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(1) Introduce Kants system, get some key definitions out of the
way, talk about the basic metaphysics. Get Critical Metaphysics
and Pre-Critical Metaphysics out of the way.
(1) Ontology
Traditional metaphysics begins with the point that we are not Being, we
are Becoming. Roughly, we are born and we die, we are finite, we are
restricted by the opinions of those around us (history and social
constitution) and we have access to the world only through sensory
appearances.
Becoming/Being (Parmenides)
Becoming-> Realm of time, causality , history, contingent and so on.
(Realm of sensory perception) (APPERANCES)
Being-> Realm of the timeless, ahistorical, necessary truth (Realm of the
ideas/or of the understanding/reason). (REALITY)
Platonic assumption
Human beings are rational animals
Thinking subjects contemplating the world.
Thus, an appropriate account of mental content will be in terms of our
ability to reason, think propositionally and follow certain rules of symbol
manipulation.
This holds for the Aristotelian syllogistic logic and for Platos notion of
noesis.
Disembodied mind confronting world.
Knowledge= accuracy of mental representations (Cartesian ideas)
Back to Kant:
How do we have thoughts about the world?
Where does aboutness come from?
TRANSCENDENTAL IDEALISM
What are the limitations that our subjectivity places on us? And
how are these limitations on the faculty of reason?
Kant: We are discursive, spatio-temporal intellects, and are restricted by
this.
What does this mean?
Josefa Toribio: the faculty by which one exercises one's conceptual and
non-conceptual capacities in thinking and judging is dynamically
constrained both by spontaneity (the subject's cognitive capacities) and
receptivity (the realm where empirical content is to be found)
Here is another way to put it:
Subjectivity is not just a thing alongside other things. Subjectivity is what
makes experiential and epistemic access to things possible in the first
place. It should not be conceived merely as some object in the world, but
instead as the ontologically irreducible context of openness through which
our access to objects must be understood. Subjectivity is our way of
being, and this needs to be understood through the characteristic of
openness to beings, rather than through the existence of beings that
might be made available by subjectivity. (David Suarez, Thinking Nature
p. 12)
(1) We are beings who do not create objects actively, but receive them
passively (through what Kant calls the faculty of intuition). The form of
our sensible reception of objects is space and time. Kant argues that
every sensation we have is necessary spatial (we cannot imagine outer
objects without space, and we cannot imagine them outside a temporal
sequence). However, this non-conceptual sensible reception of objects
lacks determinacy.
Ok, given (1) and (2), lets try and answer the metametaphysical question
in greater detail.
Markus Gabriel claims that, on Kants view, the world does not exist. This
only means that, if we take Kants domainization of the world seriously,
we have no need to think that there is a domain of domains called the
world. There are lots of domains, with little to unite them. Is this Kants
view? NO.
(But more on his later).
But how does this help to solve the problem of thought and being? We
havent yet even understood how we have accurate thoughts about the
world through mental representations.
The thing-in-itself
Beings who dont have to know objects mediately through concepts, but
can simply create objects by the power of its thought. These would be
non-discursive spatio-temporal intellects.
But, importantly, there is no reason to discard the domain of empirical
objects as mere appearances. (Cite Stang on Empirical Realism).
James Kreines calls this Reason in the world; you want to find
something like a final unconditioned condition, a ground of all things.
Kant thinks that the faculty of reason sets us unfulfillable tasks which
we have to strive towards.
The Ideas of Reason are so-called regulative ideas. They dont really
exist, but they act as guides to our practical action.
A very important example is something like the notion of the totality of
nature.
Kant thinks that the totality of nature doesnt really exist, but is a useful
benchmark for our practical action and natural science.
The issue for pre-Kantian metaphysics is that it took these Ideas of
Reason and took them as actually existing things, and as a guide to the
way objects were in themselves.
(1) No one thinks that you can deduce the categories of thought from the
logical form of judgement.
Kant has no answer for (2) other than the claim that these categories (i)
exhibit a systematic unity of reason and (ii) you interrogate your
experience, and you find these there.
(3) Whats all this stuff about judgement governing the domain of
thinkable content? Surely logic should not be subordinated to
transcendental psychology? (Frege is the source of this objection, I think
wrongly, disagrees with Kant)
(6) His model of the mind is still overly Cartesian (mind and world split)