Atla wrote: ↑Sat Nov 02, 2024 6:15 pm
Iwannaplato wrote: ↑Sat Nov 02, 2024 4:52 pm
Atla wrote: ↑Sat Nov 02, 2024 3:29 pm
How isn't partial ontological constructivism the whole point of Kant's philosophy, when anything beyond the constructed reality is 100% unknowable, 100% irrelevant?
Because despite VSAs insistence Kant did think there was a reality 'out there' but knowing about it was not our lot. He constantly refers to the things out there that we cannot know about, but they are there in his schema and we didn't make them. By the way I am not endorsing his position, just describing it. And who knows what VA's sentence means.
I think you really misunderstand, Kant never referred to the things out there. That's not possible.
“We can accordingly have cognition of things only as they appear to us, and not as they are in themselves.”
(Critique of Pure Reason, A236/B295)
“The concept of a noumenon... is not the concept of an object, but is the problem left unanswerable by reason as to what the thing in itself may be, after all abstraction from the sensible properties of our intuition.”
(Critique of Pure Reason, B307)
“The understanding... does not know of objects as they are in themselves, but only insofar as they are objects of sensibility, and are therefore called phenomena.”
(Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, § 13)
“We are therefore left with a concept of an understanding that problematically points to an object for this understanding alone, which does not belong to our sensibility, but can nevertheless be thought as something in itself…”
(Critique of Pure Reason, B307)
“The senses do not apprehend the thing in itself. What they immediately grasp is merely its appearance, and this is, in fact, all that ever comes within our knowledge.”
(Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, § 32)
"Certainly, if phenomena are things that exist in themselves, it is absurd to demand that they should conform to laws of the understanding. But if they are only representations, it is necessary that all our representations... should conform to laws of the understanding, and that appearances must have their ground, not in themselves as things, but in something else... namely, in the transcendental object."
(Critique of Pure Reason, A92/B125)
He also considered certain noumena to be necessary for moral agency and assumed they existed: the immortality of the soul and freedom are examples of this. Even here referring to God:
“We cannot have the least cognition of the existence of such a being, nor of its possibility... but we are authorized to assume its existence in a practical relation, that is, in reference to the possibility of attaining to the highest good.”
(Critique of Pure Reason, A812/B840)
“For it is morally necessary to assume the existence of God; it is also morally necessary to assume the immortality of the soul. But it is not morally necessary to comprehend them.”
(Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, 6:5)
Not irrelevant at all, but necessary. And he believed in moral agency.
Here freedom:
"A free will and a will under moral laws are one and the same. Thus, if freedom of the will is presupposed, morality together with its principle follows from it by mere analysis of its concept."
(Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, 4:447)
"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."
(Critique of Practical Reason, 5:161)
But this moral law is not tangible, not empirical, yet he refers to it as real.
If one looks through secondary sources, anything from online philosophical dictionaries/encyclopedias to Kant's critics and summarizers, there is some controversy. But give that he seems to think that freedom, immortality, and God are all noumena, yet at the same time necessary for moral agency and he believes moral agency is possible, I side with those who think he considered noumena real but not directly sensible. I don't even get the impression from Kant that this is anything like 'Well, the only way this could work out is if these unlikely noumena are real, so I will create a system for this since it is our only hope.' No he seems committed to the idea of us as moral agents, that we are that, while thinking that certain things necessary for this to be possible are noumena.