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Kant, Critique of Pure Reason
Do we get to read any Hume any time soon?
It almost seems as though he’s saying that once we are beyond the bounds of experience, beyond a posteriori, we are free to make up our own a priori (fictions), but that we’d better do so wisely… This is a very curious paragraph.
I’m glad that you posted that, I re-read this paragraph several times trying to extract all of the pertinent substance. I wish that Kant would explain what exactly he means when he uses the word “necessary”. He uses it frequently and with precise intention, but I am not sure what that intention is.
I wonder if anything that we assume we are born with, aside from reflexes, is actually inherent. It is possible that the collective consciousness is passed verbally to each new life, and not some innate part of each of us.
Two sources of human knowledge:
sense (experience) and understanding (reason)
“no conceptions must enter it which contain aught empirical”
Foundation: principles of pure reason
pro·pae·deu·tic
adj.
Providing introductory instruction.
n.
Preparatory instruction.
or·ga·non
A set of principles for use in scientific or philosophical investigation.
cp. Descartes’ Tree of Philosophy
Determining “extent and limits” of Reason “beyond the confines of experience.”
How do metaphysical questions arise?
K claims that questions that cannot be answered by empirical reason arise in every person
In the omitted section, Kant distinguishes between analytic and synthetic knowledge.
Analytic: affirmative subject/predicate statement in which the predicate’s concept is contanined in the subject’s concept. (i.e., “All bipeds are two-footed.”)
Synthetic: Everything else
Critique of Plato
Image of dove “cleaving the thin air” which provides resistance AND support
the “constructions of our fictions” HA! 🙂
The “charm” of getting “beyond the bounds of experience” …unless faced with “evident contradiction,” we “hurry on undoubtingly in our course”…
Cp Descartes’ foundation building, First Meditations
We have cognitions that do not derive from experience: God, freedom of will, and immortality.
critiquing Hume’s notion of causal reasoning, which is that neither demonstrative nor probable reasoning will show causality. Instead, we rely on custom or habit, forming an association of ideas. Vivacity distninguishes conceptions from beliefs; our beliefs are not products of reason, but of these workings of imagination.
A priori cognitions are (1) not derived, and (2) universal.
A Priori defined
Pure and Impure a priori