
>
> Here Locke clearly equates knowledge of real essences with knowledge
> that our "Maker has." With regard to his theocentrism, the key is
> that Locke regards God's knowledge as perceptual. (In a telling
> passage early in the Essay, he alludes to God's "microscopical
> eyes".) As for Leibniz, for Locke our knowledge differs from God's
> only in the sense that He has more of the same. For Locke, this means
> God has greater perceptual abilities, while for Leibniz it means God
> has infinite reason. But as it was for Leibniz, for Locke the
> difference is one of degree, not of kind. Locke and Leibniz thus both
> agree that "genuine" knowledge - the goal for us, which God achieves -
> is of things in themselves. Hence Kant's complaint is that Locke
> "sensualized all concepts of the understanding" and regarded
> sensibility "as an immediate relation to things in themselves." (CPR
> A271/B327) In other words, as did Leibniz, Locke commits the mistake
> of transcendental realism. Berkeley's empirical idealism is the
> result of drawing the appropriate conclusions from Locke's
> assumptions.
>
> http://ocean.otr.usm.edu/~sbruton/Appearances.htm
>
>> Distance, as a concept, is specific in meaning / defintion but is also
>> not limited at the same time, it can be used and or triggers in the
>> mind an explanation of a fraction of inch or zillions of miles.
>>
>
> If we remove from our empirical concept of a body, one by one, every
> feature in it which is [merely] empirical, the colour, the hardness or
> softness, the weight, even the impenetrability, there still remains
> the space which the body (now entirely vanished) occupied, and this
> cannot be removed. Again, if we remove from our empirical concept of
> any object, cor****eal or incor****eal, all properties which experience
> has taught us, we yet cannot take away that property through which the
> object is thought as substance or as inhering in a substance (although
> this concept of substance is more determinate than that of an object
> in general). Owing, therefore, to the necessity with which this
> concept of substance forces itself upon us, we have no option save to
> admit that it has its seat in our faculty of a priori knowledge.
>
> Time is not an empirical concept that has been derived from any
> experience. For neither coexistence nor succession would ever come
> within our perception, if the representation of time were not
> presupposed as underlying them a priori. Only on the presupposition of
> time can we represent to ourselves a number of things as existing at
> one and the same time (simultaneously) or at different times
> (successively).
>
> Time is a necessary representation that underlies all [A31/P075]
> intuitions. We cannot, in respect of appearances in general, remove
> time itself, though we can quite well think time as void of
> appearances. Time is, therefore, given a priori. In it alone is
> actuality of appearances possible at all. Appearances may, one and
> all, vanish; but time (as the universal condition of their
> possibility) cannot itself be removed.
>
> Time itself does not alter, but only something which is in time. The
> concept of time thus presupposes the perception of something existing
> and of the succession of its determinations; that is to say, it
> presupposes experience.
>
> http://humanum.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/Philosophy/Kant/cpr/
> http://www.bright.net/~jclarke/kant/index.html
> http://www.hkbu.edu.hk/~ppp/cpr/toc.html
> http://www.4literature.net/Immanuel_Kant/Critique_of_Pure_Reason/
> http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/ethics/kant/reason/ch01.htm
>
> That space and time are only forms of sensible intuition, and so only
> conditions of the existence of things as appearances; that, moreover,
> we have no concepts of understanding, and consequently no elements for
> the knowledge of things, save in so far as intuition can be given
> corresponding to these concepts; and that we can therefore have no
> knowledge of any object as thing in itself, but only in so far as it
> is an object of sensible intuition, that is, an appearance...Thus it
> does indeed follow that all possible speculative knowledge of reason
> is limited to mere objects of experience. ...though We cannot know
> these objects as things in themselves, we must yet be in position at
> least to think them as things in themselves; otherwise we should be
> landed in the absurd conclusion that there can be appearance without
> anything that appears.
>
>> Even mystics imagining their concept called god, are required to try
>> and imagine it as something existing in some form of existing sensory
>> matter.
>>
>> That's so as to make the image as real in their minds as possible. The
>> more use of sensory existents that the mystics use, to visualise that
>> mental image, then the more real their god becomes to them.
>>
>> Soooo how can the Kantian's claim man's knowledge of the concepts
>> space and time arrived or exist for man (innately) i.e. before man is
>> able to form mental images of the existing matter / substance / event
>> giving rise to the concepts of area and duration?
>>
>> The answer is, man doesn't do anything of the sort. Man doesn't have
>> any such thing as innate concepts / innate knowledge, its utter
>> invented Kantian trash.
>>
>> Its the stuff of mindless morons who also believe in gods and fairy
>> tales or who dont through nothing but sheer fluke or accident.
>>
>> Michael Gordge
>
>
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