You are fighting thing's, you know not. What are you trieing to do, make space head's. Maybe we all just came in the big bag. And have know reason. Nothing cannot make nothing. You are in the void, of what it was. Do you think, that there was a greater being, or not? But if you have no heart for God from the begining. For then i understand. For many come's and goes, and never fine it.
you complain that people want you to explain in your own words, and go on to not do so? go read atlas shrugged again. you really made a video about kant by reading out of some objectivist encyclopedia? jesus f. christ. are all objectivists actually functionally retarded?
Well, "functionally retarded" is a little strong, no? Doesn't Mr. Cropper address this by saying that he thinks this line of attack against him is "rabidly skeptical", and that such skeptics are just trying to "put a question in the way" so as to prevent any progress being made? So he has provided /a/ reason (justified or not) /not/ to obey their imperative, right? I think he's being consistent in proceeding to use his Objectivism-driven approach.
Who can "know" Kant, in totality? His writing is not him. It is only a moment of reflection. Someone else's thoughts about him, are not him. Nor are the reflections in another's mind-Kant. You can see a thought in writing. But a thought... and thinking, is only one part of a human-being.
We are more than just the sum of our parts. That is all I know.
Referring mainly to some comments, I think some people that attack Kant are depicting no more than an attitude, which is fine for fashion, music, etc., but not for philosophy. If his work is unsettling, then belch when no one's around. Indigestion is just that and reveals a lack of understanding. Other than that, I must credit anyone who at least attempts to sort it all out, and so I appreciate this video series, whether or not I agree with it. Kant, Rand, Hume, Plato, et al...all indispensible.
If Objectivism's "big beef" with Kant is his "arbitrary" understanding of the thing-in-itself, then let's end the beef now by understanding that Kant's assertion of this noumena comes thru universal access, so to speak. That is, all of us experience this synthetic a priori proposition. He doesn't claim to have any particular access to it. It's a description ultimately of phenomenology. Namely, that there are things that necessarily must be, but can't be experienced. For instance, other worlds.
I don't understand why you spent the first 1:25 just complaining about how others want you to explain Kant in your own words. If you are any type of professional philosopher, that is your job. And if you're not a professional philosopher, don't bother to upload a youtube video like this if you can't be bothered to do the work.
It's just weird that you are so emotional and serious about something which you don't understand even the basics of. This rant is so full of errors it's preposterous. Some examples: Kants system refutes traditional epistemological scepticism; he bever claimed to reach the noumenal world of course – you won't find logical contradictions in the Critique –; he never claims that man's knowledge is not valid or that we don't know anything; etc. etc. Do you read books or just keep them on display?
I have a suggestion: read Kant and become aware of the things he says so that when you talk about him you are referring to the things he says. The reason I suggest this is because your comments about Kant do not refer to the things he talks about.
I can tell from the things you say about Kant that Rand is not familiar with the content of what he says. It's so willfully ignorant from the beginning that to be specific seems utterly tedious. You're a bizarre irrational fundamentalist.
Lifes to short to be reading Kunt. Academic waste of time. Fucking boring and time consuming. If he couldn't be bothered to use punctuation, i'm not gonna read it.
it is important for us to regain the dualism of Kantian Philosophy as he brilliantly distinguished himself in Phenomena and Noumena. one is 'the Thing- as- it- appears- to- be' while the other is 'the Thing-in-itself'. for example is the grass green because i see it so or is it green because of its grassness?
Kant never tried to see out of the other side. If he were to see into the "noumenal" world he would have contradicted himself. Take a pet for example. Your goldfish only knows what's within the realm of his own phenomenal consciousness, and the reality which we live in is purely "noumenal" for the goldfish. This is what Kant was trying to assert; our reality is only real insofar as human beings perceptions extend, and the "true" reality is outside of what our minds can allow. It's a theory :P
"How did Kant know about noumena?" The answer is that the categories of understanding are wider than the forms of sense experience. To take Kemp Smith's example, the concept of substance signifies permanence in space and time but as PURE REASON has an indefinite meaning, signifying something that is a subject and never a predicate. The former designates the phenomenal, the latter the noumenal. We comprehend one and apprehend the other.
If reality is defined as that which is what it is, independent of how it is perceived, then the most real object is that which is utterly imperceptible, yet still exists. This is Kant's noumenal world. The a priori faculties of the human subject have not shaped them. As soon as we see them, the shape that they assume is a product of both the object and the perceiving subject; that is, not merely objective. This shape is phenomenal.
Kant does not say that experience has no baring on knowledge, but merely that the subject is active through a priori faculties in determining the appearance of experiences. That is, the experience is not independent of the subject. Kant does not say that independent objects do not exist or are not real, he merely says that the appearance an experienced object is dependent on the subject. Moreover, Kant explicitly denies the implication that experience is therefore a mere illusion.
Whoa, if this doesn't sound philosophical in nature, it's because it's not: You speak like an aggravated bitch to the point of drowning out whatever insight you are offering. My suggestion is that you fix that, oh philosopher.
I don't know as much about Kant's, metaphysics, but his categorical imperative, is all about reason. Mr.Cropper said it was not about reason but this is wrong, because humans are capable of reason, which separates us from animals for Kant, and makes us capable of reason and thus morals. Kant was all about reason, in his ethics.
@MrCropper Well it's not my intention to simply do away with all philosophy. Philosophy still has many purposes (ie ethics ,etc) but a huge majority of the topics Kant and philosophy in general cover (ie time, space, consciousness, cause and effect, the mind, god, reality, atoms, etc) are much better addressed by modern science.
@MrCropper Now hold on, let's not get ahead of ourselves. There are many definitions of philosophy and you think I'm attacking the one I'm not. I'm not suggesting that science, math, music, law, medicine, etc aren't each grounded in a philosophy. They are. If you check Webster for its definition 1c you'll find the one I mean, "a discipline comprising as its core logic, aesthetics, ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology".
You're a straight-up idiot. Kant didn't believe he was "seeing out the other side" of the mediation of human perception. He was just saying that by categorizing our experiences, we necessarily distort the world in itself. Therefore, we are living in a world of our own perceptions. Thats a very, very dumbed-down version. I hope you can wrap your pea-sized brain around it
Had to stop at 5 minutes in. This is fucking terrible. Your grasp of kant's philosophy is abysmal, and completely self-serving. A basic precept of intellectual dialogue is the principle of charity when interpreting the ideas of others. You seems incapable of acting on this principle, and as a result engage with, at best, a mere caricature of Kant and at worst a completely false picture.
Why should anyone believe you pontifications on Kant ? Wouldnt it be more resonable to attempt to understand e.g. Norman Kemp Smith or Robert C. Solomon than you ?
Cropper what if your reason is flawed?Or your rationality is flawed? I do not believe a Christian wants to control your life or even God for that matter. The gospel of Jesus Christ does not seek to control you rather it is the the good news of the Savior that God became a man to save us from ourselves. God lets you choose or reject the good news. Rather than listen to Ayn Rand on matters of faith why not read the gospel cover to cover and see for yourself? In there A is A.
If someone wants to self abnigate or self sacrafice so what? If he thought that faith needed to be saved from science its because they a very different subjects. Science is a tool to answer why things are what the are. Faith is something that that does not originate with us but enters the soul as a gift from God. Science is limited. Faith connects a believer to he who is not limited and stands outside time and is a gift from God.
On a reductionist level, imagine an alien with different senses. That alien might say that ALL humans are colour blind or that all humans are hideous to them. We don't get to decide what we find attractive eg what the paedophile finds attractive is a product of their brain not attribute of the child.
I've used aesthetics as an example because it's the easiest and because there is variation withing humanity as to what we find aesthetic. So that proves subjectivity is at play.
@Vaserlan however, there are also shared tastes and why there is somewhat of a consensus as to what is good writing or music or considered attractive in the main.
So there is an underling 'form' - a useful concept in aesthetics, music and writing - as argued by Robert Mckee.
@Vaserlan The key concept Robert Mckee gets across is that of the 'gap' between expectation and result: the gap between the subjective and objective realms. That is the substance of story and of our experience as human beings. We do not have godlike knowledge. We aint Q*. ;)
* = very btw: a godlike alien being is statistically probably ... but probably not our god. ;)
I hope mr cropper coems to wichita some day for w/e ever reason so i could meet him. hey mr cropper you ought to post a vid everytime u move around maybe. other then moving to new york.
Within philosophy Ayn Rand is kind of like a Bic Mac. Easily consumable, not necessarily right to partake of, but a nice fun break from having to do things yourself.
Kant (or at least understanding what his philosophy is about) is like a slow roasted pig that you have you devote hours and hours of attention to, to just get a little bite of its deliciousness.
Real philosophy is not for everyone. Ayn Rand is for everyone.
Kant was motivated by Hume who couldn't justify induction. We all believe it, but there is no way of justifying it. Kant believed that it was related to a priori cognition. He was also trying to rectify empiricism and rationalism. Ayn Rand seems to be claiming that all of his work in the Critique of Pure Reason was motivated by a desire to justify altruism. That simply isn't right.
Well, sure yeah, I am being sloppy. I should have said "We all believe it, but this belief is not based on a rational justification" I didn't mean to assert the impossibility in principle.
Kant asserted that certain fundamental ideas such as time, space, existence, causality are cognized a priori. So all percepts are pre-cognized through these categories. Our conscious minds aren't getting the raw data as it were. Reason can only deal with concepts of an object that reason itself ascribes to it. If you are reasoning about right triangles you can only deal with the defining properties of right triangles and any truth you arrive at will be limited to only those objects.
You are very right, Schopenhauer had the very same opinion. But Schopenhauer said on Kant, that Kant had to link the categorical imperative with Christanity otherwise he would be unemployed and maybe exiled or even worse.
Nietzsche lived about 120 years after Kant, and with the power of the church losening, he could speak more freely than any philosopher before.
However, that what you said is mostly true of German's post-kant-metaphysics, especially Hegel was not open minded at all.
The author misses the fact that Immanuel Kant was the first philosopher that started form the very core of reason, the thinking a priori. Because the thoughts are a priori they cannot be denied. It is like math, like math cannot be denied either (You cannot disprove 1+1=2 and so you can't disprove Kant).
If you want more prove of Kant's thinking check out Quantum Mechanics and Singularities, or the Measurement Theory.
Nietzsche disproved Kant. read Beyond Good And Evil. here's an excerpt. . . "How are synthetic judgements a priori possible?" Kant asked himself-and what really is his answer? "By virtue of a faculty" . . . and with such a display of German profundity and curlicues that people simply failed to note the the comical German foolishness. . . "By virtue of a faculty" - he had said. . . But is that - an answer? . . . Or is it rather merely a repetition of the question? (voila, Kant is disproved)
plus your stance on "1+1=2"... heres an excerpt from Sparknotes pertaining to Nietzsche's Beyond Good And Evil. "To return to the earlier objection, 1 + 1 = 2 without a doubt, but this truth is a simple fact, and we only get a part of the picture unless we ask who asserts it and why. . .
Why would a mathematician devote his entire life to the pursuit of such truths? What does that say about the mathematician? What does it then say about the truths? What wills are at play, what will is dominant in the pursuit of mathematics?. . .
These are the questions that interest Nietzsche, as a philosopher of the will, and not of facts and things. The "truths" of philosophers are expressions of their wills and not simple facts. A particular perspective taken on the truth is evidence for a particular will claiming dominance."
Kant said it is not easy to prove synthetic judgements a priori but it is even harder to disprove them.
Back then we believed that the world is 3-Dimensional (3D) because our perception can only see 3D.
Albert Einstein said everything is 4D and he was right - that is up to quantum theory.
The new string-theory says there is evidence that everything is 10D, 11D or 26D, that means time and space taking up to 26-Dimensions. With other theories Black Holes and the Big Bang cannot be explained.
This is what Kant wanted to say, that there are things that we cannot explain by perception but only by judgements a priori or Mathematics or Reason.
You cannot prove that time is relative with your perception, but with mathematics. You cannot prove that black holes do not last forever with your perception, but with mathematics.
You can prove many ontological things with reason, but it is very hard indeed, that is what Kant said.
Kant was proud of his table of things synthetical judgements a priori, indeed, and many of them were very wrong indeed.
But some of them are very right. Some of them still accord to all of modern science, and Nietzsche knew that, too.
In fact all his philosophy is based on Kant and Schopenhauer. All of them agree to transcendental idealistic point of view. But all of them differ to what does it mean.
well actually you're pretty right, i can't disagree. the thing you should keep in mind is that in regards to Descartes, Hume, and Kant, they were trying to answer 2 things: how the mind gets data, and how the mind processes it. what Nietzsche does is say that these philosophers made their claims about the mind under the assumption that they were able to first rid themselves of any prejudices they were taught in life before coming at the "absolute, pure answer."
Nietzsche observed that when you REALLY look closely at any philosopher's work, you find that they still harbor their prejudices, and the reasoning they give to justify their claims is only after the fact. its like saying Kant absolved himself of his religious upbringing before he made his categorical imperatives, but sadly Kant's morality still harbored religious origins. for Nietzsche, its better to learn and understand a philosopher's work but not regard it as an ABSOLUTE. KEEP AN OPEN MIND.
more than anything, I think he just got pissed off the people around him saying shit like "Kant is the right way and there's never going to be anything greater!!" Nietzsche was a person who would say, "Kant seems pretty right about his assumptions, and i cant disagree, but I know because of my own prejudices innate in me, it prevents me from any way of knowing the pure, unfiltered knowledge, and anyone claiming they can rid themselves of their own prejudices is bullshitting."
Hey, at least the guy is trying to understand the great thinkers of the past and do a video on his understanding instead of posting lame parodies or making useless videos like millions out there. More power to him (even if he is just a student...maybe he'll get to where he's going).
I read it up and didn't believe it myself, he was up to make some science (in his early days) and said that the most dominant, and mental highest race on earth are only, only the white ones. Combine... Ppl with different skin are less worth.
categorical imperative... of course a interesting theory, to me it is too lovely...
I think some ppl will always be bad so categorical imperative only works when all stick together... sorry I can't rly express what I wanna say I am german.
1) Kant believed that the categorical imperative could be deduced through reason. Kant had two formulations of the categorical imperative, and one of them (treat people as ends rather than a means to an ends) can be found in Objectivism as well.
2) Kant hated mysticism.
3) As much as I would love it if direct realism were the case, I don't see a way out of indirect realism.
1. Not really. Moral judgements have to hold as if they were deductive arguments, but morality, to Kant is way too abstract to be relegated to just reason alone. Were everyone with the exception of some Kantian traslators go wrong with his ideas on morality is understanding how moral judgments in Kant's view are numenal and outside the depths of space and time.
Your ignorance is very entertaining, but instead of making a fool of yourself by standing in a bad fitting jacket in front of old books symbolizing your "wisdom" talking bullshit about an author you quite obviously neither read nor understood, you might want to attend philosophy 101 first.
Hello. Today I have tracked down a carriage with a metal detector. Afterwards I have dug out them. With a pair of friends. In the carriage I found a glass brand of IMMANUEL KANT. Is she valuable?
You're presenting only a narrow interpretation of Kant which regards the noumena in the positive sense. One can quite consistently, and it has been repeatedly argued, that the noumena doesn't have the "existence" that you are ascribing to it, but that it is only a limiting concept. He says it specifically in several places in the first critique. Ignoring the scholarship and the text itself does not speak to your credibility on the subject.
And further, it is nothing short of -wrong- to say that the phenomenal world is a "distortion of reality" unless you are presupposing the positive existence of the noumena. Phenomena IS reality, it is OUR reality, NOT an illusion/falsity/etc. Look at the german word "Erscheinung" and you will see that calling it any such thing, if not understood contextually, is a bad translation.
And I don't suppose you might cite where in Kant he says that "we are all deluded and making this crap up." Is that Kant? Is that Ayn Rand putting words in his mouth? Where is the citation?
And Kant does NOT have a sort of "democratic" notion of ontology...I have to stop replying to every point. This is a horrible (mis)understanding of Kant. Try actually reading him.
Must agree with this and other refutations of the facile and incredibly wrong arguments being put forward here. It really sounds as if the speaker has neither read Kant nor any reliable sources on him.
The most illuminating thing about this video for me was finding out that there are still people calling themselves Objectivists. Weird.
I've never read or met a Randian who did come across as an obsessive, quasi-religious ideologue. Free your own mind Mr. Cropper. Drop the ideology. And go DIRECTLY to the source. Don't go through your Glorious Leader!
How can you go to Ayn Rand to criticize Kant. At least read the First Critique and the Groundwork. You're deliberately being deliberately intellectually dishonest.
Hey check it out, I'm Mr.Cropper, as I've stated, people say that I should go directly to Kant so let's flip to the LEXICON OF OBJECTIVISM BY AYN RAND. IS that going directly to Kant? Do you realize, Mr.Cropper, that some of the quotes in here are only claimed to be from Kant? I quote the Lexicon, p.g239 "An action is moral, said Kant, only if..." Kant actually did not say this, this is simply the inaccurate way which Rand likes to write. See the source at the bottom of my quote? It's by Rand.
i love immanuel kant. i love him so much that i castrastrated my self to help protect the enviorment. i use to be such a selfish person before i read kant. but i couldnt help my self to stop reasoning so i took an ice pick and gave my self a lobotomy.now the world is a much safer place. i now belong to democratic socialists of america. thank you mr kant. i have sexual fantasies about him daily.
I find this guys carrot and stick approach to Kant somewhat vague. To understand the world, every one is different and in trying to be different is the same. Kant is self defeating, briefly mentioning the belly dancing bit.
so what's the big deal. everyone has a different model of the world based on a priori knowledge and their experiences of the world. once you learn that your model is subjective it allows one to try other models or use more than one model to evaluate the world. one problem with America is that a large number of people have only one model for evaluating the world and it's called the bible.
you really seem to have control issues and use an excessive amount of generalizations.
Hmm... Does Kan't, in any way, imply that there's a way to access the noumenal world, the world of true knowledge and truth, obviously not through reason but through faith or the self revelation of the noumea, or any other way? If not, how is it a defense of faith? More over, he evacuates faith of any act of reason; or, if not so generally, one can conclude that the claims of truth in faith might well, at the end, depart from the delusion (phenomenical world) as unreliable desires of the noumea.
As far as I can tell, Kant defends faith in the possibility that there might be certain things that we should (morally) want to exist. And he defends the faith in things that, if we imagine them existing, would help our frail humanity do things it should be doing anyway, but can't, because we are bound to experience... but only because its doing that, and never elsewise. Something like that.
So now Kant's philosophy is religious? This is not what I have been led to understand -and maybe I am wrong. When I started to study Kant, I said: "By God, this is agnosticism at its purest form." With the premises of the noumenon and the phenomenon, faith and reason are completely separated from each other. We can't have any knowledge at all that is true about the things that are in themselves, which include God; thus where there's faith there isn't reason or knowledge.
MrCropper, I agree with you. This was well done. The rebuttles are boring and pointless. I have been upable to finish reading/wactching them. My crituque is not of reason but of your outfit. Please do not wear a t-shirt with a suit jacket. It looks cheap, unprofessional, and as if you are going clubing. Please wear a button up shirt and a tie with the coat or just the t. I am saying this not to be mean just a friendly critique. Good speech!
I say he is important because of the influence he has had: Fichte, Hegel, Shopenhauer, Nietzsche and many others; all influenced by Kant in one way or another.
As for "REASON", I'm not too sure that it's some sort of absolute.
Well, then you don't subscribe to the principles of the Enlightenment either.
It however doesn't mean that Kant(even though he was important and alive at the time), belonged to the Enlightenment(again, also called the Age of Reason), just as the popes of the 15th century were not part of the Rennaisance, even though they were powerful and influential.
The Enlightenment was brought about by the American Revolution, and the cultural and social changes that followed in Britain and Europe.
Surely Kant was not speaking out against reason? The term "Critique" does not imply a stance either in favour of or against the subject of your critique. It simply means that you will evaluate your subject in order to understand its strengths and weaknesses. Kant was arguing precisely in favour of reason. We must form hypotheses a priori through reason and logic, and then test these hypotheses to apply them to the world, much as we have done with mathematics.
Is this an accurate representation of Kant's views?
"The metaphysical facts about the ultimate nature of things in themselves must remain a mystery to us because of the spatiotemporal constraints on sensibility."
If so, how could he possibly consider reason, which can only consider our senses, significant? If we don't know reality, what exactly are you and I "reasoning" or hypothesizing on about here? What for?
Yes, it would be an accurate representation of Kant's views, but all it says is that we can't be sure of what's outside our own minds. That doesn't necessarily rule out the possibility of reason. What Kant was trying to do is reconcile the views of the rationalists who argued that we can know everything about the world a priori, and the empiricists who argued that we can only know the world a posterior.
We can't know anything about things-in-themselves but we can know (and therefore reason about) our experiences and senses. Kant divides the world into two planes. The physical plane represents the world as it really is, things-in-themselves. The phenomenal plane represents the concepts that we have imposed on the world to explain and model it. We can reason about these concepts, which represent our understanding of things-in-themselves, but does not represent things-in-themselves directly.
Perhaps an example would be fruitful. We cannot be sure that gravity really exists - we can't know anything about it for sure. But we have observed that things generally fall to the ground if dropped, rather than floating. To explain these phenomena, therefore, we have developed the theory of gravity which is a concept that man has developed through pure reason to explain the external world, even though we can know nothing of gravity in itself, or even that it actually exists.
Thus Kant does not rule out the possibility of reason, but argues that we can reason only about the concepts that we ourselves put into the world to represent things-in-themselves, rather than reasoning about things-in-themselves.
That's not really reason, now is it? It means that we are making up a false virtual reality, and we can only understand this world, not the "nominal" world.
Isn't then his idea that there even is a "nominal" world just a form of mysticism? Isn't this world a product of his fantasy, just like the angels and heaven are a product of fantasy? How else could Kant possibly know about them if he cannot sense them, except mystical revelation?
I consider this way of thinking a rejection of reason.
Your argument remains based on the assumption that we can only reason about that which we directly perceive. This, of course, rejects the possibility of mathematics. We cannot directly perceive mathematics (how do you "sense" mathematics? You can't touch it, smell it, feel it) and yet I challenge you to find a single person who would argue that the basic axiom "1+1=2" is not true.
Even if you put 1 bean next to another bean and conclude that there are 2, still you must accept that the notion of "1" and the notion of "2" are simply labels or concepts that we have assigned to things in the real world in order to allow us to reason about the world which we perceive.
The same applies to the notion of "Up" and "down". In nature there are no such concepts (stood on earth we assume that the moon is "above" us, but presumably if stood on the moon we would talk about the earth being "above" us). Yet to talk about such concepts is not unreasonably, since they help us visualise and reason about that which we perceive.
Kant's argument is that we can only know about things in themselves through our senses, but we have no way of knowing whether or not our senses are correctly revealing to us things-in-themselves so the only "mystical" revelation that is going on is that our senses are (attempting) to reveal things to us.
Of course, reason as Kant sees it cannot discover objective truth, but within the framework of Kant's philosophy reason is certainly not impossible. Furthermore, I would dispute your assumption that in order for discourse to be labelled "reason", it must discover objective truth. I would define reason merely as the process of deriving a conclusion from some basic axioms. For me, argument leading from true axioms to a false conclusion is flawed reason, but it is still a system of reasoning.
I'm start by answering your question about my own reasoning. The answer is I don't know that it's not flawed. That's the benefit of peer review. By openly revealing my reasoning I hope that others can point out any problems in my logic and thus set me straight. Regarding your question about what we can discover if not objective truth, we can find patterns in the world as we perceive it. Do you deny that mathematics, although merely a human invention, is useful?
Of course it is possible to draw conclusions independently, but they cannot be objective. For example, I can state that "I have never witnessed a glass of water freeze at 88 degrees", but I cannot conclude that "water will never freeze at 88 degrees". In order to begin to draw objective conclusions, we require the evidence and experiences provided by a range of individuals to confirm our hypothesis, and the more evidence we receive, the stronger our conclusions become.
Yes, I would say that in order to know that you are lying I would have to perform the experiment. Experience and evidence doesn't form an objective conclusion, but it forms a less subjective conclusion. Notice how what I have argued entails from Kant's philosophy ammounts to the scientific method. This is why it is legitimate to argue that Kant is important in the age of reason - because his philosophy is the basis of the scientific method as we know it today.
So in your view science is in no way based on logic, and it doesn't seek objective conclusions? It's only a statistical amalgam of likely theories?
Let's be serious, Global Warming theory may be based on that, but that's certainly not what took us to the moon or gave us the ability to communicate across oceans like we're next to each other. I know for a fact that these wires will send this message right to your computer, and that it will show up on your screen.
No, science is of course based on logic, but you continue to assume that logic must be applied to the "real" world. Logic is simply a system of deriving new statements from old statements based on the assumed truth values for the original axioms. Those axioms don't have to be "objectively" true for an argument to be logical. Also, ask any scientist and they will agree that there is a (small) possibility that science has got it wrong.
You don't know for a "fact" that your message will show up on my screen because you don't know for a fact that the system has been built with 100% reliability. Based on your experience, it's been pretty good so far, but there's a possibility that data may get lost or corrupted somewhere along the line.
The phenomenal world is the set of concepts that we have created to explain the world as we perceive it. Thus, the phenomenal world is the set of all the answers that we have to all the questions that we are able to answer with a reasonable ammount of certainty. It is clear that there are some questions that we are as of yet unable to answer, and thus the answers to these questions (if they exist at all) cannot be part of the phenomenal world.
Your post suggests that the phenomenal world is part of the real reality, we just haven't discovered all of reality yet.
That's not what Kant thought: he declared the phenomenal world to be not reality, just a product of our (collective) counsciousness, and he said reality was beyond our grasp, a different dimension.
Okay, I agree. I missed the point a little with that post. But the same logic applies. The phenomenal world contains human concepts which explain (and thus map to) our perceptions. The nominal world is the world beyond those perceptions from whence the perceptions arise. Thus the phenomenal world is within the mind, and the nominal world without the mind. There may be nothing at all outside the mind, but again, an empty set is still a set.
The only purpose for such a construct, the way I see it, is to raise the possibility of any arbitrary description of this "world beyond perceptions". It basically means that anything is possible. If someone can think of X, then X is possible.
It means Arbitrary=Possible, just as the products of reason are possible. This theory in essence equates arbitrary thoughts (Santa, God, Heaven) with logic and reason. Wouldn't you agree?
Well sure, it certainly does imply that Santa, God, Heaven etc are possible - we can't know either way. But that doesn't make them reasonable. Within Kant's framework, we reason about the phenomenal world and not about the real world. The phenomenal world is derived from our perceptions and since Santa (and arguably God and Heaven) are clearly inconsistent with our current phenomenal-world concepts (does Santa really break the speed of light?) then we can rule them out as false conclusions.
Santa, God and Heaven could all be part of the noumenal world.
Let's look at Pascal's wager: If there is a tiny possibility that Heaven is real (as you claim it to be!!!), and it means eternal happiness, shouldn't you live your life as a fundamentalist Christian? Doesn't "tiny possibility"(i.e. 0.001) times "eternal, infinitely happy life" more than make up for whatever you are giving up in this false reality we made up for ourselves?
Note that I don't claim heaven to be real, I claim that there is a possibility that it is real. Equally, there is a possibility that Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Budhism, Rastafarianism, etc, or Atheism correct. It's a calculated risk we all have to make. Personally, I find religion to be inconsistent with the phenomenal world - while the view of (any given) religion is not impossible, I believe it to be improbable and thus do not accept the doctrine it would force upon me.
Yes, 0.001 is pretty improbable. You claim that there's a small possibility of it being real, simply because someone thought of it. Now, if you calculate the potential benefits of this being real, even if they are a millionth or a trillionth of the full 100% certainty of eternal infinite happiness, they are still much greater than a short nice life on Earth. (even more so if you add to this the possibility of eternal suffering in Hell as a consequence of choosing to dismiss it)
Well, now you're bringing the issue of ethics into the debate. I thought we were discussing reason? You're assuming that I value personal comfort over consistency. Many people throughout history have faced persecution, torture and death because they refused to turn against what they held to be true. Different people rank values in different ways. Your argument attempts to apply your value system to everyone.
That's actually true, but I would know for a fact if we were at the two ends of a wire that you'll receive different signals in the order I sent them to you.
Plus, you are helping my point by using the term 100% reliability.
If science was based on probabilities, would that notion exist? Would there be laws of physics?
All science ever says is "Thus far, all the evidence appears to support X, Y and Z and therefore we shall safely assume X, Y and Z until such a time as evidence counters these claims, or a better explanation arises". For centuries, man believed the earth was the center of the Universe - it was considered a scientific fact. But clearl
You are fighting thing's, you know not. What are you trieing to do, make space head's. Maybe we all just came in the big bag. And have know reason. Nothing cannot make nothing. You are in the void, of what it was. Do you think, that there was a greater being, or not? But if you have no heart for God from the begining. For then i understand. For many come's and goes, and never fine it.
amiaquariusiam 1 month ago
Objectivism is to Philosophy what Religion is to Science. What a pile...
0MINDNTHOUGHT0 2 months ago
you complain that people want you to explain in your own words, and go on to not do so? go read atlas shrugged again. you really made a video about kant by reading out of some objectivist encyclopedia? jesus f. christ. are all objectivists actually functionally retarded?
MacbookProWizard 3 months ago
@MacbookProWizard
Well, "functionally retarded" is a little strong, no? Doesn't Mr. Cropper address this by saying that he thinks this line of attack against him is "rabidly skeptical", and that such skeptics are just trying to "put a question in the way" so as to prevent any progress being made? So he has provided /a/ reason (justified or not) /not/ to obey their imperative, right? I think he's being consistent in proceeding to use his Objectivism-driven approach.
EdmontonReader1989 2 months ago
Who can "know" Kant, in totality? His writing is not him. It is only a moment of reflection. Someone else's thoughts about him, are not him. Nor are the reflections in another's mind-Kant. You can see a thought in writing. But a thought... and thinking, is only one part of a human-being.
We are more than just the sum of our parts. That is all I know.
thequizzingglass 3 months ago
Referring mainly to some comments, I think some people that attack Kant are depicting no more than an attitude, which is fine for fashion, music, etc., but not for philosophy. If his work is unsettling, then belch when no one's around. Indigestion is just that and reveals a lack of understanding. Other than that, I must credit anyone who at least attempts to sort it all out, and so I appreciate this video series, whether or not I agree with it. Kant, Rand, Hume, Plato, et al...all indispensible.
ResistTyranny101 6 months ago
If Objectivism's "big beef" with Kant is his "arbitrary" understanding of the thing-in-itself, then let's end the beef now by understanding that Kant's assertion of this noumena comes thru universal access, so to speak. That is, all of us experience this synthetic a priori proposition. He doesn't claim to have any particular access to it. It's a description ultimately of phenomenology. Namely, that there are things that necessarily must be, but can't be experienced. For instance, other worlds.
ResistTyranny101 6 months ago
make your argument please...you can do it:-)
belmontartwork 7 months ago
if absinthe never was invented, philosophy would not exist.
87tomify 8 months ago
I don't understand why you spent the first 1:25 just complaining about how others want you to explain Kant in your own words. If you are any type of professional philosopher, that is your job. And if you're not a professional philosopher, don't bother to upload a youtube video like this if you can't be bothered to do the work.
forevertired72 8 months ago
Platonic forms and Kantian ideals are the same: utter bullshit. Noumena, things-in-themselves, and a priori truths are the same: utter bullshit.
PureLiberalRadio 9 months ago
Come on, give this guy a break, he is an objectivist :p
cobracarg 10 months ago
You are a very confused individual.
alifeofreason 10 months ago
fucking stupid
PraiseTheCrust 11 months ago
It's just weird that you are so emotional and serious about something which you don't understand even the basics of. This rant is so full of errors it's preposterous. Some examples: Kants system refutes traditional epistemological scepticism; he bever claimed to reach the noumenal world of course – you won't find logical contradictions in the Critique –; he never claims that man's knowledge is not valid or that we don't know anything; etc. etc. Do you read books or just keep them on display?
thejarverdude 11 months ago
I have a suggestion: read Kant and become aware of the things he says so that when you talk about him you are referring to the things he says. The reason I suggest this is because your comments about Kant do not refer to the things he talks about.
JCotton648 11 months ago 2
It's painfully obvious from this video that the most you have ever read of Kant is quotes about him by philosophical nonentities like Ayn Rand.
JosephTheGodless 1 year ago
7:44 I am officially an objectivest.
zieben64 1 year ago
I can tell from the things you say about Kant that Rand is not familiar with the content of what he says. It's so willfully ignorant from the beginning that to be specific seems utterly tedious. You're a bizarre irrational fundamentalist.
JCotton648 1 year ago
the grass is green because of its color and cloraphyl
W6S0A4 1 year ago
Lifes to short to be reading Kunt. Academic waste of time. Fucking boring and time consuming. If he couldn't be bothered to use punctuation, i'm not gonna read it.
sparkyinbath 1 year ago
@sparkyinbath you missed an apostrophe...ha ha ... faggot
browno26 1 year ago
it is important for us to regain the dualism of Kantian Philosophy as he brilliantly distinguished himself in Phenomena and Noumena. one is 'the Thing- as- it- appears- to- be' while the other is 'the Thing-in-itself'. for example is the grass green because i see it so or is it green because of its grassness?
tfnat 1 year ago
Don't let the dislikes discourage you. The people who disliked your video probably didn't even listen to what you were saying.
CircleBastiat 1 year ago
Fantastic video's! Thanks!
pvtmartijn 1 year ago
What is the name of the book he's reading. It's f**king awesome. :D
MyMindTank 1 year ago
Kant never tried to see out of the other side. If he were to see into the "noumenal" world he would have contradicted himself. Take a pet for example. Your goldfish only knows what's within the realm of his own phenomenal consciousness, and the reality which we live in is purely "noumenal" for the goldfish. This is what Kant was trying to assert; our reality is only real insofar as human beings perceptions extend, and the "true" reality is outside of what our minds can allow. It's a theory :P
abuseforapie 1 year ago
"How did Kant know about noumena?" The answer is that the categories of understanding are wider than the forms of sense experience. To take Kemp Smith's example, the concept of substance signifies permanence in space and time but as PURE REASON has an indefinite meaning, signifying something that is a subject and never a predicate. The former designates the phenomenal, the latter the noumenal. We comprehend one and apprehend the other.
SORMayhem 1 year ago
@SORMayhem Lol! Wow mayhem u must be smart!
andykins654 1 year ago
If reality is defined as that which is what it is, independent of how it is perceived, then the most real object is that which is utterly imperceptible, yet still exists. This is Kant's noumenal world. The a priori faculties of the human subject have not shaped them. As soon as we see them, the shape that they assume is a product of both the object and the perceiving subject; that is, not merely objective. This shape is phenomenal.
nobodady1 1 year ago
Kant does not say that experience has no baring on knowledge, but merely that the subject is active through a priori faculties in determining the appearance of experiences. That is, the experience is not independent of the subject. Kant does not say that independent objects do not exist or are not real, he merely says that the appearance an experienced object is dependent on the subject. Moreover, Kant explicitly denies the implication that experience is therefore a mere illusion.
nobodady1 1 year ago
Whoa, if this doesn't sound philosophical in nature, it's because it's not: You speak like an aggravated bitch to the point of drowning out whatever insight you are offering. My suggestion is that you fix that, oh philosopher.
TheGreatDissolve 1 year ago
I don't know as much about Kant's, metaphysics, but his categorical imperative, is all about reason. Mr.Cropper said it was not about reason but this is wrong, because humans are capable of reason, which separates us from animals for Kant, and makes us capable of reason and thus morals. Kant was all about reason, in his ethics.
natedaug1 1 year ago
Realistically, intelligent people can simply ignore Kant and most philosophy. There's almost no reason to even address it.
MrSalamander7 1 year ago
This has been flagged as spam show
@MrSalamander7 "Realistically, intelligent people can simply ignore Kant and most philosophy. There's almost no reason to even address it."
You should read Ayn Rand's book "Philosophy: Who Needs It?" I guess your answer to that question is: not intelligent people.
MrCropper 1 year ago
@MrCropper Well it's not my intention to simply do away with all philosophy. Philosophy still has many purposes (ie ethics ,etc) but a huge majority of the topics Kant and philosophy in general cover (ie time, space, consciousness, cause and effect, the mind, god, reality, atoms, etc) are much better addressed by modern science.
MrSalamander7 1 year ago
@MrSalamander7 "a huge majority of the topics Kant and philosophy in general cover... are much better addressed by modern science."
Science wouldn't exist without philosophy, so your statement is obviously misinformed to say the least.
MrCropper 1 year ago 2
@MrCropper Now hold on, let's not get ahead of ourselves. There are many definitions of philosophy and you think I'm attacking the one I'm not. I'm not suggesting that science, math, music, law, medicine, etc aren't each grounded in a philosophy. They are. If you check Webster for its definition 1c you'll find the one I mean, "a discipline comprising as its core logic, aesthetics, ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology".
MrSalamander7 1 year ago
we have to go back to Socrates :) ...Kant becames to rigid aparently...and so inevitabily he loses things out of hand:)
aladinclip 1 year ago
This guy is clearly a raging homosexual;
observe his flamboyant camp mannerisms,
take note of the angle of the camera, as to show bookcases filled with books he has never read,
Coupled with his pseudo intellectual attire.
Amateur, fuck off. Kant is clearly a mystic, not a philosopher.
utukk 1 year ago
You're a straight-up idiot. Kant didn't believe he was "seeing out the other side" of the mediation of human perception. He was just saying that by categorizing our experiences, we necessarily distort the world in itself. Therefore, we are living in a world of our own perceptions. Thats a very, very dumbed-down version. I hope you can wrap your pea-sized brain around it
schwaful 1 year ago
lol wut?
oldmanhegel 1 year ago
@oldmanhegel Kant is a joke.
BrettDunbar 1 year ago
Had to stop at 5 minutes in. This is fucking terrible. Your grasp of kant's philosophy is abysmal, and completely self-serving. A basic precept of intellectual dialogue is the principle of charity when interpreting the ideas of others. You seems incapable of acting on this principle, and as a result engage with, at best, a mere caricature of Kant and at worst a completely false picture.
Quinn2112 1 year ago
Why should anyone believe you pontifications on Kant ? Wouldnt it be more resonable to attempt to understand e.g. Norman Kemp Smith or Robert C. Solomon than you ?
hieronomy 1 year ago
Kant is a fucking douchbag. More like immanuel Cunt!!!!!!!!!! Philosphy for morons and turds
Thusyanthan 1 year ago
he he he! you said cunt!
udoloh 1 year ago
@udoloh u mad?
BrettDunbar 1 year ago
This has been flagged as spam show
@udoloh lol u mad?
BrettDunbar 1 year ago
Science, Reason and Logic are not interchangeable terms. 3:00/9:58 - they are three different processes.
Jenawahrheit 1 year ago
agree
illeviatano 1 year ago
but i rember you that for example science applied the concept of "dialettica" of Hegel. Means without Hegel science isnt real science
illeviatano 1 year ago
You seemed confused about some pretty simple stuff bro.
shiprecords 2 years ago 17
Cropper what if your reason is flawed?Or your rationality is flawed? I do not believe a Christian wants to control your life or even God for that matter. The gospel of Jesus Christ does not seek to control you rather it is the the good news of the Savior that God became a man to save us from ourselves. God lets you choose or reject the good news. Rather than listen to Ayn Rand on matters of faith why not read the gospel cover to cover and see for yourself? In there A is A.
mellowtribe 2 years ago
@mellowtribe What if Kant is god!
shiprecords 2 years ago
He kant be.
mellowtribe 2 years ago 2
Kropper wha
mellowtribe 2 years ago
If someone wants to self abnigate or self sacrafice so what? If he thought that faith needed to be saved from science its because they a very different subjects. Science is a tool to answer why things are what the are. Faith is something that that does not originate with us but enters the soul as a gift from God. Science is limited. Faith connects a believer to he who is not limited and stands outside time and is a gift from God.
mellowtribe 2 years ago
On a reductionist level, imagine an alien with different senses. That alien might say that ALL humans are colour blind or that all humans are hideous to them. We don't get to decide what we find attractive eg what the paedophile finds attractive is a product of their brain not attribute of the child.
I've used aesthetics as an example because it's the easiest and because there is variation withing humanity as to what we find aesthetic. So that proves subjectivity is at play.
Vaserlan 2 years ago
@Vaserlan however, there are also shared tastes and why there is somewhat of a consensus as to what is good writing or music or considered attractive in the main.
So there is an underling 'form' - a useful concept in aesthetics, music and writing - as argued by Robert Mckee.
Vaserlan 2 years ago
@Vaserlan The key concept Robert Mckee gets across is that of the 'gap' between expectation and result: the gap between the subjective and objective realms. That is the substance of story and of our experience as human beings. We do not have godlike knowledge. We aint Q*. ;)
* = very btw: a godlike alien being is statistically probably ... but probably not our god. ;)
Vaserlan 2 years ago
@Vaserlan sorry about the typos. :$ - I'm not a redneck/chav, honest. ;)
Vaserlan 2 years ago
I hope mr cropper coems to wichita some day for w/e ever reason so i could meet him. hey mr cropper you ought to post a vid everytime u move around maybe. other then moving to new york.
greenghost2008 2 years ago
Thanks
Alecal89 2 years ago
Within philosophy Ayn Rand is kind of like a Bic Mac. Easily consumable, not necessarily right to partake of, but a nice fun break from having to do things yourself.
Kant (or at least understanding what his philosophy is about) is like a slow roasted pig that you have you devote hours and hours of attention to, to just get a little bite of its deliciousness.
Real philosophy is not for everyone. Ayn Rand is for everyone.
stephengnelson 2 years ago
I smiled, heh.
snarge 2 years ago
@ stephengnelson
Saved your comment in a document, it's so damn accurate =)
SopLusus 1 year ago
@stephengnelson "Real philosophy is not for everyone. Ayn Rand is for everyone." Yeah, kinda like reality.
yammyspeed13 1 year ago
@stephengnelson Wow, that's one of the better trolling comments on youtube. Well done.
seanthedonconsidine 1 year ago
Comment removed
nile577 2 years ago
Kant was motivated by Hume who couldn't justify induction. We all believe it, but there is no way of justifying it. Kant believed that it was related to a priori cognition. He was also trying to rectify empiricism and rationalism. Ayn Rand seems to be claiming that all of his work in the Critique of Pure Reason was motivated by a desire to justify altruism. That simply isn't right.
TexanProgressive 2 years ago 7
"We all believe it, but there is no way of justifying it. "
To say there is no way of justifying is an inductive statement, so you contradict yourself. Induction is valid, else our words have no meaning.
MrCropper 2 years ago 5
Well, sure yeah, I am being sloppy. I should have said "We all believe it, but this belief is not based on a rational justification" I didn't mean to assert the impossibility in principle.
TexanProgressive 2 years ago
@MrCropper Words have no meaning without induction? Semantics fail.
lacansfoolosopher 1 year ago
@MrCropper @MrCropper "To say there is no way of justifying is an inductive statement." Not necessarily.
shilohwillcome 1 year ago
@MrCropper
"To say there is no way of justifying is an inductive statement"
No it isnt. and the fact that your comment got 5 thumbs up speaks volumes about your audience
InvincibleNumanist 1 month ago
Kant asserted that certain fundamental ideas such as time, space, existence, causality are cognized a priori. So all percepts are pre-cognized through these categories. Our conscious minds aren't getting the raw data as it were. Reason can only deal with concepts of an object that reason itself ascribes to it. If you are reasoning about right triangles you can only deal with the defining properties of right triangles and any truth you arrive at will be limited to only those objects.
TexanProgressive 2 years ago 2
You are very right, Schopenhauer had the very same opinion. But Schopenhauer said on Kant, that Kant had to link the categorical imperative with Christanity otherwise he would be unemployed and maybe exiled or even worse.
Nietzsche lived about 120 years after Kant, and with the power of the church losening, he could speak more freely than any philosopher before.
However, that what you said is mostly true of German's post-kant-metaphysics, especially Hegel was not open minded at all.
Y0m00 2 years ago
The author misses the fact that Immanuel Kant was the first philosopher that started form the very core of reason, the thinking a priori. Because the thoughts are a priori they cannot be denied. It is like math, like math cannot be denied either (You cannot disprove 1+1=2 and so you can't disprove Kant).
If you want more prove of Kant's thinking check out Quantum Mechanics and Singularities, or the Measurement Theory.
Y0m00 2 years ago
Nietzsche disproved Kant. read Beyond Good And Evil. here's an excerpt. . . "How are synthetic judgements a priori possible?" Kant asked himself-and what really is his answer? "By virtue of a faculty" . . . and with such a display of German profundity and curlicues that people simply failed to note the the comical German foolishness. . . "By virtue of a faculty" - he had said. . . But is that - an answer? . . . Or is it rather merely a repetition of the question? (voila, Kant is disproved)
yongngu88 2 years ago
plus your stance on "1+1=2"... heres an excerpt from Sparknotes pertaining to Nietzsche's Beyond Good And Evil. "To return to the earlier objection, 1 + 1 = 2 without a doubt, but this truth is a simple fact, and we only get a part of the picture unless we ask who asserts it and why. . .
yongngu88 2 years ago
Why would a mathematician devote his entire life to the pursuit of such truths? What does that say about the mathematician? What does it then say about the truths? What wills are at play, what will is dominant in the pursuit of mathematics?. . .
yongngu88 2 years ago
These are the questions that interest Nietzsche, as a philosopher of the will, and not of facts and things. The "truths" of philosophers are expressions of their wills and not simple facts. A particular perspective taken on the truth is evidence for a particular will claiming dominance."
yongngu88 2 years ago
Kant said it is not easy to prove synthetic judgements a priori but it is even harder to disprove them.
Back then we believed that the world is 3-Dimensional (3D) because our perception can only see 3D.
Albert Einstein said everything is 4D and he was right - that is up to quantum theory.
The new string-theory says there is evidence that everything is 10D, 11D or 26D, that means time and space taking up to 26-Dimensions. With other theories Black Holes and the Big Bang cannot be explained.
Y0m00 2 years ago
This is what Kant wanted to say, that there are things that we cannot explain by perception but only by judgements a priori or Mathematics or Reason.
You cannot prove that time is relative with your perception, but with mathematics. You cannot prove that black holes do not last forever with your perception, but with mathematics.
You can prove many ontological things with reason, but it is very hard indeed, that is what Kant said.
Y0m00 2 years ago
Kant was proud of his table of things synthetical judgements a priori, indeed, and many of them were very wrong indeed.
But some of them are very right. Some of them still accord to all of modern science, and Nietzsche knew that, too.
In fact all his philosophy is based on Kant and Schopenhauer. All of them agree to transcendental idealistic point of view. But all of them differ to what does it mean.
Schopenhauer said the will to live.
Nietzsche the will of power.
Kant the thing in itself.
Y0m00 2 years ago
Well that is the way I am thinking, and I would be glad if you can prove, why I am wrong - all I want is to understand and learn.
Y0m00 2 years ago
well actually you're pretty right, i can't disagree. the thing you should keep in mind is that in regards to Descartes, Hume, and Kant, they were trying to answer 2 things: how the mind gets data, and how the mind processes it. what Nietzsche does is say that these philosophers made their claims about the mind under the assumption that they were able to first rid themselves of any prejudices they were taught in life before coming at the "absolute, pure answer."
yongngu88 2 years ago
Nietzsche observed that when you REALLY look closely at any philosopher's work, you find that they still harbor their prejudices, and the reasoning they give to justify their claims is only after the fact. its like saying Kant absolved himself of his religious upbringing before he made his categorical imperatives, but sadly Kant's morality still harbored religious origins. for Nietzsche, its better to learn and understand a philosopher's work but not regard it as an ABSOLUTE. KEEP AN OPEN MIND.
yongngu88 2 years ago
more than anything, I think he just got pissed off the people around him saying shit like "Kant is the right way and there's never going to be anything greater!!" Nietzsche was a person who would say, "Kant seems pretty right about his assumptions, and i cant disagree, but I know because of my own prejudices innate in me, it prevents me from any way of knowing the pure, unfiltered knowledge, and anyone claiming they can rid themselves of their own prejudices is bullshitting."
yongngu88 2 years ago
Hey, at least the guy is trying to understand the great thinkers of the past and do a video on his understanding instead of posting lame parodies or making useless videos like millions out there. More power to him (even if he is just a student...maybe he'll get to where he's going).
dedbusted 2 years ago
I love watching wannabe intellectuals bickering on youtube.
RoulfYelrab 2 years ago
haha me too, this guys a creep his views are just nasty and shit
djboony 2 years ago
totally downloading your vids into my brain today
TheObnubilators 2 years ago
Kant is a racist.
I read it up and didn't believe it myself, he was up to make some science (in his early days) and said that the most dominant, and mental highest race on earth are only, only the white ones. Combine... Ppl with different skin are less worth.
categorical imperative... of course a interesting theory, to me it is too lovely...
I think some ppl will always be bad so categorical imperative only works when all stick together... sorry I can't rly express what I wanna say I am german.
MastaSplintah 2 years ago
"race" is not defined by skin color.
dedbusted 2 years ago
1) Kant believed that the categorical imperative could be deduced through reason. Kant had two formulations of the categorical imperative, and one of them (treat people as ends rather than a means to an ends) can be found in Objectivism as well.
2) Kant hated mysticism.
3) As much as I would love it if direct realism were the case, I don't see a way out of indirect realism.
socritic 2 years ago
1. Not really. Moral judgements have to hold as if they were deductive arguments, but morality, to Kant is way too abstract to be relegated to just reason alone. Were everyone with the exception of some Kantian traslators go wrong with his ideas on morality is understanding how moral judgments in Kant's view are numenal and outside the depths of space and time.
amotisi8859 2 years ago
Your ignorance is very entertaining, but instead of making a fool of yourself by standing in a bad fitting jacket in front of old books symbolizing your "wisdom" talking bullshit about an author you quite obviously neither read nor understood, you might want to attend philosophy 101 first.
yalubln 2 years ago
Brilliant !! by the way What is your view on Ernst Casser?
plaussible 2 years ago
BTW.... YOUR SUIT IS FUCKED UP!
CKALLDAYUX 2 years ago
fuck off
RobertZepeski 2 years ago
Hello. Today I have tracked down a carriage with a metal detector. Afterwards I have dug out them. With a pair of friends. In the carriage I found a glass brand of IMMANUEL KANT. Is she valuable?
JagdwolfHEDDC 2 years ago
acadeemiks
hodown94 2 years ago 2
Very good.
Now if you don't mind, I need to forward this to some crazy people that upset my logics.
Thanks for putting it so clearly!
Itabar (new subscriber)
Itabar 2 years ago
You're presenting only a narrow interpretation of Kant which regards the noumena in the positive sense. One can quite consistently, and it has been repeatedly argued, that the noumena doesn't have the "existence" that you are ascribing to it, but that it is only a limiting concept. He says it specifically in several places in the first critique. Ignoring the scholarship and the text itself does not speak to your credibility on the subject.
TDWP077 2 years ago 2
And further, it is nothing short of -wrong- to say that the phenomenal world is a "distortion of reality" unless you are presupposing the positive existence of the noumena. Phenomena IS reality, it is OUR reality, NOT an illusion/falsity/etc. Look at the german word "Erscheinung" and you will see that calling it any such thing, if not understood contextually, is a bad translation.
TDWP077 2 years ago 3
And I don't suppose you might cite where in Kant he says that "we are all deluded and making this crap up." Is that Kant? Is that Ayn Rand putting words in his mouth? Where is the citation?
TDWP077 2 years ago
And Kant does NOT have a sort of "democratic" notion of ontology...I have to stop replying to every point. This is a horrible (mis)understanding of Kant. Try actually reading him.
TDWP077 2 years ago
Perfect example of a straw man... This reading of Kant.
TDWP077 2 years ago
Must agree with this and other refutations of the facile and incredibly wrong arguments being put forward here. It really sounds as if the speaker has neither read Kant nor any reliable sources on him.
The most illuminating thing about this video for me was finding out that there are still people calling themselves Objectivists. Weird.
JohnMoseley 2 years ago 2
Just to be clear, until my comment is put in its proper place, I meant I agree with the TDWP077, not agree with MrCropper.
JohnMoseley 2 years ago
I've never read or met a Randian who did come across as an obsessive, quasi-religious ideologue. Free your own mind Mr. Cropper. Drop the ideology. And go DIRECTLY to the source. Don't go through your Glorious Leader!
Lambtonboy 2 years ago
How can you go to Ayn Rand to criticize Kant. At least read the First Critique and the Groundwork. You're deliberately being deliberately intellectually dishonest.
Lambtonboy 2 years ago
this is the most disgusting distortion of Kant i've heard, how can you possibly take yourself seriously saying these things...READ KANT
GayGuy69FTWowned 2 years ago
thanks for helping me understand kant...i never knew his ideas were so powerful
joey88jojo 2 years ago
rand has the weakest account of existentialist thought. the only reason her books made it into bookstores is because she is a woman.
also our eyes see in 528 megapixels which is alot more accurate than most cameras.
gen6k 2 years ago
Comment removed
gen6k 2 years ago
Hey check it out, I'm Mr.Cropper, as I've stated, people say that I should go directly to Kant so let's flip to the LEXICON OF OBJECTIVISM BY AYN RAND. IS that going directly to Kant? Do you realize, Mr.Cropper, that some of the quotes in here are only claimed to be from Kant? I quote the Lexicon, p.g239 "An action is moral, said Kant, only if..." Kant actually did not say this, this is simply the inaccurate way which Rand likes to write. See the source at the bottom of my quote? It's by Rand.
XcPromise 2 years ago 3
Comment removed
XcPromise 2 years ago
dude is not "cont" its "ka-nt" "ah" not "oh" my god.
skarletsky 2 years ago
You read from that book as if it is your bible...how can you consider that to be about Kant?
You are obviously a true believer - an irrationalist.
siddhaam 2 years ago
i think you read way too much rand and not nearly enough kant.
mohamedbongfish 3 years ago
when you quote rands blathering, you offer no real critique.
mohamedbongfish 3 years ago
maldicion de lo que me pierdo por no aprender ingles tamareeeee amo la Filosofia de I .Kant pero odio el no saber ingles en estos momentos
destinyphilosophic 3 years ago
SAY UR A's PROPERLY !!!!!!!!!
nikkibikki1890 3 years ago
Kubla Kan and Immunal Kant.
Martintfre 3 years ago
i love immanuel kant. i love him so much that i castrastrated my self to help protect the enviorment. i use to be such a selfish person before i read kant. but i couldnt help my self to stop reasoning so i took an ice pick and gave my self a lobotomy.now the world is a much safer place. i now belong to democratic socialists of america. thank you mr kant. i have sexual fantasies about him daily.
libertariananarchist 3 years ago 5
You'd make a good preacher, shitty philosopher, but good preacher.
DUBHAN 3 years ago 3
I find this guys carrot and stick approach to Kant somewhat vague. To understand the world, every one is different and in trying to be different is the same. Kant is self defeating, briefly mentioning the belly dancing bit.
THINKER43 3 years ago
so what's the big deal. everyone has a different model of the world based on a priori knowledge and their experiences of the world. once you learn that your model is subjective it allows one to try other models or use more than one model to evaluate the world. one problem with America is that a large number of people have only one model for evaluating the world and it's called the bible.
you really seem to have control issues and use an excessive amount of generalizations.
GODLUBE 3 years ago
Hmm... Does Kan't, in any way, imply that there's a way to access the noumenal world, the world of true knowledge and truth, obviously not through reason but through faith or the self revelation of the noumea, or any other way? If not, how is it a defense of faith? More over, he evacuates faith of any act of reason; or, if not so generally, one can conclude that the claims of truth in faith might well, at the end, depart from the delusion (phenomenical world) as unreliable desires of the noumea.
SonoPortoricano 3 years ago 2
As far as I can tell, Kant defends faith in the possibility that there might be certain things that we should (morally) want to exist. And he defends the faith in things that, if we imagine them existing, would help our frail humanity do things it should be doing anyway, but can't, because we are bound to experience... but only because its doing that, and never elsewise. Something like that.
GreyY67789 3 years ago
So now Kant's philosophy is religious? This is not what I have been led to understand -and maybe I am wrong. When I started to study Kant, I said: "By God, this is agnosticism at its purest form." With the premises of the noumenon and the phenomenon, faith and reason are completely separated from each other. We can't have any knowledge at all that is true about the things that are in themselves, which include God; thus where there's faith there isn't reason or knowledge.
SonoPortoricano 3 years ago
MrCropper, I agree with you. This was well done. The rebuttles are boring and pointless. I have been upable to finish reading/wactching them. My crituque is not of reason but of your outfit. Please do not wear a t-shirt with a suit jacket. It looks cheap, unprofessional, and as if you are going clubing. Please wear a button up shirt and a tie with the coat or just the t. I am saying this not to be mean just a friendly critique. Good speech!
bencurkendall 3 years ago
Immanuel Kant is perhaps the most important philosopher of the Enlightenment.
MarxBakuninMe 3 years ago
Kant, if I remeber correctly, came out against REASON. (you don't even have to read him to descipher that one: it's in the title of his book)
How the fuck is he the most important philosopher of The God Damn Age of Reason?
deinse81 3 years ago
I say he is important because of the influence he has had: Fichte, Hegel, Shopenhauer, Nietzsche and many others; all influenced by Kant in one way or another.
As for "REASON", I'm not too sure that it's some sort of absolute.
MarxBakuninMe 3 years ago
Well, then you don't subscribe to the principles of the Enlightenment either.
It however doesn't mean that Kant(even though he was important and alive at the time), belonged to the Enlightenment(again, also called the Age of Reason), just as the popes of the 15th century were not part of the Rennaisance, even though they were powerful and influential.
The Enlightenment was brought about by the American Revolution, and the cultural and social changes that followed in Britain and Europe.
deinse81 3 years ago
Surely Kant was not speaking out against reason? The term "Critique" does not imply a stance either in favour of or against the subject of your critique. It simply means that you will evaluate your subject in order to understand its strengths and weaknesses. Kant was arguing precisely in favour of reason. We must form hypotheses a priori through reason and logic, and then test these hypotheses to apply them to the world, much as we have done with mathematics.
naishjam 3 years ago
Is this an accurate representation of Kant's views?
"The metaphysical facts about the ultimate nature of things in themselves must remain a mystery to us because of the spatiotemporal constraints on sensibility."
If so, how could he possibly consider reason, which can only consider our senses, significant? If we don't know reality, what exactly are you and I "reasoning" or hypothesizing on about here? What for?
deinse81 3 years ago
Yes, it would be an accurate representation of Kant's views, but all it says is that we can't be sure of what's outside our own minds. That doesn't necessarily rule out the possibility of reason. What Kant was trying to do is reconcile the views of the rationalists who argued that we can know everything about the world a priori, and the empiricists who argued that we can only know the world a posterior.
naishjam 3 years ago
We can't know anything about things-in-themselves but we can know (and therefore reason about) our experiences and senses. Kant divides the world into two planes. The physical plane represents the world as it really is, things-in-themselves. The phenomenal plane represents the concepts that we have imposed on the world to explain and model it. We can reason about these concepts, which represent our understanding of things-in-themselves, but does not represent things-in-themselves directly.
naishjam 3 years ago
Perhaps an example would be fruitful. We cannot be sure that gravity really exists - we can't know anything about it for sure. But we have observed that things generally fall to the ground if dropped, rather than floating. To explain these phenomena, therefore, we have developed the theory of gravity which is a concept that man has developed through pure reason to explain the external world, even though we can know nothing of gravity in itself, or even that it actually exists.
naishjam 3 years ago
Thus Kant does not rule out the possibility of reason, but argues that we can reason only about the concepts that we ourselves put into the world to represent things-in-themselves, rather than reasoning about things-in-themselves.
naishjam 3 years ago
That's not really reason, now is it? It means that we are making up a false virtual reality, and we can only understand this world, not the "nominal" world.
Isn't then his idea that there even is a "nominal" world just a form of mysticism? Isn't this world a product of his fantasy, just like the angels and heaven are a product of fantasy? How else could Kant possibly know about them if he cannot sense them, except mystical revelation?
I consider this way of thinking a rejection of reason.
deinse81 3 years ago
Your argument remains based on the assumption that we can only reason about that which we directly perceive. This, of course, rejects the possibility of mathematics. We cannot directly perceive mathematics (how do you "sense" mathematics? You can't touch it, smell it, feel it) and yet I challenge you to find a single person who would argue that the basic axiom "1+1=2" is not true.
naishjam 3 years ago
Even if you put 1 bean next to another bean and conclude that there are 2, still you must accept that the notion of "1" and the notion of "2" are simply labels or concepts that we have assigned to things in the real world in order to allow us to reason about the world which we perceive.
naishjam 3 years ago
The same applies to the notion of "Up" and "down". In nature there are no such concepts (stood on earth we assume that the moon is "above" us, but presumably if stood on the moon we would talk about the earth being "above" us). Yet to talk about such concepts is not unreasonably, since they help us visualise and reason about that which we perceive.
naishjam 3 years ago
Kant's argument is that we can only know about things in themselves through our senses, but we have no way of knowing whether or not our senses are correctly revealing to us things-in-themselves so the only "mystical" revelation that is going on is that our senses are (attempting) to reveal things to us.
naishjam 3 years ago
Of course, reason as Kant sees it cannot discover objective truth, but within the framework of Kant's philosophy reason is certainly not impossible. Furthermore, I would dispute your assumption that in order for discourse to be labelled "reason", it must discover objective truth. I would define reason merely as the process of deriving a conclusion from some basic axioms. For me, argument leading from true axioms to a false conclusion is flawed reason, but it is still a system of reasoning.
naishjam 3 years ago
If by reason you're not discovering "objective truth", then what exactly are you discovering?
Also, how do you know your reasoning right here in these posts is not flawed?
deinse81 3 years ago
I'm start by answering your question about my own reasoning. The answer is I don't know that it's not flawed. That's the benefit of peer review. By openly revealing my reasoning I hope that others can point out any problems in my logic and thus set me straight. Regarding your question about what we can discover if not objective truth, we can find patterns in the world as we perceive it. Do you deny that mathematics, although merely a human invention, is useful?
naishjam 3 years ago
So there is no way you could just come to a conclusion by yourself and know it to be true? Why is that?
deinse81 3 years ago
Of course it is possible to draw conclusions independently, but they cannot be objective. For example, I can state that "I have never witnessed a glass of water freeze at 88 degrees", but I cannot conclude that "water will never freeze at 88 degrees". In order to begin to draw objective conclusions, we require the evidence and experiences provided by a range of individuals to confirm our hypothesis, and the more evidence we receive, the stronger our conclusions become.
naishjam 3 years ago
What's the use of having the experience and evidence of a range of individuals? Would you then have an objective conclusion?
deinse81 3 years ago
Yes, I would say that in order to know that you are lying I would have to perform the experiment. Experience and evidence doesn't form an objective conclusion, but it forms a less subjective conclusion. Notice how what I have argued entails from Kant's philosophy ammounts to the scientific method. This is why it is legitimate to argue that Kant is important in the age of reason - because his philosophy is the basis of the scientific method as we know it today.
naishjam 3 years ago
So in your view science is in no way based on logic, and it doesn't seek objective conclusions? It's only a statistical amalgam of likely theories?
Let's be serious, Global Warming theory may be based on that, but that's certainly not what took us to the moon or gave us the ability to communicate across oceans like we're next to each other. I know for a fact that these wires will send this message right to your computer, and that it will show up on your screen.
deinse81 3 years ago
No, science is of course based on logic, but you continue to assume that logic must be applied to the "real" world. Logic is simply a system of deriving new statements from old statements based on the assumed truth values for the original axioms. Those axioms don't have to be "objectively" true for an argument to be logical. Also, ask any scientist and they will agree that there is a (small) possibility that science has got it wrong.
naishjam 3 years ago
You don't know for a "fact" that your message will show up on my screen because you don't know for a fact that the system has been built with 100% reliability. Based on your experience, it's been pretty good so far, but there's a possibility that data may get lost or corrupted somewhere along the line.
naishjam 3 years ago
Did you get my argument about the implication of the nominal world from the phenomenal world? If not, I'll repost it.
naishjam 3 years ago
No. I'm curious to find out how do you know that there's a world that we cannot know through perception or reason.
deinse81 3 years ago
The phenomenal world is the set of concepts that we have created to explain the world as we perceive it. Thus, the phenomenal world is the set of all the answers that we have to all the questions that we are able to answer with a reasonable ammount of certainty. It is clear that there are some questions that we are as of yet unable to answer, and thus the answers to these questions (if they exist at all) cannot be part of the phenomenal world.
naishjam 3 years ago
Your post suggests that the phenomenal world is part of the real reality, we just haven't discovered all of reality yet.
That's not what Kant thought: he declared the phenomenal world to be not reality, just a product of our (collective) counsciousness, and he said reality was beyond our grasp, a different dimension.
deinse81 3 years ago
Okay, I agree. I missed the point a little with that post. But the same logic applies. The phenomenal world contains human concepts which explain (and thus map to) our perceptions. The nominal world is the world beyond those perceptions from whence the perceptions arise. Thus the phenomenal world is within the mind, and the nominal world without the mind. There may be nothing at all outside the mind, but again, an empty set is still a set.
naishjam 3 years ago
The only purpose for such a construct, the way I see it, is to raise the possibility of any arbitrary description of this "world beyond perceptions". It basically means that anything is possible. If someone can think of X, then X is possible.
It means Arbitrary=Possible, just as the products of reason are possible. This theory in essence equates arbitrary thoughts (Santa, God, Heaven) with logic and reason. Wouldn't you agree?
deinse81 3 years ago
Well sure, it certainly does imply that Santa, God, Heaven etc are possible - we can't know either way. But that doesn't make them reasonable. Within Kant's framework, we reason about the phenomenal world and not about the real world. The phenomenal world is derived from our perceptions and since Santa (and arguably God and Heaven) are clearly inconsistent with our current phenomenal-world concepts (does Santa really break the speed of light?) then we can rule them out as false conclusions.
naishjam 3 years ago
Santa, God and Heaven could all be part of the noumenal world.
Let's look at Pascal's wager: If there is a tiny possibility that Heaven is real (as you claim it to be!!!), and it means eternal happiness, shouldn't you live your life as a fundamentalist Christian? Doesn't "tiny possibility"(i.e. 0.001) times "eternal, infinitely happy life" more than make up for whatever you are giving up in this false reality we made up for ourselves?
deinse81 3 years ago
Note that I don't claim heaven to be real, I claim that there is a possibility that it is real. Equally, there is a possibility that Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Budhism, Rastafarianism, etc, or Atheism correct. It's a calculated risk we all have to make. Personally, I find religion to be inconsistent with the phenomenal world - while the view of (any given) religion is not impossible, I believe it to be improbable and thus do not accept the doctrine it would force upon me.
naishjam 3 years ago
Yes, 0.001 is pretty improbable. You claim that there's a small possibility of it being real, simply because someone thought of it. Now, if you calculate the potential benefits of this being real, even if they are a millionth or a trillionth of the full 100% certainty of eternal infinite happiness, they are still much greater than a short nice life on Earth. (even more so if you add to this the possibility of eternal suffering in Hell as a consequence of choosing to dismiss it)
deinse81 3 years ago
Well, now you're bringing the issue of ethics into the debate. I thought we were discussing reason? You're assuming that I value personal comfort over consistency. Many people throughout history have faced persecution, torture and death because they refused to turn against what they held to be true. Different people rank values in different ways. Your argument attempts to apply your value system to everyone.
naishjam 3 years ago
That's actually true, but I would know for a fact if we were at the two ends of a wire that you'll receive different signals in the order I sent them to you.
Plus, you are helping my point by using the term 100% reliability.
If science was based on probabilities, would that notion exist? Would there be laws of physics?
deinse81 3 years ago
All science ever says is "Thus far, all the evidence appears to support X, Y and Z and therefore we shall safely assume X, Y and Z until such a time as evidence counters these claims, or a better explanation arises". For centuries, man believed the earth was the center of the Universe - it was considered a scientific fact. But clearl