I am on Kant’s second Analogy. Now I understand generally what hes talking about and his theory of causation but I have yet to really dig in and get a rich understanding of the facets of this argument. I find as soon as I realise that something has relevance to my life then immediately I am able to grasp it with vigour (this has to do with reticular activation system I believe). Now, so far I have not been able to find it interesting for this very reason. I have to find a channel to make it interesting.
Causation…I know its an important thing with alot of potential for my interest, but remind me again…why is this so?
Kant was insanely boring, followed by Hume. I hated reading both of their philosophical works and the only reason to read them in present-day society is because academic philosophers made careers out of it.
Causation is important because it is useful to belive that stepping in front of an oncoming bus will hurt. A lot. You don’t need Kant for this.
The deeper you get into Kant, the more confusing he is. This is solely because Kant was himself confused. Be angry that your prof is forcing you to study Kant. Object, loudly. Gnash your teeth. Not since Plato has anyone done so much to render philosophy incoherent and trivial.
Leave the facets alone. Keep it as superficial as possible. Find some other secondary sources that pretend to make Kant coherent.
Now if you are having trouble reading the first critique, I do not recommend buying a secondary source from a Kant scholar. Instead you should go straight to the horse’s mouth and read the “Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics”, a summary written by Kant to keep the reader from getting lost under the verbiage and losing sight of the critique’s point. Furthermore, if you have to derive practicality from a philosopher’s ideas before being capable of appreciating them, then all I can say about Kant’s epistemology and ontology is that if you desire to acquire knowledge, then Kant’s system may tell you which paths do not lead to it, possibly saving you the hassle of going round in circles and ending up without anything. Of course, he may be wrong too, but I will leave that up to you to decide.
I don’t see why so many people hate him. I’m no expert by any means, but I’ve been reasonably exposed to his work and I think that it’s a nice little system that he’s come up with really.
You just have to wade through a lot of meaningless babble and bullshit to get to the good points. For the impatient type like me, it makes perfect sense why I dislike doing something like that.
Or you can get acrobat reader to read it out loud to you in that sweet Stephen Hawking voice while you smoke pot and masturbate. Let a book play once a day for about a month, and you’ll soak it all in with no effort at all, and you can make good use of the time by pleasuring yourself as it goes along.
Do not dismiss something because of your own shortcomings, because what looks like meaningless drivel in the German idealists’ books often turns out to be very relevant when you delve deeper into their systems. Instead, I recommend expanding your attention span, for it is very rewarding when you put some effort into reading a book and the fog begins to lift.
It’s more likely that the mind-body dilemma is solved before my attention span gets larger, there’s little I can do about it. It’s genetic! It’s instinctual! It’s determinism!..
How can anybody who is at all interested i philosophy find Hume boring? I don’t get this, sure, you can argue with his views, but Hume is that rarity: a philosopher who is a good, (mostly) clear, writer. Of course, the same does not apply to Kant. The reason why you have to study these people is that its rather difficult to make much sense of the history of philosophy after Kant without some knowledge of Kant. And Kant makes more sense after reading Hume first, because so much of what Kant says can be read as a reaction to Hume.
I don’t think you can make it particularly relevant really, but to be honest how much philosophy is, really, relevant?
As to why people hate Kant, well he is a horribly dry writer, but I do rather appreciate his ingenious solutions. Utter nonsense of course, but there’s a lot of sense to the view that the smarter the philosopher, the crazier the theory.
Personally from my own studies of Kant, I think he makes a lot of assumptions for his system to work, generally by a method of reduction to arrive at one necesarry category or another.
Ponty, are you familiar with his second analogy at all?
I agree with this- ‘The reason why you have to study these people is that its rather difficult to make much sense of the history of philosophy after Kant without some knowledge of Kant.’ and its the main reason I took Kant in the first place. Even though Ive found him hard, I do have a better appreciation of where he fits into the grand scheme of things now, as I always used to read the more contemporary guys refering to him, usually deriding him , so now I know WHY .
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