*** ***
On this day in Round and Square History 20 October 2012—Just Do It Over: First and Second Presidential Debates (c)
20 October 2011—Styling Culture: Exhausted Words and Phrases
 |
| [a] Appearing to consciousness RF |
Our attaintment of enlightenment is something like the reflection of the
moon in water. The moon does not get wet, nor is the water cleft apart...
The whole moon and the whole sky find room enough in a single dewdrop...
—Dōgen, Conversations
One of the best explanations I have ever read of Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is embedded in Brian Magee's superb autobiography Confessions of a Philosopher. As we leave the "East" (for now) and head back to the Husserlian Swirls, let's look at several excellent paragraph from Magee's chapter that sets us up for our continuing conversations.
 |
| [b] Caus...ality RF |
Consider it our Prolegomena to Any Future Phenomenology.
In his Introduction to the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics Kant tells us that the whole of his Critique of Pure Reason is an attempt to solve Hume's [puzzle] "in its widest implications." The attempt leads him to the most radical reconstruction of the theory of knowledge that anyone has ever carried out. At the end of it he pronounces that the whole nature of the world as we experience it dependent on our apparatus for experiencing, with the inevitable consequence that things as they appear to us are not the same as things as they are in themselves.
Most characteristics that our experiences have are contingent: an object of perception can be of this material or that, of this colour or that, of these dimensions or those, and so on and so forth. We find out what they are by observing them and reading off their characteristics from our observations; and we do this both in our commonsense activities and in our science.
 |
| [c] Contingent RF |
But there are some characteristics of which we can say with certainty in advance that any object of experience has to possess them if it is to be an object of experience at all. We cannot, for instance, perceive any object without perceiving it to be something, and as capable of being acted on causally by other things, and as having a location in three-dimensional space, and in one-dimensional time.
These are not characteristics of the world we learn about by reading them off from our experiences: they are things we know with certainty in advance of all possible experience. They are preconditions that have to be met before anything can be an experience at all. And in this fact we find the solution to Hume's problem.[1]
Ponder this. We'll pick it up tomorrow (and, in some of my classes...in class).
Notes
[1] Brian Magee, The Confessions of a Philosopher (New York: Random House, 1997), 143-144.
Bibliography
Magee, Brian. The Confessions of a Philosopher. New York: Random House, 1997.
No comments:
Post a Comment