[lit-ideas] Re: Plakanter
- From: Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 15 Jun 2012 09:45:04 +0100 (BST)
________________________________
From: "Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx" <Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx>
>In a message dated 6/14/2012 5:55:07 P.M. UTC-02,
donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx writes:
not sure I see an Aristotle/Kant link; (b) Popper is very much a Kantian
and an anti-Hegelian (indeed Popper's philosophy may be understood as an
updated Kantianism - one that takes into account Einstein, Darwin and Frege
and the implication that 'all knowledge is conjectural'; and many of Popper's
key philosophical arguments in the theory of knowledge are Kantian).
I should go back to this.>
You said it. (I've often thought it.)
>But this should demonstrate that Popper (unlike Grice, who praised
Aristotle/Ariskant) held inconsistent views. For how can he deem Plato
superior to
Aristotle, yet be a Kantian? >
Ans. In the same way that Popper, an empiricist of sorts, might deem/regard a
certain anti-empiricist as a deeper and better thinker than someone who is also
an empiricist. There is no inconsistency in viewing Plato as a towering
intellect yet opposing his philosophy - indeed, in Popper's case, finding
aspects of it morally repugnant and frightening.
But the intellectual connections between these thinkers are much more involved
than as depicted in JLS' simple diagram.
In the theory of knowledge, for example, Plato's pessimistic view in 'The Cave'
is much closer to the truth and cuts deeper, for Popper, than many naively
optimistic views (even though Popper believes what is true in 'The Cave' can be
squared with a somewhat more optimistic view of the growth of knowledge).
The Plato of 'The Cave' and Kant have something very important and fundamental
in common: the Kantian idea that reality as it is in itself is unknowable is
very close to the parable of 'The Cave'. Popper's theory of knowledge takes
this Kantian idea very seriously by accepting it is as true where knowledge
means certain knowledge.
Further, in the words of Bryan Magee [Confessions of a Philosopher, p.244],
Popper "does, indeed, believe that reality is hidden, and permanently so, but
he believes that this hidden reality is transcendentally real." I am unsure
Magee is quite correct here btw where "hidden" might denote 'unknowable', for
Popper argues we may have conjectural knowledge of this otherwise hidden
reality. But there is no Archimedean point from which we can survey just how
successful an approximation our 'conjectural knowledge' is - assessing its
degree of success is also a conjecture. Nevertheless what Magge next says may
be correct and develops and important connection between Kant and Popper, and
one we may trace back to 'The Cave': "Kant was an empirical realist but a
transcendental idealist; Popper is an empirical realist and a transcendental
realist also."
Magee, as it happens, believes "the empirical world is...transcendentally
ideal" and from that POV writes, "What I believe [Popper] has done is to
provide a profoundly original and substantially correct analysis of the nature
of empirical knowledge whose true place, unrealized by him, is within a larger
empirical realism/transcendental idealism frame of reference, the necessity for
which [Popper] does not acknowledge.....Taken on its own terms, what Popper has
done is combine a fundamentally empiricist view of reality with a fundamentally
rationalist view of knowledge - an empiricist ontology with a rationalist
epistemology...It is worked out on such a scale, and yet in such detail, that
it constitutes an intellectual achievement of the front rank. It is the most
highly developed philosophy yet to have appeared that incorporates within
itself a belief in an independently existing material world subsisting in
independently existing space and time. It
constitutes a huge advance upon Russell, and embodies a depth of originality
and imagination altogether outside Russell's scope. Anyone who is determined to
cling to the empiricist tradition will find in Popper's philosophy the richest
and most powerful instantiation of it...so far. At [this] point...to be a
self-ware and sophisticated empiricist has to mean either being a Popperian or
being a critical and reconstructed Popperian. And to be any sort of
transcendental idealist ought to involve embracing something like a Popperian
account of empirical reality. On either presupposition, he is the foremost
philosopher of the age. On the first presupposition his work is itself the
cutting edge of philosophical advance. Seen in the light of the second
presupposition it appears somewhat incidental ('how little has been done when
that has been done') but still of significance, and a great improvement on the
Tractatus."
On this basis alone JLS should perhaps read some more Popper (as should anyone
on this list who takes philosophy seriously). But it seems a very common
attitude that (while they wouldn't claim to know everything) people think they
know all they need to know about x or y, and so they know all they need to know
about Wittgenstein or Popper or Kant or Plato. They may not say it, but when it
comes to it [for example, in their reading] their actions speak louder. This is
an unfortunate attitude, both complacent and arrogant, but widespread
particularly among the educated.
Magee tells of his vain attempts to persuade Popper to advance his philosophy
by locating within "a larger empirical realism/transcendental idealism frame of
reference". "Since it was a fundamental tenet of his philosophy that reality is
unknowable, he agreed that there must be some sort of no-man's-land within
which what we know ends and reality begins; and that whether it was actually a
fixed frontier (as Kant believed) or a perpetually moving one (as he believed)
was a separate question....This question of whether there is anything that lies
permanently outside the range of all possible knowledge is one on which Popper
remains unbudgingly agnostic..We simply cannot know....It is possible that
there is something, obviously, and anyone who denies that possibility is wrong;
but it is possible that there is not, and anyone who denies that possibility is
wrong too. And there is no point in speculating, because we do not even have
the concepts with which to
do the speculating. The nature of the [requisite] concepts is such that if
they are to have genuine content about what is or might be factually the case
they need to be derived, if only indirectly, from somebody or other's
experience, and no such concepts of the kind we are now talking about could be
so derived."
Donal
Throwing up more questions than answers
Hear the people cry: 'Get back to the 'key tenet''
This issue of the 'knowability-of-reality' is of an absolutely fundamental
character: and we might say Plato, Kant and Popper are roughly on the same side
in certain fundamental respects here.
And so on.
Cheers,
Speranza
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