I am hating using blogger. It's impossible to easily format indents.

I am hating using blogger.  It's impossible to easily format indents!!!  Ok, I feel better now.

G. Dominick

You Kant be serious!

A couple of assumptions:

1. I do not claim to be even a novice at Kantian philosophy. 

2. E. J. Lowe worked way harder than I did in writing his section on Kant than I did on   refuting the claims of that section. 

3. I am wrong about most of what I am about to write.

So, that stuff about Kant that I was talking about in the last post.  Yeah, the stuff about thoughts being part of "mind independent reality" and therefore, according to E. J. Lowe, inaccessible seems not quite right.  In my brief research I could find nothing that indicates that "Kant's wall" separates anything other than the sensible world from the world of the mind.  Kant terms these phenomena and noumenon respectively (It should be noted that Noumenon is the name of my car).

The senses operate through the median of space and time supplying the mind information from the phenomenal realm.  That information is then organized by our rational structure; it is at this point that we are aware of this information.  Kant would assert that we can only study and know what our senses present to us by way of our rational structure's presentation.  The question, relevant to Lowe's assertion, is whether or not thoughts are merely what our rational structure makes of them.  Certainly the subject of thoughts, my car for instance, is only only whatever my rational structure makes of the information my senses collected.  This may or may not be similar to the subject directly accessed (the subject apart from sense perception).  However, I don't know why this should be the case with out thoughts.  Sure, the phenomenal realm is made up of mind independent things, but just because our thoughts can be termed mind independent doesn't mean they are inaccessible especially because thought doesn't sit behind our senses.  For instance, if I think "my car is white" it is true that "car" and "white" are referring to the noumenal (after my senses and rational structure has gotten a hold of them) realm, but the relation invoked by such a thought, subject and predicate, would seem to be a function of direct access to our rational structure and it's attempt to organize what I'm sensing.  I have no reason to doubt that when I think about my thoughts that I am not thinking about my thoughts directly, and don't think Kant would disagree.  This would be contrary to Lowe's claim that Kant's theory makes thoughts inaccessible.

Here's the big question; if assumption (3) is false, than what's going on with Lowe?  I ask this because whenever we disagree I think it important to know, not only why we disagree, but also why others don't.  Too often it is the case that one fervently disagrees but never bothers to answer the question as to why something which is, in the world of a hasty critic, "patently false" isn't termed as such by everyone especially those better educated and more skilled in a the relevant field.  Evangelicals would do well to consider this when discussing contrary systematic theologies.  I contend that if (3) is false than Lowe is a materialist (please, please please remember that if Lowe is a materialist that it doesn't follow that (3) is false, it could still be true).  I'll let you figure out why that's relevant.


In the interest of goodness, truth and beauty,

Gordon Dominick  

You Kant do that with Metaphysics:

What is Metaphysics? That’s the question I’m supposed to be answering as I pour over introduction to metaphysics texts, history of philosophy tombs, and of course the ever useful Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Trusty pen in my in hand and a selection, pulled from a tote full of books, resting on an arched knee, I studiously prepare for my first Metaphysics class in grad school. Pausing for a moment my mind wonders, “I should write a blog about this."  I return to the task at hand.

The next section in my reading is on Immanuel Kant: “Kant and the Possibility of Metaphysics.” Understand, although this is my first Metaphysics class, and though I am most certainly at the beginning of my studies in philosophy, I am no stranger to Kant. I’d say we are at least acquaintances. I’d recognize him on the street, and I think he could pick me out of a line up. That being said, I quickly prepared for impact; the first rule of Kant would most certainly take effect any moment.

First rule of Kant: Kant slows everything down.

This is not to be confused with, 

The first rule of Hegel: Hegel is a jerk and made his work purposefully hard to read. (I am not acquainted with Hegel; though I hear his first work was Phenomenal.) 

All puns aside, this section on Kant proved most intriguing. Here’s a selection:

Here we may be reminded that it was Immanuel Kant who first posed the momentous question ‘How is metaphysics possible?‘ Kant’s answer, however, was inimical to metaphysics as traditionally conceived, that is, conceived as a form of rational inquiry into the fundamental structure of reality. For Kant held that metaphysical claims in fact concern not the fundamental structure of a mind independent reality, even if such a reality exists, but rather the fundemental structure of rational thought about reality...if nothing about the structure of mind-independent reality is accessible to us then, by the same token, nothing about the structure of our own thought is accessible to us either--for, in the relevant sense of ‘mind-independent’, our thought itself is nothing if not apart of mind independent reality. (E. J. Lowe, A Survey of Metaphysics, New York: Oxford University Press, 2002, 9.)

We cannot know any object that has existence independent of our thinking about it. We can only know how our rational structure interacts with such an object, but not the actual object. Our thoughts are independent of our thinking about them (not to be confused with thinking them). Therefore we cannot know our own thoughts.  That is if Lowe's description of Kant's theory is correct.  I'm not convinced.

I covet your thoughts. Mine will be forthcoming. For now be satisfied with a word from Immanuel Kant himself:

But as in all the attempts hitherto made to answer the questions which reason is prompted by its very nature to propose to itself, for example, whether the world had a beginning, or has existed from eternity, it has always met with unavoidable contradictions, we must not rest satisfied with the mere natural disposition of the mind to metaphysics, that is, with the existence of the faculty of pure reason, whence, indeed, some sort of metaphysical system always arises; but it must be possible to arrive at certainty in regard to the question whether we know or do not know the things of which metaphysics treats. We must be able to arrive at a decision on the subjects of its questions, or on the ability or inability of reason to form any judgment respecting them; and therefore either to extend with confidence the bounds of our pure reason, or to set strictly defined and safe limits to its action. This last question, which arises out of the above universal problem, would properly run thus: "How is metaphysics possible as a science?" (Critique of Pure Reason, location 643-64, in my free kindle edition which came with NO TABLE OF CONTENTS!)

In the interest of goodness, truth and beauty,

Gordon Dominick