Is Kant merely complicating Aristotle's theory of mind?
Aristotle:
>five senses: receives discrete sensory data
>common sense: combines the senses into sensory objects, imposes concepts such as unity, motion, etc., in service of this goal)
>phantasia: synthesizes and presents the sensible objects to consciousness
Kant:
>sensibility: receives sensory data, imposes form of space and time upon them (makes pure intuitions)
>understanding: receives pure intuitions, filters them through both the "pure concepts" (innate categories) and "empirical concepts" (acquired categories)
>imagination: receives the product of the aforementioned schematization and presents it to consciousness
To me, it looks like Kant is splitting Aristotle's "common sense" so that part of it happens first and is associated with sense-data itself, while the other parts of it occur downstream in the mechanism of perception. A good question I have to ask is...
>1) What do we *really* gain in understanding from this particular setup besides re-arranging Aristotle's categories?
>2) What are the metaphysical foundations of common sense versus time/space as the conditions of sensibility and the categories? Are they located "in the world" and thus our faculties "mirror" it and guarantee understanding, or are they our prison, a cruel joke played by evolution to only grasp some, but not all, of the manifold of reality?
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Kant is basically a realist with “but like, it’s not REALLY real” tacked on to his system for some reason. Aristotle believed that nous was not merely something solipsistic but actually a principle of the universe itself, so he never asked why logic or whatever is valid. The universe is logical. But then Hume says “what if causality is like just made is by the mind” and Kant bends over backwards to both agree that causality is invented by the individual mind and to “show” that causality is still valid. It’s totally moronic. Kant is the biggest red herring in philosophy.
But anon, why don't you think those concerns are valid? Where's the proof that they're not? We make mistakes, don't we?
It’s obvious bullshit. You don’t refute hume by agreeing with his false proposition but denying its implications through 700 pages of ugly krautspeak. Anti-realism is false. Causality is not added by the subject, and requires no transcendental apperception to hold. That is all you have to show to refute Hume. William James did it without much difficulty.
>absolutely filtered
ngmi
Don’t worry anon, one day you will discover that k*nt is not the end all be all of philosophy.
correct that would be THE COMPLEAT SYSTEM OF GERMAN IDEALISM
Haha very funny anon
>Causality is not added by the subject
how so?
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/32547/pg32547-images.html
B-but Anon, that's not how imagination works in Kant.
yeah yeah I know, it's been a while.
Aristotle also acknowledges that the sensible objects must exist in space and time, too, in De Anima. So, I'm not sure what new innovation Kant brings to the table.
>new innovation Kant brings to the table.
PURE A PRIORI INTUITION
Aristotle already posited something akin to that.
nobody has read both Aristotle and Kant and understand them both. thread probably will fail
>nobody
I am that nobody
let's hear your thoughts anon
the inner machinations of my mind are an enigma
*milk spills over*
no
>immanuel kant
>height: 5'2
I will not be reading anything this fellow has to say on anything, quite frankly.
What do we gain? New dogma. What do we lose? A theory of knowledge that treats sensation as an activity rather than the other way around. If a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, Aristotle would likely argue that it does not make a sound since there is no sensing being to “embody” the sound. Neither a tree, which only has the capacity to regenerate itself, nor any animals, since they either emulate the “sound” or, if they philosophize, simply consider it as the being of the tree. Kant would likely argue that it does make a sound since, given it has the capacity to do so, the sound is immediately “freed” by our own capacity for sensation in order to perceive the world. The movement of the tree producing sound is accounted for by the matter, whereas with Aristotle it is thought to be literally “inside” the matter and thus never actually let out by anything. But still, you could probably argue both ways.
You need to read the Third Critique and De Anima to understand Kant's relation to Aristotle. Aristotle says rational soul is the "form of forms" like the hand is the tool of tools. It is similar to Plato's idea in Phaedo and the divided line metaphor in The Republic, except that instead of understanding of universals being an eternal part of the soul, it is just a natural potentiality of the soul which is actualized by abstracting from particulars.
Kant's theory of how non-categorical concepts are formed is more in line with the rest of modern philosophy, especially empiricism. Kant believes that non-categorical concepts are formed by abstraction from particulars, and that is that: they do not necessarily actualize the mind's potentiality to possess the specific concept of e.g., dog.
That means that for empirical concepts, we can always be wrong about the essence as distinguished from the accidents. For Aristotle, the correct formulation of an empirical concept is infallible.
Kant actually simplifies Aristotle in this respect, though he was not the first. Mere abstraction from particulars rather than the actualization of rational soul's potential to possess specific empirical concepts has less assumptions, and therefore is more in line with Ockham's razor.
Kant does recognize that Aristotle's theory is more explanatory power than his own. His reason is if you assume that the essence of empirical conceptions can be distinguished from accidents, you can properly posit teleological explanations of things, which allows for the explanation of the behavior of parts in terms of wholes (which he calls reflective judgments or teleology), rather than the behavior of wholes in terms of parts (which he says can be derived from discursive judgments). He simply thinks that despite the explanatory potential, the positing of an ability to truly understand the essence of empirical concepts is not justified by a transcendental analysis of our faculties. He is not innovating in that respect -- that criticism goes back to the early moderns (Bacon, Hobbes, and Descartes, especially).
What would you say is Kant's major contribution then in this area?
The transcendental deduction. The transcendental deduction shows how pure categories are necessary for discursive cognition even when that discursive cognition is otherwise strictly empiricist. Empiricism after Kant -- 20th century logical positivism, early Wittgenstein -- had to reinvent the traditional conception of logic to answer that criticism in a plausible way. Then Wilfred Sellars showed in Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind how even that theory could be subject to essentially the same criticism Kant made, except in terms altered to fit the new logic.
>The transcendental deduction. The transcendental deduction shows how pure categories are necessary for discursive cognition even when that discursive cognition is otherwise strictly empiricist.
But isn't Aristotle's koine aisthetis already a kind of transcendental deduction of its own? That faculty is what coordinates the disparate senses "together" and applies what is essentially Aristotle's Categories (e.g., shape, motion, etc.) onto sense-data. That's both your transcendental unity of apperception and the transcendental deduction right there, respectively.
>Empiricism after Kant -- 20th century logical positivism, early Wittgenstein -- had to reinvent the traditional conception of logic to answer that criticism in a plausible way. Then Wilfred Sellars showed in Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind how even that theory could be subject to essentially the same criticism Kant made, except in terms altered to fit the new logic.
Could you go into more detail in this? What was the formulation of "the new logic"?
The difference between Aristotle's categories and Kant's categories is that Aristotle's categories are various specifications of the equivocal term being (and therefore the highest general of all things said) whereas Kant's categories are the logical functions of judgments.
Aristotle comes to the investigation of knowledge with certain ontological presuppositions. The justifications for having those presuppositions are given in the metaphysics but those arguments were rejected by the moderns. Posting the koine aisthetis thus answers a subtly different question then the transcendental deduction. The question Aristotle asks is roughly "given that we have knowledge (including of categories), how does the process of acquiring knowledge work, and what is the nature of the entity that possesses knowledge."
Kant's inquiry is epistemological. The question is "what is the justification of the employment of the categories, if they are not derived from the faculty of sensibility?" The answer is "they are necessary for the faculty of sensibility to even yield any discursive content in the first place." The answer and the question are both about epistemic normativity. So even though the answer is similar in content to Aristotle, the question it answers is a skeptical doubt which Aristotle never confronts and for which his own formulation does not provide an adequate answer.
As for the new logic, the difference is sort of a development of the above Kantian definition of categories. Aristotelian logic derives its formal validity from correctly ordering this or that instance of a category in relation to another instance of a category. It is thus ontologically loaded and limited by certain ontological presuppositions. Notably, you can't formalize mathematics into syllogisms. Fregean logic exhaustively defines the meaning of its operators (as opposed to categories) in terms of how they preserve truth-values.
The point of the early Wittgenstein and the logical positivists is similar but different to Kant. It is that semantic meaning is sense-data together with operators. Thus inquiry into why the operators are able to accurately describes the relations between the facts of the world is semantically meaningless, despite producing wonder. The way that logical operators map to the world is something that is seen by the mind's eye, and is not of the nature of questions like "Why does it rain?", which are answered through combinations of the senses and Fregean logic.
Thank you for the extensive and thoughtful writeup.
>The answer and the question are both about epistemic normativity.
>So even though the answer is similar in content to Aristotle, the question it answers is a skeptical doubt which Aristotle never confronts and for which his own formulation does not provide an adequate answer.
This is a great distinction. Structurally, both accounts are quite similar, but it seems that Kant simply doesn't see much of a necessary relationship between what can be predicated of being and being itself. Which is... idk, weird? Especially since Kant borrows the categories from Aristotle and then barely changes them. There seems to be no evidence for the primacy or the arbitrariness of the categories. Maybe a weak argument for the primacy of the categories given that reality seems at least partially intelligible in practice.
>Aristotelian logic derives its formal validity from correctly ordering this or that instance of a category in relation to another instance of a category.
Wait, what do you mean by this? I don't think syllogisms work based off of categories but rather based on relationships between substances, their properties, and hierarchies of genera.
>It is thus ontologically loaded and limited by certain ontological presuppositions. Notably, you can't formalize mathematics into syllogisms.
We had a thread on this the other day. Did you manage to catch this?
>Thus inquiry into why the operators are able to accurately describes the relations between the facts of the world is semantically meaningless, despite producing wonder.
I'm kind of confused why this is the case and what this has to do with Kant, unless Fregean logic are taken to occupy the same role as the Kantian categories.
Abio
genius