Immanuel Kant's Philosophy of Mind Explained through Art

Introducing Kant's Critique of Pure Reason kaleidoscopically! Immanuel Kant and his philosophy of Transcendental Idealism displayed with painting, music, and a few Eschers. Kant is given a hard time on the internet (sometimes with good reason!), but here the genius--and some of the madness--of this giant of the European Enlightenment is laid bare. I focus on the general problems of Kantian philosophy, but the take a closer look at Kant's ideas about the structure of the mind, found in the Transcendental Doctrine of Elements--his epistemological-cum-ontological investigation into the conditions for the possibility of knowledge. The transcendental elements are the building blocks of the mind necessary for our intentional, conscious, rational and free relation to the world and our own selves. Crucially, for Kant, all knowledge involves the unification or 'synthesis' of concepts and intuitions. Kant's intellectual relations to David Hume and Isaac Newton are hinted towards and I drop a Kantian key to understanding Martin Heidegger's Heideggerian onto-mumbo-logical-jumbo about the being of beings which is not itself a being.
The quote I read at the end is the first two sentences of the Transcendental Doctrine of Method from the Critique of Pure Reason. The translation is the classic by Norman Kemp Smith.


If this is all too fast, or the mood not quite right, there is a mood-modulated Slo Mo edition that I've put up: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWHU94gY7TY

Artists represented include: William Blake, Jackson Pollock, Wassily Kandinsky, Pablo Picasso, Paul Cezanne, Vincent van Gogh, Salvador Dali, M.C Escher, Francisco Goya, and Claude Monet. 
The music is, of course, the Great Ludwig van Beethoven's 9th, 'O Freunde, nicht diese Tone!', which means "Oh friends, not this tone!"

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Immanuel Kant
• philosophy
• philosophy of mind
• metaphysics
• epistemology
• ontology
• Hume
• Newton
• Heidegger
• science
• phenomenology
• ethics
• freedom
• spontaneity
• receptivity
• synthesis
• intuition
• concept
• passion
• emotion
• reason
• consciousness
• enlightenment
• nature
• essence
• existence
• mind
• understanding
• sensibility
• meaning
• construction
• constructivism
• paradox
• self
• modern
• art
• arts
• painting
• cubism
• expression
• surreal
• real
• modernist
• documentary
• spirituality
• Cezanne
• Picasso
• Dali
• Goya
• Pollock
• Escher
• Kandinsky
• Reznek

[SecularNumanist]

I Kant get enough of this video.

[LennyBound]

Great stuff. :-)

[ciaobebbo050]

Beethoven in the background ruins it. I love Beethoven's ninth and wasn't able to pay attention to the video...sorry

[yeahwtv]

i like what you are saying but i find that the music makes it hard to listen, its distracting and is overpowering your voice. otherwise,great thoughts ;)

[Gobbledygooks1979]

Thanks, makes me want to read Kant.

[IamthePopeRome]

Splendid choice of artwork.

[MrMikeludo]

Immanuel Kant's explaining of: 'For inasmuch as only by means of such pure form of sensibility an object can appear to us, that is, be an object of emperical intuition, space and time are pure intuitions, which contain a priori the condition of the possibility of objects as phenomena, and an a priori synthesis in these intuitions possesses objective validity' - 'space' and 'time' being represented by Pollock? Where there is NO SPACE OR TIME - anywhere in a Pollock 'picture.' Impossible.

[Fleshfromashes]

perfect video

[Rtehsfk]

nice vid, but the music is a little bit to high in a few places

greetings!

[shadowsonthehills]

What a coincidence! I'm learning about philosophy of aesthetics this semester. Thanks for sharing this :)