I read some from Critique Of Pure Reason last night, The strikingist thing for me, is that Kant said that common thinking can’t be applied to abstract subjects. I realised by then, that is exactly what most of us having been doing throughout our entire history.
When the Labour talks about freedom in this way, the Conservatives talks about freedom in the other way. They all have supporters, because according to Kant, none of them can be wrong. The two ideas are the antinomies (spelling right?) that Kant had defined.
There are many contrasting ideas in my life, I wonder if that is because that I have been applying the wrong way of thinking.
But what is the right way to think about abstract ideas? Have Kant worked it out already?
If you have seen my posts on these boards, you might have noticed i usually just parasite off of great writers i have read instead of putting forward much of my own thought. Here i will invoke the Transcendental Thomists. Kant thought we cannot know every thing – and that boils down to saying we know nothing. But we don’t know nothing. There must be a problem. Consider this: – in the old regime he speaks of that the barbarians have destroyed, there was an understanding of the intellect and of the metaphysics of knowledge which allowed for actually knowing things. [I reference Rahner for this argument.]
In the antimony you mentioned, i think there is a problem with definitions. Perhaps you are using the idea that thoughts are tied to words (nominalism?) – but they’re not. Words refer to thoughts. Those two camps mean something different from each other by the word “freedom”. Is this an acceptable interpretation of that problem?
IMO, Kant is not the solution to the barbarians, he is part of the problem (at least in epistemology – (but on all accounts he was a very nice man)).
Why not just read the Greeks, didn’t they manage to do it better anyway? Not that I am familiar with all the Scholastics, but my understanding is if you simply changed some Aristotle to mention God, you would get basically the same thing.
I kid… really i am not sure if Hume ever addressed causation in relation to ideas, or merely the physical world around us. Having never thought of it like that, it does kind of put the brain on a pedestal, no?
I think Hume can lead to all sorts of whacky stuff, like Nihilism, Solipsism, and a very stern form of Skepticism that rejects even itself.
he did… when he discovered the error of inductive reasoning, all the fruit of that tree, e.g. science, was tainted… he even denied that the self could be anything but flux… yes he does lead to all sorts of wacky stuff, but the thing is, he has yet to be refuted… even most modern epistemologists who would rather ignore the inductive fallacy have to admit to its being an effective counter to any inductive conclusions…
An interesting point. The idea of Scholasticism is Christians in schools learning ancient philosophy (and Lombard). They do this for a few hundred years, then the rationalists cause a break during the Enlightenment. I don’t know why, but they left the tradition and started a new tradition which is just frustrating in how they never get around to answering questions because they don’t believe you can know things. Enter the neo-Scholastics (huzzah!) in the early 20th who try to answer modern problems according to the Old Tradition – a return to sanity.
So, i see the Scholastic as mostly a commentary on the classical schools of thought. And they’re much more fun to study than the moderns for the reason given.
I agree, but I meant ideas as in deductive. That the inductive is flawed is deductively true, but if all deduction is but ultimately inductive. Thus:
Nihil es in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu.
Nothing is in the intellect that was not previously in the senses.
If the Empirical is the inductive, and the rational is the Deductive, and the Rational is ultimately Empirical, then Hume falls to his own argument. Of course, I making some pretty big generalizations and a fair load of assumptions, but it could be possible that, for Hume to truly be right, he would have to refute himself.
Look forward to your reply, as this has been bothering me alot lately.
Screw the Kant definations! Get my head going man.
Let’s concentrate on real life. War on Irak. Bush: What f*** freedom you have if the whole of Amerikaz blown up? Kerry: What f*** freedom you have if you can’t choose wether you wana eat a bullet or not?
Is Bush wrong? Is Kerry bulls***ing? Can you come up with an argument that can deny either of them? If you can’t, whodhel would you vote for?
After the holybible? I just can’t think of two books that are more contrasting to each other!
What’s so imorptant about bible anyway? I’ve benn studing all my life so far, but I’ve never came acros the book before. What did bible give me? S***. What did bible give the biblers? Selfcomfort. You know? Like… masterbation and stuff.
Morality comes from the Bible not from Aristotle and certainly it isn’t made up as Rousseau suggested. Whether you admit it or not, whether you’ve read it or not, morality comes from the Bible.
“The existence of the Bible, as a book for the people, is the greatest benefit which the human race has ever experienced. Every attempt to belittle it is a crime against humanity.” – Kant
