Philosophy Now Forum

by Grant Bartley

https://philosophynow.org/issues/114/Ph ... nd_Science

Philosophy Now wrote:by Grant Bartley

https://philosophynow.org/issues/114/Ph ... nd_Science

Liking the 'ever-evolving Philosophy Now!'.
The new Philosophical Haiku column by Terence Green. Brill.

Don’t presume you have a deep understanding of .... [space and time].....until you know what Kant had to say about them.

This seems to be a rather arrogant assertion. One might just as well claim: " Don't presume you have a deep understanding of love until you have read the complete works of Shakespeare."

But what did Kant say about space and time? He said they were both "a priori". He might just as well have said that he didn't know where the concept of space and time came from.

And what is meant by " a deep understanding"? I suggest that a deep understanding of space and time would indicate a good model to use in the physics of space and time and also a good model for how such concepts can be thought of in the first place. So far as I can tell Kant had neither.

A_Seagull wrote:

Don’t presume you have a deep understanding of .... [space and time].....until you know what Kant had to say about them.

This seems to be a rather arrogant assertion. One might just as well claim: " Don't presume you have a deep understanding of love until you have read the complete works of Shakespeare."

But what did Kant say about space and time? He said they were both "a priori". He might just as well have said that he didn't know where the concept of space and time came from.

And what is meant by " a deep understanding"? I suggest that a deep understanding of space and time would indicate a good model to use in the physics of space and time and also a good model for how such concepts can be thought of in the first place. So far as I can tell Kant had neither.

As I seem to remember, Kant gave them far more status that simply a priori, He said that they were the two basic and fundamental categories upon which all existence relies, in fact they lay the ground for all a priori truths and a posteriori evidence. Space and Time themselves were beyond further analysis being the incorrigible facts of existence.

irremovable goggles be damned...

-Imp

The work of philosophers like Dan Dennett, David Chalmers are John Searle seem to be largely compatible with contemporary science, perhaps because consciousness research is still in its early stages and there's more "room to move". It could be said that the scientifically-based natural philosophy of the 19th century split and specialised in accordance with Taylorist principles, resulting in specialist scientists, doctors, chemists, psychologists, sociologists, archaeologists, anthropologists and philosophers.

All of these fields are simply attempts to better understand the reality we were so rudely and unknowingly thrust into.

Don’t presume you have a deep understanding of .... [space and time].....until you know what Kant had to say about them.

What I meant (but I didn't have space to say) was that Kant recognised that our understanding of space and time is mediated by our experience (he wouldn't put it like this). One implication of this is that space and time as they are in themselves (that is, independent of human perception) is not comprehendible through normal human thinking. In other words, space as it really is isn't necessarily what we think it is.

It is important to recognise that this includes physicists' understanding; physicists' models are also understood through human experience – even relativity and other mathematical models of it (science is a deconstruction of the phenomenal, not the nouminal, in Kantian terminology). This has implications, for example, for EPR (non-local entanglement), since it leaves it open that spatial connections as they are in themselves are not always necessarily mediated through spatial connections as they're understood or perceived as a result of human experience.

I hope that clears things up.

Regards,

Grant