The textbooks are wrong!

[brownbanana]

If you have actually read Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (the actual book that is ~700 pgs), then I highly recommend reading and digesting the following philosophical books in no particular order.:

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman (my personal fave)

An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding by David Hume

Meditations on First Philosophy by Rene Descartes

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn

Being and Nothingness by Jean-Paul Sartre

Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke

The Conquest of Happiness by Bertrand Russel

There is a message in Kant that many catch a hint of. Perhaps it is the moral grounding in his philosophy, to use reason, yet live by morals, in action and in mind. To use reason but not bound oneself to a relativistic notion of good and evil.

And most importantly not to do away with the subjective. But its a tricky subjective. The phenomenal world as Kant calls it.

There is also an inherent danger, but then again, that is the world if one chooses to keep one’s eyes closed or open.

Kuhn speaks of the analytic and synthetical distinguishions of judgments in the text you posted. And how recognizing this changes one’s world-view (German word: Weltanschauung) and in fact it does. William James speaks of it in Principles of Psychology , of subjective synthesis and objective synthesis. And the immense importance not to confound the two. Kant also speaks of this and warns of it. Therefore, the objective is known only because there is as subject. An “I”. So, in every judgment there is an “I Think”, at least for Kant. I say at least because James points out an “I feel”. Kant does the same thing and points out “feelings” are about morals.

You can’t really read these philosophies like novels. So I have read the texts you have posted. But I wouldn’t say I read them from page one to page 700 and understood it all.

Let me put it this way, In German and in Japanese you can’t say anything without it being an existential statement. I am therefore Being in anything I am saying, sort of, now that I think about Sartre’s Nothingness.

That being said, I have read Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, but pieces at a time.

Your list is fairly high up on the latter, especially Sartre and Kuhn.

Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View is not treated the same way as his other works but I feel in my gut it is there to provide some guidance to avoid pitfalls. Perhaps ones that cant be avoided. I can see in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, he is truly concerned about solving “The Other”, because there is no category for the other. The other is not an object, rather, we have this unusual awareness that we are being watched by another subject. We cant see into their world. But I say this with thought only, I can feel, for example compassion, which means to suffer-with.

So yes, I feel confident to say, I have read it.

These philosophies, which in my view are world-views (and of course, we have our own), we can see the world, sort of, from the view of an other, like reading Kant or Sartre, consciousness sort of reveals something that cant be said in language but it is shown in language (Wittgenstein).

I still go back and read Kant, because I have an end. He is like Arnold in philosophy, he laid ground that one cant ignore.

I personally find a lot of solace in religious text. William James or Berkeley are good choices involving a religious or spiritual text. Dostoevsky and Tolstoy as well, when it comes to putting all these pieces into a whole.

Much of what I said, requires at least partical aquantence with the texts, but only superficially, its really talking about what is right in front of everyone’s face. I feel like I am committing the logician’s mistake and refining my language but I hate how pompous they make it. But I love William James for that, he brings it back down, there is as Mitzvah, “you cant let a blind man walk into a hole or intentionallly give someone ill advice”. That is actually one Mitzvah, which says something powerful.

 

[Biggerp73]

It is interesting that atheistic materialists will reject this sort of thing. After all, if the mind is reducible to physiology, then what we think about ourselves, how we feel, etc, will be intrinsically connected with our physiology, etc.

 

[zillagraybeard]

Awesome information.

 

[brownbanana]

It is interesting that atheistic materialists will reject this sort of thing. After all, if the mind is reducible to physiology, then what we think about ourselves, how we feel, etc, will be intrinsically connected with our physiology, etc.

There is a difference between knowing and knowing for certain. What the materialst desires is something quantifiable, evidence for what I say. Something to measure, something that we can “weigh” so to speak by our Understanding.

It is that deductive reasoning and commitment to infalliblism.

But outside of science, inductive works better. So I personally dont mind being 90% right and 10% wrong. Yet, by a sort of self-deception, I trust myself and judgments, in the moment of judgment, as certain. I have to. Belief and doubt are living attitudes.

So they reject it, because they were trained by the logician. Which was my training. They create a finite within the infinite. But constrict thinking to Turing Machine computationalism. That is, a meta-language, that is consistent and self-contained. That based, or axiomatic, on a set of theorems, and truth-functions, can talk about the world with certainty. So they start with a sort negation of negative judgements , to clear the air, so to speak, before they even start discussing anything.

So they reject it at a very high price.