[lit-ideas]
- From: Adriano Palma <Palma@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 13 Sep 2014 10:41:26 +0000
m. donal mcevoy is exactly on target. Kant's interest (beside historical
relevance) is precisely that he rejects any "collapse" of the idea of x with x.
his (very strong) empiricist bent pushes him to search for a way, often
unstable --I'd suggest--, to provide real accounts of what "appears to be the
case". The easy way to test the relevance of this is negation. While phenomenal
(experiential in this terminolgy) knowledge will always tell you that the apple
in front of the eyes was green, experience does not/cannot tell anything about
the fact that it was not purple. The even more telling fact is that to the
extent one takes science seriously (Kant took very, very seriously geometry and
Newtonian physics) then while one could (almost) see series of events (ball xe
hits ball ye and ye moves etc.) and never ever see causality facts (of the form
of inertial cases, and countless others); why? because being a causal relation
entails a property of being necessary (if even one ball would not move, then we
are all wrong about the alleged causal facts) and necessities are never ever
phenomemal. compare and constrast: nothing experientially shows an act to be
free, and yet, Kant argues, nobody is able to even describe the possibility of
acting, let alone acting according to laws of morality, without the doubtful
notion of free act. Kant if wrong, was wrong in interesting ways.
best
Palma apg
Philosophy
Howard college
Ph 27 03 12 60 15 91
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