Peter Holmes: What is Fact.

[Atla]

Atla wrote
It is necessary to posit a world beyond appearances, and when we do, it becomes obvious that this world isn't a representation. Yes the appearances are a representation, but they are also an inseparable part of the world they are representing. Because inside our head, there is a model of the outside world, and the model is part of that world. Kant seems to have been shallow and didn't realize this.

Why go small? Why not do what philosophers do and take what has been offered and go into detail? The devil is IN the details. Even analytic philosophers know that you can never refute Kant. They just got tired of arguing about it after a hundred years. Then the division came with existentialists on one side and analytics on the other. Kant, on the latter's side of this, insisted that all that can be reasonably said is within empirical reality, but this is to be sure, NOT to include ontological assumptions about what reality is. Rather, it is where the assumptions begin to make sense, and there you have a working model that simply assumes an "objective" world independent of the human contribution. This is why analytic philosophy is so bent on abiding by the way physicists and others describe the world, but none of think you can get beyond one form of another of Kant's idealism. Professional analytic philosophers are not stupid at all! They know Kant cannot be refuted. They simply ignore what cannot be talked about.

There is some sense in this, to be sure, though when you read analytic philosophy, it is clear that these guys have long ago reached the limits of meaningful work. Take epistemology: When in order to try to see how the traditional standard for knowledge, which is S knows P iff, S believes P, is justfied in this and P is true, can be amended to respond to Gettier problems, they resort to inventing severed head scenarios and barn facsimile scenarios. The silliest sh** imaginable. Failed in the end, of course: Kant was there staring at these attempts, saying "P?? How does one know that there is a P? How can P's ontology be established if the only way to do so is through knowing P, and knowing P is exactly what is in question!"

Breathtakingly question begging. Kant is always there. You can't get around this, you can only accept it, as the existentialists did in their own way.

So then what's wrong with assuming this "objective" world independent of the human contribution? That's what I was saying all along, and rejecting VA's claim that everything is intertwined with the human conditions.

[odysseus]

Atla wrote
So then what's wrong with assuming this "objective" world independent of the human contribution? That's what I was saying all along, and rejecting VA's claim that everything is intertwined with the human conditions.

It is a fair question, and thanks for not calling me any names.

Again, why not start simple. There is a brain here, there is an orange there. If there is a world independent of the human contribution that can be talked about, affirmed in any way, and not to go overboard either by saying there nothing to say AT ALL, but just to deny the sense behind producing anything non metaphysical about things outside of experience, then there must be some way this Other intimates itself in experience such that were we to remove experience from the explanation, this Other would still affirmable.

How does this Other get in? The orange gets IN the brain? How? You can say it is pictures of the orange that get in, but this model of picture taking comes from a field of events and objects inside of experience itself. The supposition here is that the is something outside experience.

[Atla]

Atla wrote
So then what's wrong with assuming this "objective" world independent of the human contribution? That's what I was saying all along, and rejecting VA's claim that everything is intertwined with the human conditions.

It is a fair question, and thanks for not calling me any names.

Again, why not start simple. There is a brain here, there is an orange there. If there is a world independent of the human contribution that can be talked about, affirmed in any way, and not to go overboard either by saying there nothing to say AT ALL, but just to deny the sense behind producing anything non metaphysical about things outside of experience, then there must be some way this Other intimates itself in experience such that were we to remove experience from the explanation, this Other would still affirmable.

How does this Other get in? The orange gets IN the brain? How? You can say it is pictures of the orange that get in, but this model of picture taking comes from a field of events and objects inside of experience itself. The supposition here is that the is something outside experience.

Science explained the casual chain of percieving external objects very well, I assume that's not the issue.

Simple, it's because experience is fundamental, and is the same as the "physical" world, including the external orange. So while "our" experience can be said to have an outside, experience in general has no outside. In other words, the correct philosophical paradigm is nondualism.

[Sculptor]

It is necessary to posit a world beyond appearances, and when we do, it becomes obvious that this world isn't a representation. Yes the appearances are a representation, but they are also an inseparable part of the world they are representing. Because inside our head, there is a model of the outside world, and the model is part of that world. Kant seems to have been shallow and didn't realize this.

Kant understood this perfectly, although you express it rather poorly.
You problem is that you do not know that there is a difference between the real worl and the ideal world of your fetid imagination.

At this point I don't think he realized it, his followers never seem to get it.
And unfortunately I do know the difference, in an ideal world retarded old fools like you don't exist.

Well I suggest you keep living in your fantasy world.
But I think you might want to educate yourself a bit. Did you ever think of opening a book for once in your life?

[Atla]

Kant understood this perfectly, although you express it rather poorly.
You problem is that you do not know that there is a difference between the real worl and the ideal world of your fetid imagination.

At this point I don't think he realized it, his followers never seem to get it.
And unfortunately I do know the difference, in an ideal world retarded old fools like you don't exist.

Well I suggest you keep living in your fantasy world.
But I think you might want to educate yourself a bit. Did you ever think of opening a book for once in your life?

Books? Yeah tried some, one day I even might teach you how to not hold them upside down.

[Sculptor]

At this point I don't think he realized it, his followers never seem to get it.
And unfortunately I do know the difference, in an ideal world retarded old fools like you don't exist.

Well I suggest you keep living in your fantasy world.
But I think you might want to educate yourself a bit. Did you ever think of opening a book for once in your life?

Books? Yeah tried some, one day I even might teach you how to not hold them upside down.

Clearly you have a long way to go. I said "books" not what you do with your sex doll.

If you mean books you might have to start holding them up the right way until your learn how to read.

[odysseus]

Atla wrote
Science explained the casual chain of percieving external objects very well, I assume that's not the issue.

Simple, it's because experience is fundamental, and is the same as the "physical" world, including the external orange. So while "our" experience can be said to have an outside, experience in general has no outside. In other words, the correct philosophical paradigm is nondualism.

Causality, alas, is a principle issue. You will note that for an effect to follow a cause is different from empirical principles. The principle of sufficient cause is apriori. Apodictic, as Kant put it, meaning certain beyond imagination: one cannot even imagine a spontaneous cause. Of course, as the argument goes, empirical principles are specific observations abstracted into a universal law, like that of gravity, and they are easily imagined not to be the case. Causality being apriori puts this principle in the structure of mind: apriority found in the world is proof, to Kant, that the world is idea. The fact that apriority can be a "part of" the way the world itself works is much like space and time: Things, res extensa, are apriori in space, because extension in space is geometrical, and geometry is an apriori discipline.

The rest needs clarification: outside and inside? "It's because experience is fundamental, and is the same as the "physical" world" needs explaining. How can both be fundamental, yet be the same? And "experience in general" means what?

Ah, I think I understand: you defend non dualism, and if everything is one, then the individual's experience presents a seeming outside, but actually, in the grand unity of all things, there is no outside. Outsideness is only a relative perspective of part of the unity, my "conditioned" vantage point, and If I could only see things through, say, the mind of an all knowing God, I could see that all is one.

How is this different from Hinduism?

[Atla]

Atla wrote
Science explained the casual chain of percieving external objects very well, I assume that's not the issue.

Simple, it's because experience is fundamental, and is the same as the "physical" world, including the external orange. So while "our" experience can be said to have an outside, experience in general has no outside. In other words, the correct philosophical paradigm is nondualism.

Causality, alas, is a principle issue. You will note that for an effect to follow a cause is different from empirical principles. The principle of sufficient cause is apriori. Apodictic, as Kant put it, meaning certain beyond imagination: one cannot even imagine a spontaneous cause. Of course, as the argument goes, empirical principles are specific observations abstracted into a universal law, like that of gravity, and they are easily imagined not to be the case. Causality being apriori puts this principle in the structure of mind: apriority found in the world is proof, to Kant, that the world is idea. The fact that apriority can be a "part of" the way the world itself works is much like space and time: Things, res extensa, are apriori in space, because extension in space is geometrical, and geometry is an apriori discipline.

The rest needs clarification: outside and inside? "It's because experience is fundamental, and is the same as the "physical" world" needs explaining. How can both be fundamental, yet be the same? And "experience in general" means what?

Ah, I think I understand: you defend non dualism, and if everything is one, then the individual's experience presents a seeming outside, but actually, in the grand unity of all things, there is no outside. Outsideness is only a relative perspective of part of the unity, my "conditioned" vantage point, and If I could only see things through, say, the mind of an all knowing God, I could see that all is one.

How is this different from Hinduism?

Look, I honestly don't know what point you are trying to make. Yes, every appearance we experience, everything we think, every model we posit about the world beyond appearances, is manufactured in our head, using our "a priori" cognitive makeup. It's just impossible to get outside of this.

But this is something you understand, and then bury deep down. And then return to acting like you could go outside of this anyway, because that's the simplest, natural, most healthy thing to do. As far as I can tell, Kantians don't get this. Tell me where I'm wrong.

[odysseus]

Atla wrote
Look, I honestly don't know what point you are trying to make. Yes, every appearance we experience, everything we think, every model we posit about the world beyond appearances, is manufactured in our head, using our "a priori" cognitive makeup. It's just impossible to get outside of this.

But this is something you understand, and then bury deep down. And then return to acting like you could go outside of this anyway, because that's the simplest, natural, most healthy thing to do. As far as I can tell, Kantians don't get this. Tell me where I'm wrong.

The part of this that is puzzling is where you say, "And then return to acting like you could go outside of this anyway, because that's the simplest, natural, most healthy thing to do. As far as I can tell, Kantians don't get this." It seems like you don't think Kantians understand how to act naturally according to the culture and spontaneous way of living with others, holding a job, and so forth. It sounds like you think Kant just spent his days in philosophy cocoon morbidly dwelling on the impossibility of knowing beyond the veil of experience. I guess you think Platonists walk around "seeing" rational forms rather than Cephalus here, Parmenides there, and here the road they walk on. I mean, do you think Pyrrhonian skeptics just walk in front of buses?
Kant was quite the party man, and to attend an affair at his home one had to bring a story to tell and amuse guests. It was kind of a contest and very socially proper for the time. But one did have to have the wit to participate.

Anyway, but if this is NOT what you mean, then what could this be about? Return to acting like all is well and there is an inside and outside to things?: surely you jest. German idealism is a theoretical idea, not a practical guide to living in the physical world. You are being invited to think circumspectively about knowledge and how it is related to the world. The PRACTICAL world of going to the bank and doing your taxes is simply about other matters. These practical affairs are done routinely, spontaneously, and this requires knowledge of how things are done, not what the nature of knowledge is.

[Atla]

Atla wrote
Look, I honestly don't know what point you are trying to make. Yes, every appearance we experience, everything we think, every model we posit about the world beyond appearances, is manufactured in our head, using our "a priori" cognitive makeup. It's just impossible to get outside of this.

But this is something you understand, and then bury deep down. And then return to acting like you could go outside of this anyway, because that's the simplest, natural, most healthy thing to do. As far as I can tell, Kantians don't get this. Tell me where I'm wrong.

The part of this that is puzzling is where you say, "And then return to acting like you could go outside of this anyway, because that's the simplest, natural, most healthy thing to do. As far as I can tell, Kantians don't get this." It seems like you don't think Kantians understand how to act naturally according to the culture and spontaneous way of living with others, holding a job, and so forth. It sounds like you think Kant just spent his days in philosophy cocoon morbidly dwelling on the impossibility of knowing beyond the veil of experience. I guess you think Platonists walk around "seeing" rational forms rather than Cephalus here, Parmenides there, and here the road they walk on. I mean, do you think Pyrrhonian skeptics just walk in front of buses?
Kant was quite the party man, and to attend an affair at his home one had to bring a story to tell and amuse guests. It was kind of a contest and very socially proper for the time. But one did have to have the wit to participate.

Anyway, but if this is NOT what you mean, then what could this be about? Return to acting like all is well and there is an inside and outside to things?: surely you jest. German idealism is a theoretical idea, not a practical guide to living in the physical world. You are being invited to think circumspectively about knowledge and how it is related to the world. The PRACTICAL world of going to the bank and doing your taxes is simply about other matters. These practical affairs are done routinely, spontaneously, and this requires knowledge of how things are done, not what the nature of knowledge is.

Still don't know what point you're trying to make. Yes, this is roughly how knowledge is related to the world, therefore ________?

[Veritas Aequitas]

Anyway, but if this is NOT what you mean, then what could this be about? Return to acting like all is well and there is an inside and outside to things?: surely you jest. German idealism is a theoretical idea, not a practical guide to living in the physical world. You are being invited to think circumspectively about knowledge and how it is related to the world. The PRACTICAL world of going to the bank and doing your taxes is simply about other matters. These practical affairs are done routinely, spontaneously, and this requires knowledge of how things are done, not what the nature of knowledge is.

Kant was not targeting the conventional practical world of going to the bank and banging girls.

I believe Kant's intention was to promote his theories against the imposed practical world of the Scholastics [the Schoolmen] where what is practical is "because God said so".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scholasticism

To achieve the above Kant has to expose the groundless "idea" of the schoolmen's God-in-itself, things-in-themselves and their pseudo-divine-morality whilst Kant introduced his own Moral Principles and System grounded on the Categorical Imperatives and experience the reality of the world;

• Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.
  
  I do not seek or conjecture either of them as if they were veiled obscurities or extravagances beyond the horizon of my vision; I see them before me and connect them immediately with the consciousness of my existence.
  
  The first starts at the place that I occupy in the external world of the senses, and extends the connection in which I stand into the limitless magnitude of worlds upon worlds, systems upon systems, as well as into the boundless times of their periodic motion, their beginning and continuation.
  
  The second begins with my invisible self, my personality, and displays to me a world that has true infinity, but which can only be detected through the understanding, and with which . . . I know myself to be in not, as in the first case, merely contingent, but universal and necessary connection.
  
  The first perspective of a countless multitude of worlds as it were annihilates my importance as an animal creature, which must give the matter out of which it has grown back to the planet (a mere speck in the cosmos) after it has been (one knows not how) furnished with life-force for a short time.
  
  The second, on the contrary, infinitely elevates my worth, as an intelligence, through my personality, in which the moral law reveals to me a life independent of animality and even of the entire world of the senses, at least so far as may be judged from the purposive determination of my existence through this law, which is not limited to the conditions and boundaries of this life but reaches into the infinite.
  
  (Practical Reason, 5:161–2)

[odysseus]

Atla wrote
Still don't know what point you're trying to make. Yes, this is roughly how knowledge is related to the world, therefore ________?

One has to be interested. I look at the world of things and people around me and wonder at the very basic level about what is means to be a self, thrown into a world to suffer and die. This is as with all questions an epistemological one. It leads to questions about the nature and limits of knowledge and how this plays out vis a vis the palpable world. Turns out that knowing is IN the world. that is, the world is constituted by one's apprehension of it; that what an object is, is idea as well as "substance," and substance (hyle) is, apart from the faculties that receive it and name it, utterly transcendent.
Take a look at Jean luc Marion's Being Giving, and Giveness and Revelation just to get clearer on what can be said about the presence of the world as presence.

This kind of schtick has to be interesting at the outset to get one to the library in the first place.

[odysseus]

Veritas Aequitas wrote
The second, on the contrary, infinitely elevates my worth, as an intelligence, through my personality, in which the moral law reveals to me a life independent of animality and even of the entire world of the senses, at least so far as may be judged from the purposive determination of my existence through this law, which is not limited to the conditions and boundaries of this life but reaches into the infinite.

His moral law is seriously flawed concept, though you may want to defend him on this. As well as "my personality, and displays to me a world that has true infinity."

Kant is a rationalist and when he says all of our passions and inclinations of any sort are ruled out moral decision making, I have say he has a very empty concept of what a self really is and what ethics is all about. Ethics and the self, and this conception that "reaches into the infinite" begs the question: what good is this reaching if all that turns up is logical certainty? Logic in itself has no value at all. It is a mere vessel that gives form to value din the world, but as such is itself, and this is a rather big deal for me, value contingent. What I mean is that in the matter of ethics, value, aesthetics, logic depends on these. It may be that logic is necessary for conceiving of them, but it in itself produced no value, no starry night wonder.

Perhaps you've read something to clarify Kant on this. His account of the Good is a Good will, but he says nothing of the palpable good of love, happiness, ice cream. How does he get away with this, which to me is like removing the engine that makes ethics go.

[Atla]

Turns out that knowing is IN the world. that is, the world is constituted by one's apprehension of it; that what an object is, is idea as well as "substance," and substance (hyle) is, apart from the faculties that receive it and name it, utterly transcendent.
Take a look at Jean luc Marion's Being Giving, and Giveness and Revelation just to get clearer on what can be said about the presence of the world as presence.

Sorry I won't, I'm a nondualist and nothing you've said has changed my opinion that Kant and phenomenology didn't reach critical depth, and got lost in the end. I find this idealistic confusion about objects, being, presence, knowing, substance etc. unbearable. Seeing cognitive phantoms everywhere and misunderstanding them.

Again: the world is NOT constituted by one's apprehension of it. Apprehension is apprehension, and it's impossible for us to get outside of it, which doesn't mean that it doesn't have an outside. It's merely a part of the world.

[odysseus]

Atla wrote
Sorry I won't, I'm a nondualist and nothing you've said has changed my opinion that Kant and phenomenology didn't reach critical depth, and got lost in the end. I find this idealistic confusion about objects, being, presence, knowing, substance etc. unbearable. Seeing cognitive phantoms everywhere and misunderstanding them.

Again: the world is NOT constituted by one's apprehension of it. Apprehension is apprehension, and it's impossible for us to get outside of it, which doesn't mean that it doesn't have an outside. It's merely a part of the world.

Okay. then my final thought on the matter: Before I read Kant, Heidegger, and others I knew nothing of what they had to say and if someone told me what they had to say, I would have thought just as you do. There is no remedy for this but reading. Philosophy without Kant as a foundation in one way or another is like physics would be if you just sat there on a hill with a pen and paper looking around.

Nobody likes to hear this. The Critique of Pure Reason is very difficult to read. But if you don't read it, you will never understand the world philosophically well at all. Even the analytic philosophers have all read Kant extensively. He is to philosophy what Newton is to physics: a lot comes on the shoulders of Newton in physics, but Newton comes first.

It's a book. Why not just set time aside to read it? The internet is a massive resource for supplemental reading.