[quote=“ScottMears”]
[quote=“kesh”]
There are a few Apolcalpse (of the Marvel genera) wannabes of philosophy/intelligence here. Its generally alot more synaptically stimulating to follow up a verbal attack with a visualized fight. It’d be great to put philsophers into a kinda Marvel chaotic final battle for superiority scenerio: you’d get the ancient big three of Soc, Plat, Arist who’s world and lives are so… old and different its hard to imagine, it’s even harder to imagine that people will one day think the same of ‘our times’ etc. Those guys’d be massive. Then theres your Descartes, Locke, Spinoza, Leibniz, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant. D, S and K been the central role characters with a love affair thrown in for the ladies. And then, oh no! Hegel (who’d be wearing a cloak). Then would come Team Existential: Kierk, Niet, Sat and there allies. Marx joining with a big hammer. Heid, Witt, Russ and co the type that run up throw a bunch and run for safety. Add a few others i’ve missed into the mix and woooooooo!
Who’d come out the blood covered exhausted champ?
Kant would totally dominate.
Perhaps next to Ric Flair, Kant is the greatest philosophical mind the West has produced. I’ve struggled through the Critique of Pure Reason, but needed secondary sources to “get him”, to the extent that I do. His formulation of the categorical imperative as part of our moral “furniture” is confirmed by many current schools of cognitive neuroscience. Most biopsychologists agree that an innate “moral grammar” as well as precepts such as causation or number are part of our genetic inheritance.
Some of Kant’s conclusions don’t withstand the findings of many cognitive scientists. Lakoff and Johnson in “Philosophy in the Flesh” find that contrary to Kant’s views of autonomy and rationality, we are greatly constrained in the way we can think, pointing to the power of the “cognitive unconscious” which is acknowledged to largely govern how we can think and how we can conceive of the world. (p.537)“Our unconscious conceptual systems, which structure the cognitive unconscious, limit how we can think and guarantee that we could not possibly have the kind of autonomy that Kant ascribed to us.”
All foundational and evaluative questions lead back to Kant, who addressed all the questions and set the table for thinkers to the time we post.
In a "Pre-Postmodern Royal Rumble, Russell may have an unfair advantage because he lived much too long. But Kant saved science from Hume’s destruction of causation, and without science these posts and this forum wouldn’t be here. Kant, just before dying of cerebral exhaustion, throws a 99 year old Russell over the top rope. It isn’t necessary, Russell dies, when realizing his solution to the “Liar Paradox” has been rejected by a peer review at ILovePhilosophy.