Chapter I: The Aim, and the Method of Treatment

1980 ◽  
Vol 25 (S1) ◽  
pp. 3-5
Author(s):  
Richard Albert Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Human Mind ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Human Knowledge ◽  
Critique Of Pure Reason ◽  
Adequate Treatment ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The World ◽  
Philosophical Writings

But that same Where (Space), with its brother When (Time), are from the first the master-colours of our Dream-Grotto; the Canvas (the warp and woof thereof) whereon all our Dreams and Life-Visions are painted.—CARLYLE, Sartor Resartus, 1830.When Kant in his investigation of the nature and validity of human knowledge in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781) undertook an examination of the nature of Space and Time as the starting point in the discussion, he struck the path which all fruitful philosophical investigation has followed since. Since Space and Time are the two ‘forms’ within which the whole system of life and nature unfolds itself to the human mind, and are at the same time the ‘warp and woof on which man elaborates his mental sense-picture of the world, an examination of these two sense-forms should be the self-evident starting point in any true cosmic philosophy. Yet it seems to have taken something more than a century for the full significance of Kant’s method to sink into the general philosophical consciousness, and it is only in our own time that its fruits have begun to mature. What strikes one in the philosophical writings of the present century, whether starting from mathematics, or science, or pure speculation, is the common assumption in all of them that some exposition of Space and Time must form the foundation of any adequate treatment of the nature of the world, the human mind, and the structure of human knowledge. The title of Professor Alexander’s book, Space, Time, and Deity (1920), is symbolic of the modern point of view.

Concluding Postscript: The World According to Kant

2021 ◽  
pp. 355-356
Author(s):  
Anja Jauernig
Keyword(s):  
Human Mind ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Intentional Objects ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
Special Character ◽  
Empirical Level ◽  
The World ◽  
Thing In Itself ◽  
Levels Of Reality ◽  
Ontological Position

This completes my account of Kant’s critical idealism, understood as an ontological position, as developed in the Critique and associated theoretical writings. According to Kant, the world, understood as the sum total of everything that has reality, comprises several levels of reality, most importantly, the transcendental level and the empirical level. The transcendental level is a mind-independent level at which Kantian things in themselves exist; the empirical level is a mind-dependent level at which Kantian appearances exist. Things in themselves are mind-independent, appearances are fully mind-dependent. Things in themselves and appearances are numerically distinct and do not ontologically overlap in any way. Kantian outer appearances essentially are intentional objects of outer experience; Kantian inner appearances essentially are intentional objects of inner experience. Empirical objects are Kantian outer appearances, empirical space and time are constituted by the spatial and temporal determinations of outer appearances, pure space and time are (nothing but) forms of sensibility, and empirical selves, or empirical minds, are Kantian inner appearances. In contrast to other intentional objects, such as the intentional objects of fictions, dreams, hallucinations, illusions, and perceptions, Kantian appearances genuinely exist, that is, they exist from the point of view of fundamental ontology. This is due both to the special character of experience, in particular, the special character of outer experience and its conformity to Kant’s formal conditions of objectivity, and to the grounding of Kantian appearances in things themselves. Kantian things in themselves transcendentally affect sensibility and thereby bring about sensations, which provide the ‘matter’ for Kantian appearances and underwrite their existence. Kantian things in themselves are supersensible, non-spatial, and non-temporal, as well as distinct from God and thus finite. Each inner appearance is grounded in a unique Kantian thing in itself that is a human transcendental mind, and all outer appearances are grounded in Kantian things in themselves that are distinct from all human minds. What we commonly call ‘the external empirical world’ exists, including empirical space and time. Accordingly, there is also at least one Kantian thing in itself that is not a human mind. Moreover, there is at least one human being, that is, an entity whose ontologically basic parts include, minimally, a body (which is an empirical object), an empirical self (which is an empirical mind), and a transcendental self (which is a human transcendental mind). Since other intentional objects that are not Kantian appearances, although not genuine existents, are not nothing but have some reality and being, it is useful to conceive of Kantian reality as including yet another mind-dependent level to provide a home for these other fully mind-dependent entities—even if this conception goes beyond the direct textual evidence and may also go beyond Kant’s private, explicitly articulated thoughts on the matter. The ultimate basis for Kant’s case for transcendental idealism is the finitude of the human mind and, more specifically, its fundamentally uncreative nature in which this finitude manifests ...

scholarly journals Does Language Determine Our World’s Borders? The Deaf Beyond the Pale

2019 ◽  
pp. 129-138
Author(s):  
Magdalena Szpilman
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Literature ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approach ◽  
Denis Diderot ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The World ◽  
Comparison Judgment ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Etienne Bonnot De Condillac ◽  
Philosophical Writings

Does Language Determine Our World’s Borders? The Deaf Beyond the PaleThe limits of our language are the limits of our worldLudwig Wittgenstein“If not in words, how did she organize her thoughts?,” asks contemporary American writer André Aciman thinking of his deaf mother. In other words, how did she organize her world – one could ask, since even if not consciously, it is often assumed that “the limits of our language are the limits of our world.” Taking Ludwig Wittgenstein’s well-known dictum as a starting point, I would like to present an interdisciplinary approach to the subject, set on the border of comparative literature, linguistics, and medicine. In my paper, using the works of Plato (Cratylus), Denis Diderot (Paradox of Acting), Étienne Bonnot de Condillac (Philosophical Writings of Etienne Bonnot Abbé de Condillac), Oliver Sacks (Seeing Voices: A Journey into the World of the Deaf), and others, I focus on how people perceive the borders (limits) of our world through the prism of language. Is language just a prosthesis, a grafted limb one can live without? Do hands speak more intimately than words? Or maybe deafness is more of a disability than blindness? Is hearing essential for creating memory, allowing comparison, judgment and association of ideas? From a medical point of view, it is impossible to develop speech without hearing. So how does not hearing and therefore not speaking limit our world? Does it at all? Czy język określa granice naszego świata? Głusi poza nawiasemGranice naszego języka są granicami naszego świata.(Ludwig Wittgenstein)Jeśli nie w słowach, jak organizowała swoje myśli? – pyta współczesny amerykański pisarz André Acimana w eseju o swoje głuchej matce. Innymi słowy, można zapytać - jak organizowała swój świat - bo nawet nieświadomie wierzymy, że: granice naszego języka są granicami naszego świata. Biorąc za punkt wyjścia słynne powiedzenie Ludwiga Wittgensteina oraz wykorzystując dzieła Platona (Kratylos), Denisa Diderota (Paradoks o aktorze), Étienne’a Bonnota de Condillaca (Traktat o wrażeniach zmysłowych), Olivera Sacksa (Zobaczyć głos) i innych, analizuję postrzeganie granic świata przez pryzmat języka, w ujęciu interdyscyplinarnym, z pogranicza literatury porównawczej, językoznawstwa i medycyny. Czy język to tylko proteza, bez której można żyć? Czy ręce mówią dokładniej niż słowa? A może bycie głuchym to niepełnosprawność znacznie bardziej ograniczająca niż bycie niewidomym? Czy słyszenie jest naprawdę ważne, ponieważ odgrywa kluczową rolę w tworzeniu pamięci, umożliwiając porównywanie, ocenianie i tworzenie skojarzeń? Słyszenie, z medycznego punktu widzenia, jest niezbędne do wykształcenia mowy. Jak zatem niesłyszenie, a zatem niemówienie ogranicza nasz świat? Czy ogranicza?

Kant’s ‘Transcendental Deduction’

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barry Stroud
Keyword(s):  
A Priori ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Critical Assessment ◽  
Structural Description ◽  
A Posteriori ◽  
Human Knowledge ◽  
Transcendental Deduction ◽  
The World ◽  
Empirical Realism

This chapter presents a straightforward structural description of Immanuel Kant’s conception of what the transcendental deduction is supposed to do, and how it is supposed to do it. The ‘deduction’ Kant thinks is needed for understanding the human mind would establish and explain our ‘right’ or ‘entitlement’ to something we seem to possess and employ in ‘the highly complicated web of human knowledge’. This is: experience, concepts, and principles. The chapter explains the point and strategy of the ‘deduction’ as Kant understands it, as well as the demanding conditions of its success, without entering into complexities of interpretation or critical assessment of the degree of success actually achieved. It also analyses Kant’s arguments regarding a priori concepts as well as a posteriori knowledge of the world around us, along with his claim that our position in the world must be understood as ‘empirical realism’.

scholarly journals Autonomi er noget vi giver hinanden

2020 ◽  
pp. 125-139
Author(s):  
Christian Juul Busch
Keyword(s):  
Essential Element ◽  
Assisted Dying ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The World ◽  
Mutual Obligation ◽  
The Common ◽  
Common Understanding

The concept of autonomy is essential in the discussion of assisted dying. In this chapter I will endeavour to nuance the concept of autonomy towards also encompassing an essential element of mutual commitment. Thus, the chapter will emphasise the importance of strengthening a nuanced concept of autonomy that I consider to be essential. Therefore, I will try to take the argument about the individual’s right to decide over his or her own life as a starting point to investigate autonomy and assisted dying. In the common understanding of autonomy, the mutual obligation towards the community seems to be reduced in favour of the individual’s right to decide for himself/herself. I will illustrate this aspect with an example from the world of cinema, Bille August’s Stille hjerte (Silent Heart).

scholarly journals Gregory Bateson’s Ecology of Mind and the Understanding of Human Knowledge

2017 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 37
Author(s):  
Elzbieta Magdalena Wasik
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Communication Studies ◽  
Human Knowledge ◽  
Gregory Bateson ◽  
Ecology Of Mind ◽  
The World ◽  
Living Species ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Theoretical Foundations

<p>Departing from the biological notion of ecology that pertains to mutual relationships between organisms and their environments, this paper discusses theoretical foundations of research on the nature of human mind in relation to knowledge, cognition and communication conducted in a broader context of social sciences. It exposes the view, explicitly formulated by Gregory Bateson, that the mind is the way in which ideas are created, or just the systemic device for transmitting information in the world of all living species. In consequence, some crucial points of Bateson’s reasoning are accentuated, such as the recognition of the biological unity of organism and environment, the conviction of the necessity to study the ecology in terms of the economics of energy and material and/or the economy of information, the belief that consciousness distorts information coming to the organism from the inside and outside, which is the cause of its functional disadaptation, and the like. The conception of the ecology of an overall mind, as the sets of ideas, notions or thoughts in the whole world, is presented against the background of theoretical and empirical achievements of botany and zoology, anthropology, ethology and psychiatry, sociology and communication studies in connection with the development of cybernetics, systems theory and information theory.</p>

An Early Nominalist Critique of Platonic Realism: Ibn Ḥazm’s Metaphysics of the Created Corporeal World

2019 ◽  
Vol 112 (04) ◽  
pp. 541-554
Author(s):  
Ali Humayun Akhtar
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Human Knowledge ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
Prime Matter ◽  
The World ◽  
Dialectical Argumentation ◽  
Ibn Hazm

AbstractThis study examines how Ibn Ḥazm (d. 456 AH/1064 CE) articulated his nominalist critique of Platonic realism in the context of a larger rejection of ontological dualism in philosophy. It draws on evidence in Al-Fiṣal fī l-Milal wa-l-Ahwāʿ wa-l-Niḥal (The Book of Opinions on Religions, Heresies, and Sects) and his Marātib al-ʿUlūm (Categories of the Sciences). In response to those who “claim to follow philosophy (falsafa),” and in dialogue with earlier theologians and philosophers such as al-Bāqillānī (d. 403/1012–1013) and al-Kindī (d. 258/873), Ibn Ḥazm redefined the universal soul (al-nafs al-kulliyya) and universal intellect (al-ʿaql al-kullī) as linguistic references to the total of all particular souls and particular intellects, which he defined as corporeal accidents inhering in the body. Ibn Ḥazm’s identification of souls and intellects as corporeal was part of his larger conception of the world as discrete and finite in both space and time. The world, in other words, is measurable in numbers and therefore limited by the volume of its visible and invisible air-like corporeality to the exclusion of philosophical notions of a perfect void or prime matter. In his additional critique of contemporary Muslim epistemology and the theologians’ reliance on dialectical argumentation, Ibn Ḥazm held that a true scholar of Islam should turn to logic-oriented deductive methods and scriptural evidence together in order to ascertain the possibilities and, more importantly, the limits of human knowledge about both the corporeal created world and the ontological unknown (ghayb) of the divine realm.

Hegels Philosophie des Geistes

2015 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 66-86
Author(s):  
Pirmin Stekeler-Weithofer
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Investigation ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Human Cognition ◽  
Human Knowledge ◽  
Empirical Observation ◽  
The World ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Philosophie Des Geistes ◽  
Object Level ◽  
Forms Of Knowledge

In order to understand Hegel’s form of philosophical reflection in general, we must read his ‘speculative’ sentences about spirit and nature, rationality and reason, the mind and its embodiment as general remarks about conceptual topics in topographical overviews about our ways of talking about ourselves in the world. The resulting attitude to traditional metaphysics gets ambivalent in view of the insight that Aristotle’s prima philosophia is knowledge of human knowledge, developed in meta-scientific reflections on notions like ‘nature’ and ‘essence’, ‘reality’ (or ‘being’) and ‘truth’, about ‘powers’ and ‘faculties’ – and does not lead by itself to an object-level theory about spiritual things like the soul. We therefore cannot just replace critical metaphysics of the human mind by empirical investigation of human behaviour as empiricist approaches to human cognition in naturalized epistemologies do and neuro-physiological explanations propose. Making transcendental forms and material presuppositions of conceptually informed perception and experience explicit needs some understanding of figurative forms of speech in our logical reflections and leads to other forms of knowledge than empirical observation and theory formation.

The Correspondence with Clarke

2020 ◽  
pp. 228-249
Author(s):  
Gregory Brown
Keyword(s):  
Sufficient Reason ◽  
Identity Of Indiscernibles ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
Principle Of Sufficient Reason ◽  
The World

The correspondence between Leibniz and Samuel Clarke—mediated by Leibniz’s erstwhile friend and disciple at the electoral court in Hanover, Caroline of Brandenburg-Ansbach, princess of Wales—is arguably the most famous and influential of philosophical correspondences. In this chapter, I begin by tracing the background of the correspondence and the role that Caroline played in its inception and development. I then turn to a discussion of the main themes of the correspondence, paying particular attention to the importance of Caroline’s presence in shaping the themes of the debate: the principle of sufficient reason, the identity of indiscernibles, God’s choice in creating this world, space and time, God’s presence and activity in the world, miracles, and gravity.

scholarly journals Kant on the Transcendental Deduction of Space and Time: an Essay on the Philosophical Resources of the Transcendental Aesthetic

2010 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-37
Author(s):  
Melissa McBay Merritt
Keyword(s):  
Pure Reason ◽  
Human Knowledge ◽  
Critique Of Pure Reason ◽  
Transcendental Deduction ◽  
Production Of Knowledge ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
Modes Of Representation

Commentary on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason has focused intensively on the transcendental deduction of the categories – the pivotal chapter of the book that governs our understanding of much that precedes it and just about all that follows it. One simple way to understand the systematic function of the Transcendental Deduction is to appreciate that it provides an account of how the ‘two stems of human knowledge’ (A15/B29) – sensibility and understanding – must relate to one another in the production of knowledge. On Kant's view, these capacities are distinguished by their radically different modes of representation: intuition and concept. Although sensibility and understanding are fundamentally distinct – they ‘cannot exchange their functions’ – they must nevertheless cooperate in the production of knowledge: ‘Only through their unification can cognition arise’ (A51/B75–6). The task of the Deduction is to show how the categories – concepts that stem from the ‘nature of the understanding’ alone – apply necessarily to objects that can only be given in experience, and represented as given through sensible intuition.

Bonaventure (c.1217–74)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bonnie Kent
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Human Knowledge ◽  
Sense Experience ◽  
The World ◽  
Union With God ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Higher Purpose

Bonaventure (John of Fidanza) developed a synthesis of philosophy and theology in which Neoplatonic doctrines are transformed by a Christian framework. Though often remembered for his denunciations of Aristotle, Bonaventure’s thought includes some Aristotelian elements. His criticisms of Aristotle were motivated chiefly by his concern that various colleagues, more impressed by Aristotle’s work than they had reason to be, were philosophizing with the blindness of pagans instead of the wisdom of Christians. To Bonaventure, the ultimate goal of human life is happiness, and happiness comes from union with God in the afterlife. If one forgets this goal when philosophizing, the higher purpose of the discipline is frustrated. Philosophical studies can indeed help in attaining happiness, but only if pursued with humility and as part of a morally upright life. In the grander scheme of things, the ascent of the heart is more important than the ascent of the mind. Bonaventure’s later works consistently emphasize that all creation emanates from, reflects and returns to its source. Because the meaning of human life can be understood only from this wider perspective, the general aim is to show an integrated whole hierarchically ordered to God. The structure and symbolism favoured by Bonaventure reflect mystical elements as well. The world, no less than a book, reveals its creator: all visible things represent a higher reality. The theologian must use symbols to reveal this deeper meaning. He must teach especially of Christ, through whom God creates everything that exists and who is the sole medium by which we can return to our creator. Bonaventure’s theory of illumination aims to account for the certitude of human knowledge. He argues that there can be no certain knowledge unless the knower is infallible and what is known cannot change. Because the human mind cannot be entirely infallible through its own power, it needs the cooperation of God, even as it needs God as the source of immutable truths. Sense experience does not suffice, for it cannot reveal that what is true could not possibly be otherwise; so, in Bonaventure’s view, the human mind attains certainty about the world only when it understands it in light of the ‘eternal reasons’ or divine ideas. This illumination from God, while necessary for certainty, ordinarily proceeds without a person’s being conscious of it.

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