This is asking a lot, I know, but is there somebody out there who could give a brief summary of Kant’s metaphysics - or at least what they personally make of it.
Seraph
It’s bloody confusing, hard to read and can be interpreted in different ways. I didn’t really bother with it much in my course, didn’t interest me very much, I think he was a great philosopher and all that, but he isn’t a very good writer, and metaphysics isn’t one of my favourite areas of philosophy, so I could never be bothered to slog through the book. I don’t know if something is lost in the translation.
A very brief explanation if you’re familiar with philosophy to degree level:
wfu.edu/~hhardgra/kantmet.html
I noticed a mention of Aristotolean logic in there, I’m not sure how critical it was to his argument, but that logic has been completely abandoned for modern logic started by Frege which allowed universal quantification.
www-philosophy.ucdavis.edu/phi151/KANT19TH.HTM
is moderatly good as well, check the link to metaphysics, but again you need a half decent grasp of philosophy to understand it.
The best simple one I found was
meta-religion.com/Philosophy … hysics.htm
This seems to be the only one which mentions synthetic a priori truths which were key to Kant’s metaphysics, though I only scanned all the links to check they were right and were what I know of Kant. Interestingly enough this one seems to be a religious site, but the synopsis of Kant’s metaphysics is pretty right.
They were all taken from google if you want to look for more.
cheers matt,
Yep, I am up to degree level. I’ll take a look at those, thanks. I think the problem with his writing is that he wrote in german and you are relying on translation. A good translator is not necessarily a good philosopher and vice versa!
Seraph
Here’s a short eassy, about Kant’s and Schopenhauer’s idea’s on external world and how we relate to it.
How we and other life relates to the external world
The world we see, (what we see is different from the complete world, which I shall come to in a moment) is constructed only in our minds built from the stimuli receive from our 5 senses. While our 5 senses show us a picture of the world, it doesn’t show us the complete picture. We only see part of the light spectrum, we can see visible light, but not infrared. We can only hear part of all the sounds that are made in the world, like the way you can’t hear a dog-whistle when its calling a dog, yet the dog still comes running. So all the stimuli that exist yet don’t get experienced by any of our senses go unnoticed as if they didn’t exist when in fact they are quite real. This breaks the world into two sections, the world we can experience and the world, which can only be known through inference. This is what I take Kant and Schopenhauer meaning when they use the words Phenomenon (the world we can experience through our senses, which only exists in are minds because it’s the partial picture of the world), and Noumenal (which is the complete world that exists in reality, but we can never see, as the only world we can see must be filtered through our senses. The real raw world can never be made know to us, as our senses both allow and block it from forming in our mind’s eye).
It’s from using our 5 senses to build the Phenomenon world, which only exists in our mind, and then using our powers of reason and logic to deduce knowledge of the Noumenal. We use the Phenomenon world of our senses, which can be a valid interpretation although only ever a subset of the Noumenal world to distil knowledge of how the Noumenal world operates. These operations are normally hidden from us, as we don’t directly experience them through a sense or gain knowledge of them directly. But using our conscious mind we can logically order events that happen on the Noumenal, which we perceive in the Phenomenon to understand what went unseen, but was implied.
So we can see that the Noumenal world follows rules, yet we can never see the actual rules. As the Phenomenon world does not show them, but implies them. We only see the Noumenal world as it’s represented by the Phenomenon world of our mind and in the Phenomenon we can see that some events cause other events to happen. There must be rules for how this happens, as the Noumenal world would be in a constant state of chaos. The Mind works logically, and our mind is a part of the Noumenal, so the Noumenal must also have the ability to work logically, otherwise our minds would be unable to do logical thinking.
It should be noted that our body lives in the Noumenal, but we can only see it through the Phenomenon. Like the way the eye can never see its’ self, but can see the world.
They also believed that all our knowledge comes from the external world. Meaning if we can think of something, it’s because we perceived it in some form from the world of the Phenomenon. We can’t have an original thought; everything comes from our perceptions of the world as it’s represented to us.
Pax Vitae
Thanks pax vitae - very kind of you to post that.
Johann, I can’t believe that you have nothing to say about Kant!?!?