From: Erik Aronesty (erik@zoneedit.com)
Date: Tue Oct 14 2003 - 20:51:35 MDT
The issue with Kant is a utilitarian one. Not "was he right", which is clearly subjective, but it it useful to view the world through Kant colored glasses? What can you derive from it? And vice-versa regarding Russel.
-----Original Message-----
From: "rhinoceros" <rhinoceros@freemail.gr>
Date: Tue, 14 Oct 2003 20:04:04
To:virus@lucifer.com
Subject: virus: Re:"Brights" more destructive than good / WSJ attacks atheism
As our Tuesday IRC chat is approaching, here is a last look at Kant's answer to the fundamental question of philosophy, the relationship between what "is" and what we perceive -- his synthesis between rationalism ("I think therefore I am" - Rene Descarted) and empiricism ("There is nothing in the mind except what was first in the senses" - John Locke).
Two snips: One from Bertrand Russell, rejecting Kant, and one from Kurt Goedel, partially vindicating Kant. It is about mathematics, of course (the nature of mathematics and logic is well worth a future chat).
Bertrand Russell
Philosophy of Mathematical Logic (1911)
http://virus.lucifer.com/bbs/index.php?board=32;action=display;threadid=28746
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In spite of the fact that traditional empiricism is mistaken in its theory of knowledge, it must not be supposed that idealism is right. Idealism -- at least every theory of knowledge which is derived from Kant -- assumes that the universality of a priori truths comes from their property of expressing properties of the mind: Things appear to be thus because the nature of the appearance depends on the subject in the same way that, if we have blue spectacles, everything appears to be blue. The categories of Kant are the coloured spectacles of the mind; truths a priori are the false appearances produced by those spectacles. Besides, we must know that everybody has spectacles of the same kind and that the colour of the spectacles never changes. Kant did not deign to tell us how he knew this.
As soon as we take into account the consequences of Kant's hypothesis, it becomes evident that general and a priori truths must have the same objectivity, the same independence of the mind, that the particular facts of the physical world possess. In fact, if general truths only express psychological facts, we could not know that they would be constant from moment to moment or from person to person, and we could never use them legitimately to deduce a fact from another fact, since they would not connect facts but our ideas about the facts. Logic and mathematics force us, then, to admit a kind of realism in the scholastic sense, that is to say, to admit that there is a world of universals and of truths which do not bear directly on such and such a particular existence. This world of universals must subsist, although it cannot exist in the same sense as that in which particular data exist. We have immediate knowledge of an indefinite number of propositions about universals: thi!
s is an ultimate fact, as ultimate as sensation is. Pure mathematics -- which is usually called "logic" in its elementary parts -- is the sum of everything that we can know, whether directly or by demonstration, about certain universals.
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Kurt Goedel
The modern development of the foundations of
mathematics in the light of philosophy (1961)
http://virus.lucifer.com/bbs/index.php?board=32;action=display;threadid=28747
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I would like to point out that this intuitive grasping of ever newer axioms that are logically independent from the earlier ones, which is necessary for the solvability of all problems even within a very limited domain, agrees in principle with the Kantian conception of mathematics. The relevant utterances by Kant are, it is true, incorrect if taken literally, since Kant asserts that in the derivation of geometrical theorems we always need new geometrical intuitions, and that therefore a purely logical derivation from a finite number of axioms is impossible. That is demonstrably false. However, if in this proposition we replace the term "geometrical" - by "mathematical" or "set-theoretical", then it becomes a demonstrably true proposition. I believe it to be a general feature of many of Kant's assertions that literally understood they are false but in a broader sense contain deep truths. In particular, the whole phenomenological method, as I sketched it above, goes back in i!
ts central idea to Kant, and what Husserl did was merely that he first formulated it more precisely, made it fully conscious and actually carried it out for particular domains. Indeed, just from the terminology used by Husserl, one sees how positively he himself values his relation to Kant.
I believe that precisely because in the last analysis the Kantian philosophy rests on the idea of phenomenology, albeit in a not entirely clear way, and has just thereby introduced into our thought something completely new, and indeed characteristic of every genuine philosophy -- it is precisely on that, I believe, that the enormous influence which Kant has exercised over the entire subsequent development of philosophy rests. Indeed, there is hardly any later direction that is not somehow related to Kant's ideas. On the other hand, however, just because of the lack of clarity and the literal incorrectness of many of Kant's formulations, quite divergent directions have developed out of Kant's thought - none of which, however, really did justice to the core of Kant's thought. This requirement seems to me to be met for the first time by phenomenology, which, entirely as intended by Kant, avoids both the death-defying leaps of idealism into a new metaphysics as well as the posit!
ivistic rejection of all metaphysics. But now, if the misunderstood Kant has already led to so much that is interesting in philosophy, and also indirectly in science, how much more can we expect it from Kant understood correctly?
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