Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

  • The Standard Picture of Kant’s Idealism

    This entry draws on Henry E. Allison, Kant's Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense, Yale University Press, 1983. "According to the standard picture, Kant's transcendental idealism is a metaphysical theory that affirms the unknowability of the 'real' (things in themselves) and relegates knowledge to the purely subjective realm of representations (appearances)." (p. 3)  P.F. Strawson and H. A. Prichard are exponents of this reading along with many others in the Anglosphere. The standard picture makes of Kant an inconsistent Berkeley who limits knowledge to appearances, these being understood as "mere representations" (blosse Vorstellungen), while at the same time positing an unknowable  realm of things in themselves.  Mere representations are assimilated to Berkeleian ideas so that when Kant states that we know only appearances, what he is telling us is that we know only the contents of our minds.

    The standard picture opens Kant to the devastating objection that by limiting knowledge to appearances construed as mental contents he makes knowledge impossible when his stated aim was to justify the objective knowledge of nature and oppose Humean skepticism. Allison reports that Prichard "construes Kant's distinction between appearances and things in themselves in terms of the classic example of perceptual illusion: the straight stick that appears bent to an observer when it is immersed in water." (p. 6)  But then knowledge is rendered impossible, and Kant is reduced to absurdity.

    Anyone who studies Kant in depth and in context and with an open mind should be able to see that his transcendental idealism is not intended as a subjective idealism. A related mistake is to think that subjective idealism is the only kind of idealism. The "standard picture" is fundamentally mistaken. Appearances (Erscheinungen) for Kant are not the private data of particular minds, and thus not ideas in the Cartesian-Lockean sense, or any other sort of content of a particular mind. Kant distinguishes crucially between Erscheinung and Schein/Apparenz between appearance and illusion/semblance. Because of this distinction, appearances cannot be assimilated to perceptual illusions in the way Prichard and the "standard picture" try to assimilate them.

    For Kant, the world of phenomena or appearances is a world of  public, intersubjectively accessible, objects.  If you don't understand this you will never understand what Kant is maintaining. So the straight stick lately mentioned is for Kant a phenomenon, a public object, not a private mental item, whereas its seeming bent is an illusory private content of those particular embodied minds who, because of accidental factors, are unable to perceive the stick as it is in empirical reality.

    The publicly accessible objects of the outer senses are said to be "empirically real, but transcendentally ideal." To understand this signature Kantian phrase, one needs to understand two distinctions, that between the ideal and the real, and that between the empirical  and the transcendental. The ideal is that which is 'inside the mind' and thus mind-dependent whereas the real is that which is 'outside the mind' and thus mind-independent. The inverted commas signal that these phrases are not to be taken spatially. 

    What is ideal is either empirically ideal or transcendentally ideal. The empirically ideal embraces the "private data of an individual mind." (Allison, p. 6) Included therein are what are normally taken to be mental contents and "ideas in the Cartesian-Lockean sense." The empirically real embraces the totality of public, intersubjectively knowable objects in space and time.  In a word, the natural world.  Kant's claim that he is an empirical realist, but not an empirical idealist, amounts to the affirmation that  that "our experience is not limited to the private domain of our own representations . . . ." (7).  It should now be perfectly obvious that Kant is not espousing a subjective idealism.  

    The planets and indeed everything in nature are empirically real. What then could it mean to say that these objects are transcendentally ideal?  It is to say that they are subject to certain "epistemic conditions" — I borrow the phrase from Allison — that make possible our knowledge of them.  Kant is clearly committed to there being a set of epistemic conditions without which empirical knowledge of empirically real objects would not be possible. Now in my humble opinion, Kant's theory of these epistemic conditions leaves a lot to be desired and is indeed without one univocal sense.  But this is not the issue at present. The issue is solely whether Kant's intent is to affirm a form of subjective idealism. The answer is that he is not. That is not his intent despite the existence of some passages that invite a subjectively-idealist reading. The proof that Kant is not promoting a subjective idealism is that his epistemic conditions, whatever they are, are not psychological or physiological.  

    A psychological condition is

    . . . some mechanism or aspect of the human cognitive apparatus that is appealed to in order to provide a genetic account of a belief or an empirical explanation of why we perceive things in a certain way. [. . .] Custom or habit, as used by Hume in his account of causality, is a prime example of such a psychological condition. As is well known, Kant was insistent in claiming that, although the appeal to such factors may be necessary to explain the origin of our beliefs and perceptions, or even of our knowledge "in the order of time" (der Zeit nach), it cannot  account for its objective validity. In Kant's terms it can answer the quaestio facti but not the quaestio juris.  The latter is the proper concern of the Critique, and this requires an appeal to epistemic conditions. (Allison, p. 11)

    It should now be quite clear that Kant is not promoting a subjective or psychological idealism. His project, or rather a large part of it,  is to secure the objectivity of our knowledge of nature in the teeth of Humean skepticism, and to do so without a deus ex machina, without bringing God into the picture as both Descartes and Berkeley do.  (The other main part of his project is to show that rationalist metaphysics is not a source of objective knowledge.) Whether Kant succeeds in his project is a further question. I don't believe he does.

    But if the question is whether Kant is espousing a subjective or psychological idealism, the answer is a resounding No.

    Bill Vallicella

    5 responses to “The Standard Picture of Kant’s Idealism”

  • And Then Along Came the ‘Sixties

    I can easily see
    How Merton lost his way
    By exposing himself
    To events of the day.

    Bill Vallicella

  • The Dialogue Form

    Scott Johnson, Learning from Euthydemus:

    The dialogue form is conducive to venturing otherwise forbidden thoughts in a time of persecution. The form might usefully be employed to address the shibboleths shoved down the throats of students like Euthydemus in our own day. Let us have our best teachers turn to the dialogue form with students touting “equity” versus equality, “affirmative action” and racial preferences versus equal treatment, the history of the founding of the United States versus the 1619 Project, the quandary of “reparations,” and so on.

    Bill Vallicella

  • On ‘Stuff’ and ‘Ass’

    A Substack language rant. Excerpt:

    'Ass' is another word gaining a currency that is already excessive. One wonders how far it will go. Will 'ass' become an all-purpose synecdoche? Run your ass off, work your ass to the bone, get your ass out of here . . . ask a girl's father for her ass in marriage? In the expression, 'piece of ass' the reference is not to the buttocks proper, but to an adjoining area. 'Ass' appears subject to a peculiar semantic spread. It can come to mean almost anything, as in 'haul ass,' which means to travel at a high rate of speed. I don't imagine that if one were hauling donkeys one could make very good time. So how on earth did this expression arise? (I had teenage friends who could not refer to a U-Haul trailer except as a U-Haul-Ass trailer.)

    Bill Vallicella

  • Facebook

    I gave it up for Lent. Lent came and went. I debated with myself whether to return.  Sugar Mountain  and his bots are a scrofulous crew, but FB's a  good place to offload interesting links and political animadversions so as not to clutter MavPhil.  It also brings people to my Substack articles.  If you can keep your FB time down to 30-60 minutes per day, it probably won't do too much damage to your mind and soul. There's some good stuff there. It is not all kitty kat pix and what-I-had-for-dinner.  By the way, my use of 'stuff' always carries  a slightly pejorative connotation.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Idealism: Subjective, Objective, Transcendental

    This from a recent comment thread:

    I think we should all agree on what counts as ‘subjective idealism’. I characterise it as the view that the objects we commonly take to be physical objects are in some way, or wholly, mind dependent. This a reasonable interpretation of Kant.

    Let's leave the interpretation of Kant for later. The definition on offer raises questions.

    1) Does the 'in some way' render the definition vacuous? I see a tree. The tree exists whether or not I am looking at it. But while I am looking at it, the tree has the relational property of being seen by me.  This property depends on my seeing which is a mental act of my mind.  (An act is not an action, but an intentional, or object-directed,  experience.) So there is a way in which the tree is mind-dependent.  It is dependent on me for its being-seen. There is a whole range of such  properties. The tree is such that: it is deemed beautiful by me; falsely believed by me to be a mesquite; thought by me to have been planted too close to the house, thought by you to have been planted just the right distance from the house, etc.  

    Or consider money. What makes a piece of paper or a piece of metal money? Obviously, money to be money, i.e., a means of exchange, depends on minded organisms who so treat it.

    2) If, on the other hand,  physical things are wholly mind-dependent, then that presumably means that trees and such are dependent on one or more minds for all of their properties, whether essential or accidental, whether monadic or relational, and also dependent on minds for their very existence.  This leads ineluctably to the question as to who these minds are.  Surely the physical universe in all its unspeakable vastness does not depend on my mind or yours or any finite mind or any collection of finite minds.

    So the question arises: has there ever been a subjective idealist (as defined above) among the 'name' philosophers?  George Berkeley, you say? But the good bishop brought God into the picture to secure the existence of the tree in the quad when no one was about:

    Dear Sir, your astonishment’s odd
    I am always about in the Quad
    And that’s why the tree
    continues to be
    since observed by, Yours faithfully, God

    If the other spirit in question is God, an omnipresent being, then perhaps his perception can be used to guarantee a completely continuous existence to every physical object. In the Three Dialogues, Berkeley very clearly invokes God in this context. Interestingly, whereas in the Principles, as we have seen above, he argued that God must exist in order to cause our ideas of sense, in the Dialogues (212, 214–5) he argues that our ideas must exist in God when not perceived by us.[20] If our ideas exist in God, then they presumably exist continuously. Indeed, they must exist continuously, since standard Christian doctrine dictates that God is unchanging. (SEP Berkeley entry)

    Now if the ultimate subject of subjective idealism is God, who exists of absolute metaphysical necessity and who creates and ongoing sustains in existence  everything other than himself, then such an idealism is better described as objective. 

    Kant's brand of idealism is neither subjective nor objective, but transcendental. What this means I will explain later. 

    Bill Vallicella

    5 responses to “Idealism: Subjective, Objective, Transcendental”

  • When Politics Comes to be Like Philosophy

    Trouble is on the way.

    Substack latest. Short, incisive, 'on target.' To the range tomorrow!

    Bill Vallicella

  • A Kantian Aporia?

    This just in:

    I know you like puzzles in aporetic form, so here you are.

    1. My perception involves (though is not necessarily limited to) the immediate awareness of mental phenomena.

    2. When I look at the visible surface of this desk, all I am immediately aware of is the visible surface of this desk.

    3. The visible surface of this desk is not a mental phenomenon.

    All three cannot be true. If (1) is true then my perceiving the desk involves the awareness of mental phenomena. Note that this does not assert that the visible surface of this desk is a mental phenomenon, only that, if it is not, then I must be immediately aware of some mental phenomena in addition to my awareness of the desk.

    But (2) says that the visible surface of this desk is all I am immediately aware of. Hence (3) cannot be true.

    Likewise, if (2) and (3) are true, (1) is false, and if (1) and (3) are true, (2) is false.

    Nicely presented. I agree that the three propositions are collectively inconsistent: they cannot all be true. But there is an interesting problem here only if the propositions are, in addition,  individually plausible.  The more plausible, the tougher the problem. 

    (3) is plausible to a high degree. (Plausibility, unlike truth, comes in degrees.)  A desk is a physical thing. The surface of a desk is a physical part of a physical thing. A mind, its states, and its contents are none of them physical.  An occurrent episode of visual perceiving is a mental phenomenon.  So, yes, (3) is highly plausible and I would rank it as the most plausible of the three propositions.  

    (2) is the least plausible of the three. It is true that when I look at my desk I do not see my visual perceiving of the desk or of some part thereof.  But it does not follow that I am not aware of my perceiving.  Right now, as I stare at my desk, I am not only visually aware of  (part of) the desk; I am also aware of being visually aware of it.  This is what Franz Brentano calls innere Wahrnehmung, inner perception, which he distinguishes from innere Beobachtung, inner observation. This ongoing inner perception, or rather perceiving, is a simultaneous secondary awareness of the primary 'outward' visual awareness of the (surface of) the desk.

    This inner awareness of being outwardly aware of something is not the same as full-blown reflection which one could, but need not, express by saying 'I am now seeing the surface of a desk.'  It also must be distinguished from the type of awareness in which I am outwardly aware of something without being aware of being aware of it at all. Suppose you have been driving for some time, stopping at the red, going at the green, negotiating turns, etc. when you suddenly realize that you have no memory of doing any of those things. And yet your present physical integrity shows that you must have been aware of all those traffic changes. You were outwardly aware via the five outer senses without being explicitly aware of being aware or implicitly aware via Brentano's inner perception. 

    And so I solve the above problem by rejecting (2).  (2) is the least plausible of the three and a very strong case can be made for its being false.

    (1) leaves something to be desired as well. Later on this.

    So we don't have an aporia in the strict sense, an intellectual impasse, or insoluble problem.  And even if we did, it is not clear what this has to do with Kant.

    Bill Vallicella

    10 responses to “A Kantian Aporia?”

  • From Hagiography to Pathography: Yates and Kerouac

    YatesI'll admit to being more fascinated by Richard Yates' life as reported in the 671 pages of Blake Bailey's biography than in Yates' writing. So this struck a nerve:

    I’m no fan of hagiographers, obviously, but I’m only a bit less distrustful of literary biographers.  Too often their books slide toward what Joyce Carol Oates has dubbed “pathography,” which she defined as “hagiography’s diminished and often prurient twin.”  Its motifs are “dysfunction and disaster, illnesses and pratfalls, failed marriages and failed careers, alcoholism and breakdowns and outrageous conduct.”

    Since we live in an age that’s obsessed with personalities and celebrities, it’s not surprising that so few readers are satisfied with loving a book and so many insist on knowing as much as possible about the person who wrote it.  While this appetite has inspired literary biographers to produce a long shelf of pathographies and other monstrosities – does the world really need Norman Sherry’s three-volume biography of Graham Greene? – it has also resulted in some well researched and finely written literary biographies that did what such exercises do at their best: they led readers back to the subject’s books.  Among these I would include Blake Bailey’s recent biographies of Richard Yates and John Cheever and, strangely enough, Ann Charters’s thorough and balanced 1973 bio of Kerouac.  In her introduction, Charters wrote insightfully, if a bit clunkily: “The value of Kerouac’s life is what he did, how he acted.  And what he did, was that he wrote.  I tried to arrange the incidents of his life to show that he was a writer first, and a mythologized figure afterward.  Kerouac’s writing counts as much as his life.”

    I would argue that his writing counts more than his life, much more.  Eventually Charters seemed to come around to my way of thinking.  In 1995, after she’d edited two fat volumes, Jack Kerouac: Selected Letters, 1940-1956 and The Portable Jack Kerouac, I interviewed her for a newspaper article.  “I wanted (the book of letters) to be a biography in Jack’s own words,” she told me.  “His life is in his books, but on the other hand the most essential thing is missing from those novels.  What he tells you in the letters is that the most important thing in his life is writing.”

    Why did Kerouac's writing give rise to an outpouring of biographies, commentaries, dissertations, articles, not to mention new editions and the publication of the shoddiest of his literary efforts, when Yates' novels and short stories had no similar effect?  One thought is this. Kerouac was a sort of unwitting pied piper. His 1957 On the Road gave rise to the 'rucksack revolution' of the 'sixties.  Yates' 1961 Revolutionary Road, his best novel, was backward-looking, in large part social criticism of the  Zeitgeist of the fading 'fifties.  

    But my one thought is one-sided and wants augmentation and qualification. Later perhaps.

    While I admire Yates' superb craftsmanship, his writing does not move me. Kerouac moves me.  Literary slop, hyper-romantic gush, and all. So far I have found nothing in three of Yates' novels and a couple of his short stories  like this:

    Kerouac and motherHere is Jack Kerouac on the road, not in a '49 Hudson with Neal Cassady, but in a bus  with his mother:

    Who are men that they can insult men? Who are these people who wear pants and dresses and sneer? What am I talking about? I'm talking about human helplessness and unbelievable loneliness in the darkness of birth and death and asking "What is there to laugh about in that?" "How can you be clever in a meatgrinder?" "Who makes fun of misery?" There's my mother a hunk of flesh that didnt ask to be born, sleeping restlessly, dreaming hopefully, beside her son who didnt ask to be born, thinking desperately, praying hopelessly, in a bouncing earthly vehicle going from nowhere to nowhere, all in the night, worst of all for that matter all in noonday glare of bestial Gulf Coast roads — Where is the rock that will sustain us? Why are we here? What kind of crazy college would feature a seminar where people talk about hopelessness forever?

    Jack Kerouac (1922-1969), Desolation Angels, 1960, p. 339.

    Compare Mexico City Blues, 1959, 211th Chorus:

    The wheel of the quivering meat conception . . .
    . . . I wish I was free of that slaving meat wheel
    and safe in heaven dead.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Why I Want to Live Long

    I want to live a long life so as to be able to experience and reflect upon this predicament of ours from every humanly possible temporal perspective. For each age of life has its characteristic insights and illusions.  Youth has its truth as midlife its crisis, a crisis risible to the man ten years beyond it: "What the hell was that all about?" 

    And as the years roll on, and the fire down below subsides, certain insights become possible which were not possible before. The young man's dong is a magic wand that conjures and weaves the web of maya the better to ensnare him and keep him tied to the transient. The old man who makes good use of his old age sloughs off the illusions of earthly love that were always more hydraulic in provenance than pneumatic.  He now has a good shot at moral and spiritual improvement. But will he take it?

    Or will he essay to prolong his dong and with it the web of lies it weaves? Nothing is more pitiful than the decrepit oldster who keeps himself jacked up Hefner-style.  But despite the Viagra and the nubile nymphs cavorting for his delectation, poor Hef could not rise to the occasion and was reduced to manual mode. 

    Live long for the end of life's day in wait for the the owl of Minerva who spreads her wings at dusk.  There are still things to be learned and things to be done that can only be learned and done here below.   As for you workers in the vineyards of Wissenschaft,  "Die Erntejahren eines Gelehrten kommen spät," as I once heard Hans-Georg Gadamer say.  "A scholar's harvest years come late."

    Bill Vallicella

  • On whether an individual is identical to its existence

    This just over the transom:

    Good day Dr. Vallicella,
     
    I was reading your book on existence, and on page 71, there is this argument for the real distinction between an individual's essence and its existence:
     
    "[I]f in a essence and existence are identical, then a's essence entails a's existence. But that is to say that a is a necessary being… [this] implies that every individual is a necessary being, which is absurd."
     
    I've reconstructed this as follows, and it seems one can object to premise (2):
     
    (1) If a's existence is identical to a's essence, then a's essence entails a's existence. 
    (2) If a's essence entails X, then a is necessarily X. 
    (3) Therefore, if a's existence = a's essence, then a necessarily exists. 
    (4) a is a contingent being. 
    (5) No contingent being can exist necessarily. 
    (6) Therefore, a's existence is not identical to a's essence.
     
    (2) seems ambiguous. We can say that a can be necessarily X absolutely or conditionally. Put in terms of possible worlds, a is necessarily X absolutely if a is X in all possible worlds, while a is necessarily X conditionally if a is X only in all worlds where a exists. 
     
    BV: I accept your distinction, but I would couch it in different terms, terms in keeping with standard practice. Let the free variable 'x' range over individuals.  To say that x is essentially F (where 'F' is a predicate that picks out a property) is to say that x is F in every possible world in which x exists. To say that x is accidentally F is to say that x is F in some, but not all, of the possible worlds in which x exists. To say that x is necessarily F is to say that (i) x is essentially F, and that (ii) x exists in every possible world.  
    If we read (2) in terms of absolute necessity, then (2) is false–just because a triangle's essence entails being three-sided, it doesn't follow that triangles exist in all possible worlds. 
     
    BV:  If you are talking about  particular  material triangles, a triangular piece of metal for example, then it it is true that they do not exist in all worlds.  And this despite the fact that every triangle is essentially three-sided.  But what I mean by the essence of a concrete contingent individual such as a triangular piece of metal is the whatness or quiddity of that very individual minus its existence. Recall that I distinguish between wide and narrow senses of 'essence' on p. 68:
     
    'Essence' is here employed in a wide sense to denote the conjunction of those properties that make up what a thing is, and not in the narrow sense according to which a thing's essential (as opposed to accidental) properties are those it cannot fail to possess. Thus in the wide sense of 'essence' being sunburned now is part of my essence, even though I might not have been sunburned now. Thus [both] narrowly essential and accidental properties (whether monadic or relational) are part of my wide essence. 
    So consider that triangular piece of metal. It exists, and it exists contingently, which is to say — avoiding possible worlds jargon — that it is possibly such that it does not exist. It might not have existed: there is no metaphysical necessity that it exist.  But if the existence of x and the wide essence of x are one and the same — as the 'no difference theory' implies — then our triangular piece of metal exists just in virtue of its being what it is. That is equivalent to saying that its possibility entails its actuality, which is the definition of a necessary being. But that piece of metal is surely no necessary being. So I conclude that there is a real distinction between wide essence and existence in it and in every contingent being.  What I argue in the book is that the metaphysical contingency of a contingent being is rooted in the real distinction.
    If we read (2) in terms of conditional necessity, then (2) is true–a triangle is three-sided only in worlds where it exists–but this would render (6) false, since something can exist necessarily in a conditional sense and still be a contingent being.
     
    It is certainly true — to put it my way — that a thing can have an essential property and "still be a contingent being."  But this is not relevant to what I am saying.
     
    You must bear in mind that I deny  that existence is a property where P is a property =df P is possibly such that it is instantiated.   Your argument above seems to miss this important point. You seem to be assimilating existence to a property.  We rightly distinguish essential and accidental properties, but existence is neither an essential nor an accidental property.
     
    The existence of x  is just too basic to be a property of  x, but not so basic as to be identical to x!
    Is this a fair reconstruction of your argument, and if so, how can the above objection be addressed?
     
    I would say that you haven't grasped by argument. Comments are enabled in case you have a rejoinder. 
     
    Thank you for your time.
    Best,
    M. L. Pianist
     
    Thank you for writing, M. L.
     
     
    Bill Vallicella

    18 responses to “On whether an individual is identical to its existence”

  • For the Left, the Issue is Never the Issue

    I unpack the saying in my latest Substack article.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Mark Granza Interviews Blake Masters: ‘Woke’ Capitalism and Kyle Rittenhouse

    (Related: my Substack article, The Trial of Kyle.)

    Here is the interview.  A couple of excerpts:

    Mark Granza: A decade ago most people would have considered ‘Woke Capitalism’ a contradiction, and probably laughed at the idea. Today, nobody questions its existence. Do you think there are there inherent characteristics within Capitalism that transform it into a progressive machine, or are corporations simply responding to the ideological demands of the political class?

    Blake Masters: Capitalism works. It’s a really good system for generating wealth. The problem with capitalism is that can work too well in a sense, it can create the conditions for people to grow complacent, which ultimately, as Ross Douthat has written, contributes to the sort of decadence we’re experiencing today. Capitalism’s an incredible engine of material progress, but it’s not a self-contained moral system. It has its own incentives, but those incentives aren’t always necessarily correlated with a conception of the good. Companies under capitalism just respond to profit incentives. If you act on them you’ll generate a lot of wealth, but it won’t tell you what to do with that wealth, which is why a parasite like Wokeness can basically spread and take over. An example is offshoring. Maybe it’s good for GDP, but if you have too much of it, that’s clearly really bad for the country and most people living in it. It crushes the middle class by sending jobs overseas by the millions. But such are the incentives that the capital owners are responding to. So I think problems like Woke Capitalism, or ‘globalization’, are actually much older and bigger problems than people think. Because you can’t just be a capitalist country, because a country is not just an economy. You also need a conception of yourself as a nation, as a people, and as a culture. And that’s what America is increasingly lacking today.

    BV: The last three sentence are very important. A country is not just an economy. Do libertarians understand this? Not to my knowledge. They want to reduce everything to economics when it is the history, heritage, and culture of a nation that provides the framework within which a successful economy can operate. Or is the rule of law an economic concept?  How about the concept of citizen?

    Mark Granza: I’d like to move from here to the issue of Justice in America. You were a vocal supporter of Kyle Rittenhouse before and during the trial. What do you think the fact that Kyle (as opposed to someone like Gaige Grosskreutz) was the one being prosecuted says about the US justice system?

    Blake Masters: I think we’re very close to a two-tier justice system, if we’re not there already. Look how differently loyalists and dissidents are punished today. The Kyle Rittenhouse case was simple. The ruling class hated that a young man defended himself with an AR-15 because it contradicts their official narrative. And so they did everything they could to punish Kyle. The FBI literally withheld high-resolution version of the footage from Kyle’s lawyers, because it basically clearly exonerated Kyle and they found that inconvenient. Now I think the jury’s decision to acquit Kyle of all charges showed that you can still get sort of a fair trial in America, that there’s hope. But again, that only happened because in this case, there happened to be extremely clear video evidence in his favor. If there weren’t, Kyle would be in jail for life. So this case is a wake-up call. It’s crazy that Rittenhouse, and not his attackers, was on trial at all. Contrast that to how the BLM and Antifa looters and rioters who committed violent mayhem during the summer of 2020 – nothing happened to them! And on the off-chance one of them did get arrested, then-Senator and Vice Presidential candidate Kamala Harris was there with her bail fund, just waiting to bail them out. Meanwhile, the January 6 protestors, many of whom were not violent at all, are treated like terrorists, with some being held without trial in solitary confinement and others getting sentenced to many years in prison. If we don’t do something now, the rule of law will soon be gone forever. Anyone who questions the left’s narrative is going to be hunted down. I truly believe that. That’s what we’re fighting against.

    BV: Again I say that the last three sentences are very important. 

    Blake Masters gives a speech next to Donald Trump, December 2021.
    Bill Vallicella

  • Hume and Kant on Sense Perception

    Another round with Ed Buckner who writes,

    Meanwhile I continue to struggle through Kant, and I point out what seems to be a fundamental and insuperable difficulty below. (I may be wrong).

    Start with Hume, and with what he means by ‘impressions’. As I write, I am looking at what I take to be the black surface of my desk. Note “what I take to be”. Assume that what I take to be the surface is the surface. But what then does Hume mean by an ‘impression’? He says “Those perceptions, which enter with most force and violence, we may name impressions; and under this name I comprehend all our sensations, passions and emotions, as they make their first appearance in the soul”. Ideas are ‘the faint images’ of the impressions in thinking and reasoning.

    This is not clear at all. By ‘impression’ Hume means either that which I (perhaps wrongly) take to be the surface of the desk, or something else. Suppose the former. Hume makes it clear that the impression makes its appearance in the soul, and it is clear from everything he says later that an impression is a mental item. But the desk is not a mental item, hence the surface of the desk is not a mental item. Which is absurd.

    Or he means the latter. Then the ‘impression’ must be something other than what I take to be the surface of the desk. But I am aware of no such thing. In looking at the desk I am aware of nothing corresponding to a perception which enters “with force and violence”. Nor, when I shut my eyes and think of the surface of the desk, am I aware of anything but a faint memory of seeing the surface itself, rather than the faint image of any ‘impression’.

    So both interpretations are problematic. Either my desk and its surface are mental items, which is absurd. Or it is impossible to say what Hume means by ‘impression’. So Hume’s position makes no sense.

    I agree with the above analysis. It is clear and convincing. We can also display the problem in my preferred way as an aporetic polyad, in this case a tetrad:

    1) Impressions are mental items.

    2) The surfaces of physical things are not mental items.

    3) What we know when we have sensory knowledge are impressions.

    4) We have sensory knowledge of the surfaces of physical things.

    These propositions are collectively inconsistent.  So at least one of them must be rejected. As I read Hume, he is committed to (1), (3), and (4), and so he must reject  (2). But this leads to a subjective idealism that both Ed and I find intolerable.  No physical thing such as Ed's desk is a bundle of sense impressions.  Sense impressions are 'in the mind' and no desk or part thereof is in anyone's mind.

    The Humean solution is worse than the problem.  Another solution is to reject (3). One might hold a representational theory of mind according to which what we know via the outer senses are, in the typical non-illusory cases,  mind-independent things and some of their parts, but we know them via mental representations.  Enter the epistemic intermediary: contents in the mind mediate between mind and external thing.  

    There are other putative solutions such as Husserl's and Butchvarov's. They too have their difficulties. I won't go into them because Ed hasn't read these philosophers.

    The next question is whether Kant’s position makes any sense, given that his position here seems closely connected with that of Hume. He speaks of ‘sensible sensations’, ‘the world of the senses’, ‘the field of appearances’ etc etc. What does he mean by these terms? Does he mean the sorts of things that e.g. I take to be parts of material objects? But then it seems to follow from everything else he says that either material objects are mental items, or that I am wrong in thinking that what I take to be part of a material object, is in fact such. Both positions are absurd.

    Have I misunderstood Kant? 

    To assimilate Kant to Hume is a mistake. There are many crucial differences between the two. For one thing, Kant is not a subjective idealist. He does not hold that physical things are bundles of impressions.  He would reject (3) in the tetrad above.  To explain this is impossible in a few sentences.  I refer Ed to Kant's Letter to Marcus Herz, 21 February 1772 which may help. 

    There is also the following excerpt from a different entry:

    Kant
     
    I think Ed is wrong above about Kant.  For Kant, the pure is the opposite of the empirical. Every concept is either pure or empirical and no concept is both. A pure concept is one that is not drawn from experience, ein solcher der nicht von der Erfahrung abgezogen ist, but originates from the understanding in respect of both form and content, sondern auch dem Inhalte nach aus dem Verstande entspringt. The form of all concepts, including pure concepts, arises from reflexion Reflexion, and thus from the understanding. Empirical concepts arise from the senses, entspringen aus den Sinnen,  by comparison of the objects of experience. Their content comes from the senses, and their form of universality, Form der Allgemeinheit, alone from the understanding.
     
    If Buckner is telling us that Kant's pure-empirical distinction runs parallel to Zabarella's first intention-second intention distinction, then that can't be right. For Zabarella's animal and human being, which are first intentions for him, count as empirical concepts for Kant. 
     
    Any comparison of Zabarella (1533-1589) the Aristotelian and Kant is bound to be fraught with difficulty because of the transcendental-subjective turn of modern philosophy commencing with Descartes (1596-1650).  For Aristotle, the categories are categories of a real world independent of  our understanding; for Kant, the categories are precisely categories of the understanding (Verstandeskategorien) grounded in the understanding both in their form and in their content.  The categories of Aristotle are thus objective, categories belonging to a world to be understood, and not subjective, categories whereby a mind understands the world.
     
    Pure Concepts of Reason as Limit Concepts
     
    Kant also speaks in his Logic and elsewhere of Ideas which are pure concepts of reason, Vernunft, and not of understanding, Verstand. Die Idee ist ein Vernunftbegriff deren Gegenstand gar nicht in der Erfahrug kann angetroffen werden. (Logik, sec. 3)  The objects of these pure concepts of reason cannot be known by us because our form of intuition, Anschauung, is sensible, not intellectual. We can know only phenomena, not noumena. Among these Ideas, which are plainly limit concepts, are God, the soul, the world-whole, and freedom. And they are not merely negative limit concepts. Free will, for example, is objectively real despite its not being obejctively knowable. But more on this later.
    Bill Vallicella

    19 responses to “Hume and Kant on Sense Perception”

  • Globalist Greenies Go after Cryptomining in New York State

    Story here. To understand the issue,  bear in mind that bitcoins are not literally mined, they are 'mined' using supercomputers  which consume a lot of electricity.

    Anthony Flood sent me the hyperlink. He comments:

    Bitcoin threatens globalist/statist "green" agenda . . . and everything else on their to-do list. No monopoly on money via fiat central banking? Then no "democratic" imposition of lower living standards. With respect to achieving global decentralization, the spontaneous, market-based decentralization of money "moves the needle." It's happening slowly, almost imperceptibly so, but it's in a race with globalist countermoves.
    Bill Vallicella

Latest Comments

  1. Hi Bill Addis’ Nietzsche’s Ontology is readily available on Amazon, Ebay and Abebooks for about US$50-60 https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?an=addis&ch_sort=t&cm_sp=sort-_-SRP-_-Results&ds=30&dym=on&rollup=on&sortby=17&tn=Nietzsche%27s%20Ontology

  2. It’s unbelievable that people who work with the law are among the ranks of the most sophists, demagogues, and irrational…

  3. https://www.thefp.com/p/charles-fain-lehman-dont-tolerate-disorder-charlie-kirk-iryna-zarutska?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

  5. Hey Bill, Got it now, thanks for clarifying. I hope you have a nice Sunday. May God bless you!

  6. Vini, Good comments. Your command of the English language is impressive. In my penultimate paragraph I wrote, “Hence their hatred…

  7. Just a little correction, since I wrote somewhat hastily. I meant to say enemies of the truth (not from the…

  8. You touched on very, very important points, Bill. First, I agree that people nowadays simply want to believe whatever the…

  10. https://barsoom.substack.com/p/peace-has-been-murdered-and-dialogue?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=841240&post_id=173321322&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1dw7zg&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

Categories

Philosophy Weblogs

Other Websites