I’m sure these posts are getting old by now, but despite the acrimony and heated nature of these discussions, I do think a good deal of progress has been made in clarifying points, posing questions, and developing positions. I doubt that ultimately there will be any consensus, but this development of respective positions is itself worthwhile and, I think, it is refreshing to see an actual philosophical debate taking place rather than endless exegesis on texts without asking the much broader question “is this position true?”. It’s a shame that these discussions have to get so ugly. I’m guilty of being ugly in some of my rhetorical tactics, as are, I think others. Over at Grundledung, there’s a post up discussing the recent debates surrounding Kant, Meillassoux, realism and anti-realism, announcing a more thorough discussion of Kant to come. At the end of his post, Grundledung writes:
In the posts that follow, I will concentrate on three cases, with an eye towards why the readings of Kant matter. (I won’t address the recent hot topic concerning time and ancestrality, since I can’t devote the energy to it, especially as tempers are flaring once again.). Again, the aim will be to show why a focus on Kant is not a morbid fixation but a useful piece of the puzzle. I want to show how the cases I’ll look at bear upon substantive issues in metaphysics, epistemology and ethics, even when abstracted from the historical issue of what Kant thought. Also, I shall try to counter the second-guessing of the motivations of critics of speculative realism, providing some symptomatological musings of my own. However, I also want to issue a plea for a bit of old-fashioned bourgeois civility, which would not go amiss on all sides. I’ve no interest in questioning other people’s intelligence or integrity.
Unfortunately I’m having difficulty linking directly to the post, but that aside, I cannot agree more. It is difficult to practice this sort of civility in the heat of debate, but I do think it’s something worth striving for. As I’ve remarked before, I do not think that sarcasm and jest translate well in this medium, and they often are counter-productive to the course of discussion, shifting the discussion to the speakers involved rather than the analysis and evaluation of the claims being made. Everything spirals out of control. It’s difficult to understand why these philosophical discussions get so heated or ugly.
read on!
Anyway, back to the issue at hand. Over at Speculative Heresy, Alexei draws attention to a passage series of passages from Meillassoux’s After Finitude and concludes that he is basically stating that the correlationist must reject the big bang or be inconsistent with his philosophical premises. I reproduce most of Alexei’s quotations and analysis here:
When speaking of a Kantian approach to ancestral statements, QM writes
It is the intersubjectivity of the ancestral statement […] that guarantees its objectivity, and hence its ‘truth.’ it cannot be anything else, since its referent, taken literally, is unthinkable (AF 15)
And,
The logical (consitutive, originary) anteriority of givenness over the being of the given therefore enjoins us to subordinate the apparent sense of the ancestral statement to a more profound counter-sense, which is alone capable of delivering its meaning: it is not ancestrality which precedes givenness, but that which is given in the present which retrojects a seemingly ancestral past. (AF 16)
And,
the correlationist […] end[s] up with a rather extraordinary claim: the anscestral statement is a true statement, in that it is objective, but one whose referent cannot possibly have actually existed in the way this truth describes it It is a true statement, but what it describes as real is an impossible event; it is an ‘objective’ statement, bu it has no conceivable object. Or to put it more simply: it is a non-sense (AF 17)
Finally, from the same page as the last,
There is no possible compromise between the correlaion and the arche-fossil: once one has acknowledged one, one has thereby disqualified the other. In other words, the consistent correlationist should stop being modest and dare to assert openly that he is in a position to provide the scientist with an a priori demonstration that the latter’s ancestral statements are illusory; for the correlationist knows that what they describe can never have taken place the way it is described.
So all these quotations aside, I think a nice, synthetic reformulation is my paraphrase: If you’re a correlationist,” says QM, “you must think that the big bang is a fiction, or not be consistent!”
Alexei is correct, this is what Meillassoux is arguing. In fact, it gets even worse. Unfortunately I don’t have After Finitude at hand, but Meillassoux, in a rather snide moment, goes as far, at one point, with comparing the correlationist with a young earth creationist.
I think all of this fails to make much sense if we do not understand what is central to Meillassoux’s entire argument. When Meillassoux evokes the arche-fossil and ancestral statements, he is not interested in just any old claim about the ancestral. Rather, at the core of Meillassoux’s arguments are precisely those instances of the ancestral relating directly to the emergence of life and, more specifically, human consciousness. In other words, the key issue for Meillassoux is that of what we are to make of claims that life, mind, consciousness, humans, etc., are the result of natural causes.
The question here should be that of why this particular case is so important to Meillassoux. Why should neurological claims and evolutionary claims be any different than any other scientific claims with respect to correlationist thought? One point worth keeping in mind is that when Kant wrote the Critique of Pure Reason, there was neither a neurological account of consciousness, nor a theory of evolution. Consequently, within the Kantian framework of natural science, these issues were not even on the radar. Kant could comfortably make claims about the nature of mind and consciousness without having to think of mind as an object of natural science.
Matters, however, change with the advent of evolutionary theory and neurology. With neurology, for example– which Meillassoux doesn’t evoke –mind because just one more object governed by natural laws. This object is very complex, of course, but it is not, nonetheless, outside of nature. In these discussions I have seen others, on a number of occasions, claim that there is no conflict between neurology and a Kantian account of mind. However, look at how Kant resolves the third antinomy. The third antinomy revolves around the debate between free will and determinism. Unlike the first two antinomies where both opposing positions turn out to be false, the third and forth antinomy are resolved by showing how the apparently conflict between the two positions is just that, apparent, and that therefore both positions are true. As a crude sketch of Kant’s solution to the third antinomy, Kant argues that at the level of phenomena or appearances, all things, including mind, are governed by cause and effect relations. However, at the level of things-in-themselves, or the domain beyond appearances, the categories no longer apply so there is no contradiction in the claim that we are free at this level.
I am not here trying to make the case that all of our actions are determined or to advocate determinism. Rather, what I wish to draw attention to is this split between appearances and things-in-themselves with respect to mind. From the standpoint of neurology what Kant is, in effect, claiming is that brain is not really a condition of consciousness or mind because we are here only talking about appearances. So the Kantian is simultaneously claiming that at the level of appearances all these observations about brains are true, but since we’re only here talking about appearances brain is nonetheless not the condition or ground of mind or consciousness. In other words, it seems to me that this is a tricky and sophisticated way of remaining a dualist. But this is precisely what cannot be accepted within the framework of neurological accounts of mind or within the framework of evolution because in both cases mind is the result of natural causes, not some beyond forever unimpeachable by natural causes. I certainly agree that we should raise questions of whether or not we’re free, but these questions must be posed within the framework of a realist neurological account of mind, not an account that treats these findings as mere appearances.
April 28, 2009 at 5:06 pm
[…] action: Grundlegung has a post on the matter, with Levi’s always-already-there response here, plus a couple of exchanges at Larval Subjects and a continuation of the thread at Speculative […]
April 28, 2009 at 5:40 pm
I’m sorry, my bullshit detector just exploded – what? Seriously, Levi, I know we’ve been mean to each other for no reason sometimes, or just in the heat of the battle, but once in a while I’m just utterly shocked at some of your statements (the same way you are amused by my lack of understanding of evolution/neurology, but I’m not a scientists, so it’s understandable) – the whole point of antinomies – all four of them – is that you propose a thesis and an antithesis and you can logically demonstrate that both are true, that’s the puzzle. I’m almost tempted to copy some below, since they are very short. I mean it would take you 5 minutes to glance at them to see that you are wrong. I promised myself I will not intervene when you (according to me) misread Kant, unless it’s essential, but this is a different case.
It’s actually a very simple way. And who is claiming that Kant is a monist or a materialist or a realist like yourself? Of course, Kant would not agree that mind=brain in your crude materialist way, but he is hardly alone in his stance, please stop misleading everyone by suggesting that everyone but a few rogue idiots are “dualists” and think that mind=brain. I think Alexei had a long exchange about this with you when he tried to show you that you are not getting the distinction between empirical/transcendental ego, so I won’t go there again.
April 28, 2009 at 5:47 pm
Your whole attitude toward Kant is basically this: I think X, Kant seems to think Y, therefore, Kant is wrong – can you just leave the old Prussian along? You found gaping contradictions right in the heart of his philosophy, contradictions that apparently went unnoticed by generations of scholars (or they’ve repressed them in bad conscience), you found Kant to be a parochial backwaters pre-scientific mediocrity – Why do you keep bringing him up? Do you really think that you are taking on some Kantian orthodoxy here and clearing the path for humanity’s future? Please, just leave Kant alone already, I beg you. Let us, Kantian idiots, revel in our love for the Master without your stinging criticisms that ever so cruelly threaten to destroy our very being. Whatever happened to the good old days of proposing principles and formulating new fresh original philosophy? Can we just go back there? Please?
April 28, 2009 at 5:57 pm
Levi,
Forgive me from entering this debate through your reports, but since you and I have the most philosophical overlap, I feel that I can come to grips with the arguments best by finding out where you and I diverge. This, instead of treating the hot-blooded Kantians with disputation.
When you write,
“When Meillassoux evokes the arche-fossil and ancestral statements, he is not interested in just any old claim about the ancestral. Rather, at the core of Meillassoux’s arguments are precisely those instances of the ancestral relating directly to the emergence of life and, more specifically, human consciousness. In other words, the key issue for Meillassoux is that of what we are to make of claims that life, mind, consciousness, humans, etc., are the result of natural causes.”
I wonder if you can translate this issue back into Maturana and Varela’s theory of Autopoiesis, which I believe you have some affinity for. Now this theory is strongly naturalistic, one in which evolution and biology plays a heavy role. Now, is Autopoiesis for you Realist or Anti-Realist.
It seems to me that the content of the theory is realist, in that it claims that organisms indeed do have these autopoietic structures, and that life fundamentally works in the fashion, but it also seems that we can say it is Kantian, in the sense that the theory argues that each organism is organizationally closed, and its cognitive actions are really recursively defined. The organism cannot in a sense, ever “get out” of its skin. To explain the connection between organisms, as you know, they invoke structural coupling. This primary coupling wherein regularities of the environment are coupled to regularities in the organism, and then secondary coupling where regularities between organisms are coupled.
Now, does not Kant’s hermeticism of human knowledge simply circumscribe the species horizon of human cognition, a skin which can only be “coupled” with an environment, but which can never be “known” in terms not already recursive to the domain of shared criteria.
Is not Autopoeisis Kantian in a certain sense, or at least Anti-Realist? If you can explain to me why Autopoeisis fulfills your Realist demands, I’ll have a much better picture of what is at stake for you.
April 28, 2009 at 5:57 pm
Mikhail,
This just isn’t the case:
Truth is a property of propositions or judgments, not of arguments. Arguments are either valid or invalid, sound or unsound, weak or strong. The point of the antinomies is not that both sides of the antinomy are “true”, but that we can provide valid arguments for both of the opposing positions which poses a serious problem for reason. Kant resolves the first two antinomies by showing that both claims (i.e., propositions) of each antinomy are false, and resolves the third and fourth antinomy by showing that both claims are in fact true and that the contradiction is only apparent.
April 28, 2009 at 6:01 pm
M.E.: “You found gaping contradictions right in the heart of his philosophy, contradictions that apparently went unnoticed by generations of scholars (or they’ve repressed them in bad conscience), you found Kant to be a parochial backwaters pre-scientific mediocrity – Why do you keep bringing him up? Do you really think that you are taking on some Kantian orthodoxy here and clearing the path for humanity’s future? Please, just leave Kant alone already, I beg you. Let us, Kantian idiots, revel in our love for the Master without your stinging criticisms that ever so cruelly threaten to destroy our very being.”
Kvond: The truth can only be told as a fiction, someone once say.
April 28, 2009 at 6:02 pm
Moreover, insisting that for Kant mind = brain does not make it so. I don’t see how one can endorse the arguments of the third antinomy and hold this position. As for this:
I am not sure what any of this has to do with anything and it strikes me as a bunch of red herrings, smokescreens, and ridicule that is not related to the issues being discussed. I’ve noticed that every time I address some issue in Kant’s text– which incidentally you requested from me originally –you fly off the handle like this. I am not simply saying “I think X, Kant things Y, therefore Kant is wrong”. Clearly you have little idea of what actually constitutes an argument if you think this is what is going on. I am pointing to things that are very well substantiated in the case of, for example, neurology and arguing that Kant can’t account for these things. I could be mistaken. If I am, the burden is on you to show how Kant can deal with these criticisms. Simply insisting that there is no conflict here is not actually an argument but is an instance of question begging and pounding the table loudly.
April 28, 2009 at 6:04 pm
One final point:
Yes, Alexei and I had a long discussion about this issue but I did not find his argument compelling as I do not think the transcendental ego can be separated from embodiment in this way. I presented that argument, following Meillassoux, in my third post on Meillassoux which you are free to examine here:
https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2009/04/04/meillassoux-iii-rejoinders-and-responses/
I am not “misinterpreting” Kant on this distinction– I know he makes that distinction –but I am presenting my reasons for rejecting that distinction.
April 28, 2009 at 6:50 pm
I wrote:
You wrote:
Where did I say anything about arguments, even if you were right, I wrote that in antinomy a thesis (a proposition) and an antithesis (a counter proposition) are both shown to be true. Thesis is a proposition, look it up in a dictionary.
April 28, 2009 at 6:59 pm
Levi, you are confused on the antimonies, and I mean it in a friendly way, read up a bit – maybe even online encyclopedia article or something, because this is not one of those contentious points where people argue over it – they argue about the implications, but not about what Kant says antinomies are:
“The contradictory claims could both be proven [to be true] because they both shared the mistaken metaphysical assumption that we can have knowledge of things as they are in themselves, independent of the conditions of our experience of them.”
April 28, 2009 at 7:24 pm
I really have little interest in intervening in this debate, and I certainly don’t want to revisit old ones (those hounds are fast asleep), but folks following might be interested in a minor point concerning Kant’s German. What’s translated into English as ‘mind,’ is Gemüt, which doesn’t really correspond to what we normally mean by ‘mind’ in English (i.e. a body-indepedendent substance, a pure consciousness, etc). I mean, really, ‘Gemüt‘ is embodied and affective mind. I’m too lazy to go through the German to really prove this, but those interested can take a peak at Howard Caygill’s A Kant Dictionary. There’s an entry for Gemüt therein, which lays everything out quite nicely. Point being, there’s no mind-body duality in Kant (hence the refutation of problematic idealism), and to that extent the mind simply is the body. Hence, whatever the body turns out to be is what the mind turns out to be.
April 28, 2009 at 7:35 pm
Mikhail,
I just think you’re wrong in your understanding of what’s taking place in the antinomies. The issue is not that both can be “proven to be true”, but rather because a valid argument can be given for both the thesis and the antithesis the truth or falsity of the thesis and the antithesis becomes undecidable. Since you don’t provide page numbers I can’t track down your quote. When you place “to be true” in brackets, is that your own addition to the text or not? As Kant explains in “The Antinomy of Pure Reason; Second Section; Antithetic of Pure Reason”, “each of them is not only without contradiction in itself but even meets the conditions of its necessity in the nature of reason itself, only unfortunately the opposite has on its side equally valid and necessary grounds for its assertion” (A421/B449).
As Kant further elaborates in the Prolegomena (http://philosophy.eserver.org/kant-prolegomena.txt):
I apologize for the lack of page numbers. My copy of the Prolegomena is at home so I’m working with the online version. Kant goes on to remark that,
This is therefore a decisive experiment, which must necessarily expose any error lying hidden in the assumptions of reason.32 Contradictory propositions cannot both be false, except the concept, which is the subject of both, is self-contradictory; for example, the propositions, “a square circle is round, and a
square circle is not round,” are both false. For, as to the former it is false, that the circle is round, because it is quadrangular; and it is likewise false, that it is not round, that is, angular, because it is a circle. For the logical criterion of the impossibility of a concept consists in this, that if we presuppose it, two contradictory propositions both become false; consequently, as no middle between them is conceivable, nothing at all is thought by that concept. (sec. 52b)
In the first two antinomies Kant will show that there is a genuine contradiction between the thesis and the antithesis and that both thesis and antithesis are false:
In the third and fourth antinomy, by contrast, Kant will argue that the contradiction between the thesis and the antithesis is only apparent and that they are actually compatible and that both thesis and antithesis are true:
This is exactly what I said in my post. Moving on to my discussion of the third antinomy which I did not quote in the text because I unwisely took it that knowledge of how Kant resolves the third antinomy is so commonplace that any discussion of it did not require textual support, Kant writes,
The neurological challenge to Kant, as I see it, is that mind itself is now being treated as subject to natural cause and effect and as resulting from natural processes. That is, mind is the product of these natural cause and effect relations. But if this is the case, I don’t see how we can argue that there is an “in-itself” dimension of mind independent of natural causality. On these grounds, I don’t see how one can simultaneously be a Kantian and advocate a neurological account of mind. Maybe you or someone else will explain this to me. By to my thinking, at least, it looks like one is simultaneously saying “mind has a natural ground in the brain that is governed by causality but not really because there’s this dimension of the in-itself to which the categories of causality cannot be applied.” In my view, if mind and consciousness is the result of brain and brain is governed by causal processes just as all other natural processes are, then this Kant move just doesn’t work. Either one sides with neurology and relinquishes the Kantian account or sides with Kant and relinquishes neurology.
April 28, 2009 at 7:37 pm
Alexei,
That might be Kant’s assertion, but I still don’t see how Kant can simultaneously hold that mind is body and that the categories of causality don’t apply to the mind as it is in itself. This is what I’m saying. One can make the assertion that mind is body as a Kantian, but I don’t see how they don’t end up falling back into some sort of dualism.
April 28, 2009 at 7:39 pm
Additionally, Alexei, can you present a better argument than a philological argument as to how the term Gemüt is used? We are all aware that philosophers use ordinary language in highly unusual and original ways, so I don’t know that this sort of “hermeneutic” argument gets the job done. Are there passages where Kant explicitly asserts the mind/body relations you’re suggesting and where he explicitly states that mind is a product of the body (and not just connected to the body as Descartes would claim)? I am not suggesting that such textual evidence cannot be found, but I haven’t come across it and would certainly be interested in seeing it.
April 28, 2009 at 7:57 pm
Levi’s right. The point is that for the first two antinomies, they can both be demonstrated true from the perspective of transcendental realism. But they can’t both be true from the perspective of transcendental realism, therefore transcendental realism must be false.
As for the second two, both premises are also simply contradictory from the perspectice of transcendental realism (and beginning from transcendental realism, both can be shown true). But the premises can be retained from the perspective of transcendental idealism–i.e. from the transcendental idealist perspective, which is the good one, they are both true. So we are both free and determined, depending on whether we examine phenomena for a chain of causes or whether we invoke responsibility and our supersensible nature. But it is not the case that there both is and is not a first cause in any transcendentally real sense.
Here is Allison, whom you told Levi to read to get a sense of your good, straight, boring Kant:
“The resolution of the first two or ‘Mathematical Antinomies’, which are concerned, respectively, with the extensive magnitude of the world…and the divisibility of matter..turns on showing that both the thesis and antithesis positions are false…Conversely, since the ‘Dynamical Antinomies’ …do not rest on such a self-contradictory conception, they leave room for the possibility that…both sides may be correct…”
April 28, 2009 at 7:58 pm
Look, you’re overcompensating with all these citations, as I said before, I know you’ve read Kant, in order to argue your point, you don’t need to throw a bunch of unprocessed crude textual data at me, I don’t have time to read all of this, just give me an argument – here’s your point:
So there is a thesis A and there is a “valid argument” given to show that a thesis A is true. Then there is an antithesis -A and, again, a “valid argument” is given to show that it is also true. We have a contradiction because A is true and -A is true: either there’s a logical mistake somewhere in the “valid arguments” or we have an antinomy in which case, because both A and -A are shown to be true, we can’t tell which one is “really true” but both are proven to be true, there’s no mistake in the proofs. Thus we have, for example, a rational argument that the world is finite, and equally rational argument that world is infinite = antinomy that cannot be solved by more rational arguments. What’s so difficult to understand here. All four antinomies (yes, different names, as you noticed) work the same way: thesis=true, antithesis=true, “holy shit what are we to do” moment, aha moment, done and tea-time moment.
I know you’re probably trying to impress all the invisible readers with your command of Kant, but really – I get it, you know a lot, but when you do make a mistake (like misreading my comments or occasionally slipping here and there) there is really no reason to be so stubborn in your error. We’re all humans here, no one’s going to crucify you for it. I think part of the tension in these debates comes from your almost constant refusal to back down from even the smallest points which produces the same reaction in me and others. It’s not all about the subject matter, Levi, it’s also about give-and-take, I think – but I may be wrong…
But hey who am I to lecture you on stubbornness, right?
April 28, 2009 at 8:00 pm
“The contradictory claims could both be proven [to be true] because they both shared the mistaken metaphysical assumption that we can have knowledge of things as they are in themselves, independent of the conditions of our experience of them.”
If they share mistaken assumptions, they can’t be proven to be TRUE, they can just be PROVEN, i.e. argued for validly. So “[to be true]” is an illicit addition.
April 28, 2009 at 8:10 pm
I take it that Kant’s whole discussion of intuition in the transcendental Aesthetic (and in particular his discussion of sensibility and the matter of intuition) provides the argument yuo’re asking for. So does the Refutation of Problematic Idealism.
I would typically agree with you that etymologies aren’t very helpful in philosophical discussion. But I’m not making an etymological argument. Had Kant wanted to imply something more abstract, less embodied, he could have used Geist or Seele. He explicitly distinguishes between Gemüt and Seele (the latter being reserved for rational psychology, and positions like Descartes.
But, again you don’t have to take my word for it. Look at Caygill’s book.
April 28, 2009 at 8:11 pm
Alexei: “following might be interested in a minor point concerning Kant’s German. What’s translated into English as ‘mind,’ is Gemüt, which doesn’t really correspond to what we normally mean by ‘mind’ in English (i.e. a body-indepedendent substance, a pure consciousness, etc). I mean, really, ‘Gemüt‘ is embodied and affective mind.”
Kvond: This is very interesting Alexei, and perhaps a way forward. As a possible connection Spinoza as well in his appendix to part one of Ethics makes a rather Kantian sounding statement about the “order of things” (which remains undefined). If it is true that Kant reads the “Gemüt” as the embodied, affective mind, the he and Spinoza are very close on this, the notion that we simply imagine the connections between things – This of course apparently flies in the face of much else that Spinoza seems to claim about the order of things (…the all important The order and connection [ordo et connexio] of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things. Ethics Part II, prop7), presenting something of a contradiction in Spinoza’s treatment of order. But if Kant is thinking of the affective mind is his very close to the same terrain that Spinoza is discussing, the nexus of the imagination and the intellect.
Spinoza:
“And those who do not understand the nature of things, but only imagine them, affirm nothing concerning things, and that the imagination for the intellect, they firmly believe, in their ignorance of things and of their own nature, that there is an order in things [ Latin: ordinem in rebus ]. For when things are so disposed that, when they are presented to us through the senses, we can easily remember them, and so easily remember them, we say that they are well-ordered [ bene ordinatas ]; but if the opposite is true, we say that they are badly ordered, or confused.
And since those things we can easily imagine are especially pleasing to us, men prefer order to confusion, as if order were anything in nature more than a relation to our imagination [quasi ordo aliquid in natura praeter respectum ad nostram imaginationem esset]…”
Appendix, Ethics Part I
April 28, 2009 at 8:17 pm
For what it’s worth, I have to say as a final result, pending any further explication, that following Davidson…
We must assume that you and I are responding and referring to the same features of the world when we understand each other, but what those features are to be called is completely historically contingent. This places any property ascription to features of the world in the “historically contingent” basket, yet with the understanding that we must be by and large, more often than not, talking about and responding to the same features in the world.
This makes me an non-Realist in terms of justifaction, but perhaps a Realist in terms of coherent stability of reference.
This really is the only Scylla and Charybdis negotiation I have seen offered.
April 28, 2009 at 11:01 pm
It’s not a misreading.
April 28, 2009 at 11:13 pm
Mikhail,
An argument does not prove something “true” simply by being valid. The premises can also be faulty, in which case the conclusion is not true. The antinomies argue from the (implied) premise of transcendental realism. Once this premise is abandoned, the conclusions of the mathematical antinomies are found to be false, whereas we are left with the possibility that the conclusions of the dynamic antinomies are true–as Kant himself says. Maybe you didn’t have time to wade through all Levi’s citations, so here’s Kant again:
“so that, as in the former case [mathematical antinomies], the opposed assertions are both false, in this case[dynamical], on the other hand, where they are opposed to one another by mere misunderstanding, they may both be true.”
(section 53)
If this doesn’t mean what it appears to, please explain.
April 29, 2009 at 3:30 am
Frank,
You’re totally right, I don’t know what I was thinking – that Allison quote really hit it home for me, I mean what a precise on-the-spot quotation? And that final “section 53” which is almost a full sentence quote from Kant is simply irrefutable – good god, how embarrassed am I?
Mikhail
April 30, 2009 at 7:16 pm
“One point worth keeping in mind is that when Kant wrote the Critique of Pure Reason, there was neither a neurological account of consciousness, nor a theory of evolution.”
Well, things might be somewhat more complicated; Kant did face some ideas that were at least heading in this direction. His dispute with Herder had to do with the question of the origin of the human mind out of nature. Now Herder´s theory was not a modern day naturalism, but evolutionary it was. So Kant had to consider these things, even though he did not give the clear (and strange) answers given by modern phenomenologists.
April 30, 2009 at 7:44 pm
Vril,
That’s all true. You might also add Diderot and Le Mettrie to the list as well. The difference, I think, is that these hypotheses were almost entirely speculative at this time given our scant knowledge of the workings of our brain. As such, they could easily be brushed aside as dogmatic.