Theme 1: Reflections after the Lecture and the Seminar

When I first read Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason”, it took me a long time, to understand some basic ideas. In contrast with Plato’s Theaetetus, that was easier to follow his thought, due to the answers and questions structure of the text. Although, after the lecture everything was clearer, there still were some blur parts that we discussed further in our seminar. The lecture and the seminar were very interesting and lead me to self reflection after I left the class. 

The Aristotelian world (cosmos) replaced by the mechanical world. Everything in the mechanical world picture has primary and secondary qualities. The primary qualities are the qualities that an object has inherited, independent of us, like form, weight and motion. The secondary qualities are the qualities that we perceive, and are not the presentence of the world itself. For instance colour, taste, coldness are some secondary qualities.  Pre Kant scientists support that in order to have knowledge, we have to represent the world independent of our experience, to represent it as it is by itself. This is the ideal of objectivity. If we want to achieve this we have to eliminate the human subject (body, sex, culture, etc.) for the production of knowledge. Which means, to use a view of nowhere, a god’s point of view. After the critique of pure reason has been written, all epistemologists are characterized as post Kant epistemologists, and argue that we can no longer accept the world as it is by itself.

So, we have analytic and synthetic judgments. An analytic judgment is knowledge we have a prior, a judgment that is verified before the experience. When you know a concept of something, you have a prior knowledge. For example, if you know the concept of the “class” you know that there are people in it. The concept of the class it will not exist if there are not people in it. But, you cannot know how many people are in a class, until you experience it. That is a synthetic judgment. Metaphysics is something we can say without verified it. For example, that the world has an end or that God exists. Kant is wondering if we can answer these questions by pure reason. His main question is “how is it possible to make synthetic knowledge about the world a prior?”. 

The answer is in the explanation of this phrase “Let us assume that our faculties of knowledge do not conform to objects, but the objects conform to our faculties of knowledge”.  Our faculties of knowledge consist of form of intuition and 12 categories. The forms of intuition are the space and the time. The physical world perceived only in space and time. The mind and our impressions are not enough to produce knowledge. So our impressions have to be organized into forms and categories to become knowledge. We know the world, we are using the forms, so we can have a prior synthetic knowledge. Kant suggests thinking in terms of meaning and not in terms of facts. Like Plato who has a similar opinion to experience the world through our eyes and ears and not with our eyes and ears, meaning that we learn with our soul. 

At the seminar we had an interesting conversation about the case that a baby has never been taught anything of his parents. Is he going to perceive the world as we perceive it? Maybe not, but he still will create a world to him. Like Mowgli, from the Jungle Book movie did.

One can say that “The meaning of world is depended on us. There is not such a world independent of us”.