I found both the dialogue between Socrates and Theaetetus and the preface to Kant’s Critique of pure reason very hard to understand when I read them. In an attempt to clarify I discussed them with some people from class. To my relieve/disappointment they understood about as much as I did about the meaning of the texts, but together we managed to sort out some of the concepts and ideas. The lecture about Kant and the seminar clarified it a bit further for me.
I think that the main thing Kant is saying is that we will never be able to look at the world in a completely objective way. Everyone will always have different perceptions of the world. Just the basic fact that we are humans makes us look at the world in a special way. Because of this we can not look at the world from “God’s point of view” which is a view of the world without any experiences intervening with the perception of it. Without context and earlier experiences nothing in the world makes sense anymore. The world where a thing exist is what makes that thing be that thing. A bottle is a bottle only in the world where people know what a bottle is.
Kant said that “Perception without conception is blind and conception without perception is empty”. This means that we can not know anything about the world in itself without seeing it in our conception. Everyone sees the world according to themselves and not from “God’s point of view”. The world is dependent of us interpreting it. An example from the lecture was that a tree is still there when no one is around to see it. Therefore it is “in itself” and some might argue that no one has to be there and see the tree for it to exist. But the concept “in itself” only exists because we came up with that concept and would not exist otherwise.
During the discussion at the seminar we were all a little bit confused about what a priori knowledge really meant. Here is a short explanation of what we came up with. Kant divides all the basic ways we perceive an object into 12 categories. These categories are characteristics we can know about an object before we examine it. Therefore it is a priori knowledge and that is what we use to get a posteriori knowledge. I feel that this is a really hard concept to grasp and I am still not sure that I get it.
Dicussing in a group about these matters is something that I also have learnt a lot from during this theme and it seems like many people in this course has done this in order to get understanding of the texts. I like how you give some examples of your thoughts on Kants´ text. I do feel however as if you repeat yourself a little while talking about Kant and it would be interesting to read a bit about your thoughts and reflections on Platos ´ text as well. All in all an interesting read and a good reflection.
ReplyDeleteYour reflection is logical and expicit.Also,during the fisrt seminar,we all got the point that if there is nobody in the world, the pencil is not a pencil, because it loses its value and becomes meaningless. It was also interesting. We also discussed a lot on baby's cognition.I still don't understand until now.Maybe analytic judgement is kin of a priori,and we use the forms of intuition and categories to get the apriori to get knowledge of the world,enven though we can not understand the real world.
ReplyDeleteHi!
ReplyDeleteI had the exact same problem as you with the texts initially, but just as you did, things got a great deal clearer after the lecture and seminar! You provide a great and insightful read with these two blog posts on this rather interesting yet hard-to-grasp subject. It seems as though you’ve understood everything with great depth and you provide for these ideas with a great written language and interesting arguments. Even though you state that you don’t quite grasp the concept of Kant’s faculties of knowledge, you seem to be able to explain them for me to understand them at least! The way I understand them is that, as you mention, they are a posteriori knowledge we’ve collected from experiences with society and environment. From that we then experience things through our faculties of knowledge to be able to conceive them correctly. Therefore we can generate a priori knowledge of the world since the world we inhabit is made up of things we previously experienced (through perception). Great description of your philosophical week thinking of what knowledge is. Keep up the good work!
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ReplyDeleteHi Arvid!
ReplyDeleteI also had troubles understanding the texts but things cleared up slowly. You write about how we will never be able to see the world in a truly objective way and that our view differs from one human to another and that without context and earlier experiences nothing in the world makes sense anymore. I agree with you. Everything we experience goes through our senses and is compared to all previous experience. Although Kant says that we can in someway, It's hard be truly objective.
Group discussion seems to be the way to go to really understand what is going on in these texts.
ReplyDeleteI find what you said about human perception to be really interesting. Obviously there is no concept of bottle in the minds of people who have never encountered one, and therefore the thing doesn’t matter to them. I get a little curious as to what a thing would be if we had no concept of it, and how that would change if we were to suddenly get one. If I, let’s say, used a towel for a scarf and you told me that it was supposed to be for drying my hands, would that really alter my view of the thing or would I consider you crazy? I don’t really have an answer, I just thought it a really interesting point of view that I hadn’t considered.
It is really interesting that we can come to the conclusion that we can not look at things from a "gods point of view" because we are subjective yet we can create a concept of true objectivity and think about it. We can see our boundaries but also we have a mind that breaks boundaries naturally that is really amazing! But I think that just as you said: it is confusing to read and think about this because we are not used to philosophical reasoning ut also becaus we when thinking about these stuff reach the boundaries of what we can think at all!
ReplyDeleteHi!
ReplyDeleteA well written reflection with a good structure making it easy to follow your points of view and understanding of this theme. I agree with you saying that we can never really be completely objective when looking at the world. My thoughts are that humans have a subconscious which makes it hard for us to know if we are truly being objective or affected by our subconscious.
I also found a priori and Kant's categories to be hard to grasp. But I felt that googling and reading other sources cleared it up a bit for me.