In Kant's example of a synthetic judgement a priori he gives 5+7=12 as an example because no matter how long you analyse both 5 and 7 you will never arrive at the concept of 12. In that equation though would one not see that the concept of 12 contained the sum of 5+7 or am I being moronic?
Also Kant thread I guess.
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There’s no such thing as a real analytic-synthetic distinction
Not here for that, I'm talking in the framework of Kant's system.
Of course 5 and 7 don't give you 12, just like 5 and 7 don't give you 2 or -2 or 35 or 5/7 or 7/5 or so forth. The + is key. Do "F" and "a" suffice to give you "Fa"? No, you need something further, the category of substance-accident or something. The problem is that if Kant is saying that a judgment 5+7=12 is synthetic because 5 and 7 need a further connective tissue (the +) to get us to 12, then every analytic judgment where one side of the equivalence is a gloss will be synthetic, because the gloss requires connective tissue between the conceptual parts of the equivalent concept. After all, even conjunction is a logical connective. Did Kant not notice that? His table of judgments doesn't list conjunction among the relations. But he does list subsumption (categorical judgment connective), implication (hypothetical judgment connective), and disjunction (disjunctive judgment connective), plus negation earlier under the judgments of quality. You can, technically, logically define conjunction out of negation and disjunction. But I'm not sure Kant thought about it that hard.
This is incorrect. From the introduction, B15, Pluhar edition:
"It is true that one might at first think that the proposition 7+5=12 is a merely analytic one that follows, by the principle of contradiction, from the concept of a sum of seven and five. Yet if we look more closely, we find that the concept of the sum of 7 and 5 contains nothing more than the union of the two numbers into one; but in [thinking] that union we are not thinking in any way at all what that single number is that unites the two."
Kant is not saying that the numbers 5 and 7 do not contain the sum 12, but that the sum of 5 and 7 does not conceptually contain 12; rather, you must make a synthetic a priori jump to come to 12.
> find that the biggest problem Schopenhauer has is his pathway to knowing the noumena. He claims that because we know what it is like to be an object and also see ourselves, we know the noumena and phenomena at the same time with our body. I don’t know how both knowledge is not necessarily being represented to us if we are observing it.
Kant's system takes this into mind. The self is not some airy idea that is taken in assumption; it already is a representation. In fact, the entirety of Kant's system is a phenomenology, an analysis of representations and how they interact - the most elementary ones. The sensibility, the intuitions, the "self", the mind, it is representation, and according to him this is simply impossible to overcome, because both our sensibility and understanding, themselves representations, only allow us to deal with the representations of intuition/concept. There is no access to things-in-themselves, to the point that we can't even say whether they exist.
Kant himself is an extremely clear writer. He says exactly what he wants to say without fluff or histrionics. If there's difficulty, it's almost definitely on the part of the reader.
I wasn’t aware of Kant saying that so thank you so much for the explanation. I came to this problem through meditation where you look for the self and ultimately cannot find what is “seeing” the representation, as every thought that constitutes the self is appearing as well. It is the ultimate mindfrick to realize everything you know including “you” is appearing everywhere but also ‘nowhere’ as it is the grounds of spatial representation. Perhaps there is another way to read Schopenhauer I am missing however, perhaps Schopenhauer simply sees the will as the empty observer that is the grounds of everything.
>but in [thinking] that union we are not thinking in any way at all what that single number is that unites the two.
And how is that different from someone saying that in the union of unmarried and male we are not in any way at all thinking what that single concept (bachelor) is that which unites the two?
>in the union of unmarried and male we are not in any way at all thinking what that single concept (bachelor) is that which unites the two?
I don't believe Kant himself used the example of bachelors. However, I'll address it.
What you've done is reversed the order of the question and assumed the relation still holds, effectively (but not exactly) affirming the antecedent. The exact phrasing of this is "All bachelors are unmarried men." What else could be in the concept of a bachelor but an unmarried man, is there any? There isn't, because by definition, that's what a bachelor is. That is to say, the predicate is contained in the subject and as such, it's analytic a priori. However, what you've said is "All unmarried men are bachelors". Is the concept of a bachelor contained in the term "unmarried men"? Not exactly - it's an addition. You don't have to think of the term bachelor when thinking of an unmarried man. As such, it's synthetic a priori, as the subject does not contain the predicate.
I don't think you understand the things you're saying. You grant that all bachelors are by definition unmarried men because that's what it means to be a bachelor, by definition, and there is nothing else in the concept of bachelor. Here you've made an identity claim. Identity is a symmetric relation though. For comparison, "All dogs are animals" is true but not because dogs are identical to animals; they're subsumed under the concept of animal, but animals include other things like cats, elephants, etc. There's no identity there, and hence, no symmetry. It wouldn't be identity (because it wouldn't be symmetric) if you said that "All unmarried men are bachelors" was somehow not an identity claim (and thus fundamentally analytic), but some synthetic one instead. Kant goofed up. One of his biggest mistakes was to confuse conceptual opacity with syntheticity. I can grant to Kant that when I add two large numbers and get a third, I can't introspect and realize that this is true "by definition." That's precisely why I can get the sum wrong and not realize, or why merely stating the sum doesn't immediately put before my mind the two summands, nor are they available by immediate introspection. But Kant is wrong to think that this lack of transparency proves sums are synthetic. Introspective transparency has nothing to do with whether something is or isn't immanently contained within something else, such as concepts contained in concepts. Unfortunately due to his transcendental idealism, where we are the source of concept-building, there's bigger pressure to think that this is the case. But that's a conclusion to prove, not an assumption to make to rule out the opposite view.
>I don't think you understand the things you're saying.
That's because you're uneducated.
>You grant that all bachelors are by definition unmarried men because that's what it means to be a bachelor, by definition, and there is nothing else in the concept of bachelor.
Yes.
>Here you've made an identity claim.
Yes.
>It wouldn't be identity (because it wouldn't be symmetric) if you said that "All unmarried men are bachelors" was somehow not an identity claim (and thus fundamentally analytic), but some synthetic one instead.
Incorrect. Identity claims can be either analytic or synthetic. The sentence "All bachelors are unmarried men" is an identity claim, and analytic a priori because the subject contains the predicate conceptually, and nothing else, as per my previous statements. The sentence "All unmarried men are bachelors" is an identity claim, but synthetic a priori as per my previous statements. You do not have to demonstrate identity through the same means and by the same reasoning both ways. You can use different proof methods or justifications, and in fact often times these justifications are different. Whether the jump we make from one to the other is synthetic or analytic both ways doesn't matter.
>One of his biggest mistakes was to confuse conceptual opacity with syntheticity.
He did not.
>I can grant to Kant that when I add two large numbers and get a third, I can't introspect and realize that this is true "by definition."... But Kant is wrong to think that this lack of transparency proves sums are synthetic.
He does not think this. The large numbers example is not a proof. It's a persuasive example. Synthetic claims in actuality have nothing to do with immediacy of understanding. There are analytic a priori claims which aren't immediately obvious, and synthetic a priori claims which are.
>Introspective transparency has nothing to do with whether something is or isn't immanently contained within something else
Yes.
What is the subject and predicate of "7+5=12"?
samegay
I am the cowposter from above but I will try to explain to you why I don’t agree Kant is incorrect. You base your argument on the idea that 12 = 7+5 and 7+5=12 and claim this is analytic and not synthetic. The problem arises in how you discover this statement. You cannot arbitrarily define 7+5 to equal 13 or 12, you must discover what it is equal to, which is new information. To do this you need to use your intuition of space, and either add up units in space until you have 12, or once you have done that enough you can more easily abstract the process into faster mental math. It is not self-evident that 7+5 = 12 until you do the math to determine this, and therefore it is new knowledge and synthetic a priori. Refer also to the fact that only three lines can intersect at 90 degree angles at one point in 3D space. This is not inherent to the concept of a line, point, angles, etc. If you want to include this into the definition of any of the above arbitrarily, you are missing the point of how we discovered the knowledge in the first place.
I think the biggest confusion between the three of us is that you are seeing that a priori truths are necessary and confusing this with something being definitional. It is more about the pathway to discovering the knowledge involving the use of intuitions and not merely reciprocal concepts.
Not him and want to go off topic a bit here
>To do this you need to use your intuition of space, and either add up units in space until you have 12,
Does kant specifiy you need space to actually think of things in your head? As in the actual symbols of 7 and 5? Does he seperate this from the space that we actually live in, as in where we GET sensory information compared to where we process it in sensibility?
>also
Does there, in Kant's mind, exist an intuition that requires or has any concept to be applied to it? Or is that a bit trancendental/ "pure"?
You have to remember that all space is ultimately the same space that is simply appearing to you. There is no external space outside of your mind’s representation you are observing, it is all one representation of the mind. Kant does try to make some sort of distinction that space is the “outer sense” and time is the “inner sense”, but I’m not so sure this is coherent considering you need both space and time for any sort of object to think about.
To focus more on your question, you can observe what it is like to think of something. It is not occurring to you in sensation like sight, but it is still appearing in space, as if it wasn’t there would be no “thing” to think of.
In regards to the intuition question, all intuitions must have concepts applied to them in order for you to “experience” them. These are the Categories of the Understanding. To clarify this more, an intuition without any concepts applied would just be noise.
I'm the samegay guy, and I'm just a random poster who hadn't been participating but wanted to bump an interesting thread. I have several questions:
1) What is the "subject" and "predicate" of 7+5=12?
2) Is it possible that "space" and "time" are not the correct structural elements by which we ought to dissect experience? I understand the necessity of having pure intuitions, both in what they do and what they cannot do, but perhaps they are not the elements we ought to be looking for.
3) Why shouldn't a priori truths be foundational in some way? I think this segues with a gripe I've heard about mathematics where axioms used to be "common sense" (in some sense) back in Euclid's day, but are now merely definitional and can be anything one wants as long as we follow the logic.
Also:
>I am the cowposter from above but I will try to explain to you why I don’t agree Kant is incorrect. You base your argument on the idea that 12 = 7+5 and 7+5=12 and claim this is analytic and not synthetic. The problem arises in how you discover this statement. You cannot arbitrarily define 7+5 to equal 13 or 12, you must discover what it is equal to, which is new information. To do this you need to use your intuition of space, and either add up units in space until you have 12, or once you have done that enough you can more easily abstract the process into faster mental math. It is not self-evident that 7+5 = 12 until you do the math to determine this, and therefore it is new knowledge and synthetic a priori.
Correct me if I'm wrong, isn't this idea about "discovering statements" the focal point of WVO Quine's argument for collapsing the analytic-synthetic distinction?
I don’t usually think in terms of subject predicate, but if I had to describe it:
5+7 is the subject,
12 is the predicate as it is new information about 5+7.
In regards to the structural elements question, I don’t know that there are other more fundamental elements than space and time. If you can imagine something that is spaceless and timeless that exists I would entertain this idea much more. You can pretty much strip everything from your experience and you would still be left with space and time. Again, if you have any other ideas please tell me as I would be very intrigued to explore other structural elements more or as fundamental as space and time.
The point Kant is making is that a priori truths are foundational to experience. The truths of geometry apply necessarily to all experience you can have. For example, the three lines at one point thing I keep bringing up, you can apply this to your experience and never be incorrect, it is necessary. That is why it is synthetic a priori and not analytic, this is non trivial orb non definitional knowledge.
Finally, I have not read Quine so I have no idea. If you don’t mind and want to give a summary or short exposition I would love to read it and learn more. I should be clear that I am not a diehard Kant defender, I am simply trying to make his ideas as clear as possible, even if there are potentially flaws.
based bovine bro
Immoonuel Cownt
>I don’t usually think in terms of subject predicate, but if I had to describe it:
For what it's worth, you kind of have to, because the whole point of the analysis-synthesis distinction is to point out what is contained in the predicate that isn't already in the subject. And while you've rejected the idea that Kant's analytic-synthetic definition is not one about introspective transparency, I think we ended up missing the point of what it is really about, which is how understanding is generated writ large. Another way of framing the "is mathematics a priori synthetic" case is saying: do we have enough epistemic material and equipment from 7+5 = 12 to say that, indeed, 7 + 5 = 12, and not have there be any extra cognitive or experiential steps involved? And frankly, my intuition is leading me into two camps. It's either all analytic, or all synthetic, and whether it has mathematics in it has nothing to do with it.
>Finally, I have not read Quine so I have no idea. If you don’t mind and want to give a summary or short exposition I would love to read it and learn more. I should be clear that I am not a diehard Kant defender, I am simply trying to make his ideas as clear as possible, even if there are potentially flaws.
Here is a good one:
>His famous critique of the ‘dogma’ of the analytic-synthetic distinction, however, hinges on a very technical matter, and one that leaves a number of philosophers not entirely convinced. Basically, Quine argued that in order to claim that an analytic statement is truly such one has to provide an account of synonymy, since it is the latter concept that does the actual philosophical work: for instance, when we say that ‘All bachelors are unmarried’ we understand this as an analytic truth precisely because, as stated above, we mentally equate the terms ‘bachelor’ and ‘unmarried [man],’ i.e., the two terms are synonymous. But whence synonymity? According to Quine, at some point, even the notion of synonymity itself needs to be anchored by some sort of empirical fact, for instance about marriage, or men. If that’s the case, then the apparent solidly impenetrable barrier separating analytic and synthetic statements is no such thing and all truths, at bottom, are synthetic. This is Hume on steroids, in a sense.
Basically according to Quine, no statements, judgments, etc., are made in a nutshell, so the "analytic vs. synthetic" framework is a false one. There's also the Duhem-Quine thesis that's based on similar logic, the idea that when you're testing a scientific hypothesis, you're also testing the whole body of science it is built upon too.
I'll return to paragraphs 2&3 later. Peirce has a lot to say about the argument. And it's worth noting that Kant has a lot of Aristotelian, Euclidean, mathematical "in vogue", etc., baggage when it comes to assembling the transcendental schema and why it "has" to be space and time. If the theory is "geometrical", then it is proven beyond doubt!
When you word it that way, yes all truth is synthetic. You need synthetic material to work with to even form any sort of “analytic” statements. Is this not in essence what Kant is saying however? He is arguing that synthetic a priori knowledge is the metaphysics (not of the thing-in-itself, but the phenomena) that you can work with to form judgements that are analytic a priori and synthetic a posteriori. So yes, while everything is at bottom synthetic I don’t believe this completely eliminates statements like “All bachelors are unmarried” from analytic because it is just a definition.
If that is what you and Quine are saying, then I believe that is a really good point to raise.
In regards to the epistemic justification for 7+5=12, if you think there are extra steps outside of taking the two quantities in space and counting out the result, I am open to hearing it.
On the left side, you have 7.things and 5 things. On the right side, you have 12 things. If you're not trying to mentally "group" anything, then what you're looking at is two sides with 12 ungrouped things. All you have to do is recognize that fact and then it is analytic.
Arguably, the classic "unmarried man, bachelor" example fails to be analytic a priori if you didn't already know that a bachelor is an unmarried man. That would make it an a priori synthetic statement.
You have actually reversed it funnily enough. You assume that 7+5=12, but we are trying to explain how we reach this knowledge. If I ask you what 4382 + 5729 is, you don’t have access to the fact that it is 10111 until after you add it together. This is a synthetic action. You know you have 4382 and 5729, they add up to a sum that is larger than both, but you don’t know what the sum is until you do the math.
The unmarried bachelor thing is definitely analytic because you know that unmarried man = bachelor without having to carry out any sort of synthetic operation. Yes, the concepts of unmarried, man, and a bachelor must be present, but once you know these you can deduce that any unmarried man is a bachelor. You already know both sides of the equation because that is the definition you assigned to it.
>You have actually reversed it funnily enough. You assume that 7+5=12, but we are trying to explain how we reach this knowledge. If I ask you what 4382 + 5729 is, you don’t have access to the fact that it is 10111 until after you add it together. This is a synthetic action. You know you have 4382 and 5729, they add up to a sum that is larger than both, but you don’t know what the sum is until you do the math.
Fair enough. But we're back to the "mental machinery" argument. Otherwise:
>The unmarried bachelor thing is definitely analytic because you know that unmarried man = bachelor without having to carry out any sort of synthetic operation.
If I didn't know what a bachelor was prior to reading "Bachelors are unmarried men," then I would have learned something new from that statement, even if it is an a priori definition. There was a synthetic operation carried out.
I will concede that what you are saying sounds correct. The fact that there are unmarried men and they are called bachelors is all synthetic. I am curious as to what you would describe the difference between mathematics, ampliative, and that statement, which seems to just state the same thing again would be. We can at least agree that mathematics is a priori and that statement would be a posteriori though, right?
Sorry for the moronic grammar, I am writing from my phone and it is hard to check before I send it out.
The main point I am asking is then what is the difference between what we deem to be analytic statements and synthetic statements, given that it is not how the knowledge is obtained. It is still clear to me that “analytic” statements seem to just repeat and loop the same information while synthetic statements add new nontrivial information.
Well, superficially yes. But more deeply, I don’t think the distinction makes any sense and is, at best, a reflection of what someone has learned. Analytic-synthetic is a spectrum that measures what someone already knows (synthetic meaning assembly is required) and a priori/a posteriori is a simple either/or of how somebody comes to know it. This is a significant departure from Kant, at least in spirit.
Thanks for engaging with me man, you have provided me with significant problems to work out in my thought now. I am not fully convinced by either position now, I still would like to spend much more time working through Quine’s work and revisiting Kant’s distinction to make sure I am not missing something crucial. If you feel like you are done that is fine, but if you are still interested in the conversation how do you think this would affect Kant’s system, or would it just leave it unscathed? I still think synthetic a priori is valid and the correct path to metaphysics.
Thank you for providing interesting thought experiments to work with too. I view Kant as somebody who asked the right questions, problematized the right things, and made important progress by making the right prototype. But that's all Kant's system is, a prototype. Peirce does a great deconstruction of the concept of a pure intuition, both as an idea and in practice (how would we know what an intuition is?), as is recapitulated here:
>https://www.jstor.org/stable/40321008
Aristotle > Kant > Peirce > Heidegger > Novel insight.
Pseud
Real
How does one define the value or the meaning of a number? Why is 5 = 1+1+1+1+1 and not the number “2” repeating itself certain amount of times with the sign “+” in between?
This is a point of contention I also had regarding Kant. One example someone else used is that if you think the concept of 12 contains the definition of 7+5, it would also contain 9+3, 10+2, 11.2+.8, etc. and these would all in turn contain each other. At a certain point it is not entirely obvious or intuitive that 1+2+.2333+(8/438)^20+….(imagine a string of difficult math)….+.02 is obviously just 12 without your mind having to synthetically deduce that new information.
Another clearer approach is what Kant says in the Prolegomena, that in the concept of 7+5 you have the ideas that there are two seperate quantities, one is 5, one is 7, and that is all of the information you have available until you intuitively find out it is 12.
The final example of synthetic a priori knowledge is the idea that there can only be three lines that intersect at 90 degree angles. You can discover this in your mind and it just works for no apparent reason that is found in the definitions of the three lines and angles.
The claim Kant makes about math being synthetic a priori is disputed by many, but I hope the examples I gave kind of led you to a fuzzy approximation of what he means. It is simple new knowledge without any sort of sense experience.
>This is a point of contention I also had regarding Kant. One example someone else used is that if you think the concept of 12 contains the definition of 7+5, it would also contain 9+3, 10+2, 11.2+.8, etc. and these would all in turn contain each other. At a certain point it is not entirely obvious or intuitive that 1+2+.2333+(8/438)^20+….(imagine a string of difficult math)….+.02 is obviously just 12 without your mind having to synthetically deduce that new information.
See I feel when I think this I'm almost going down the road of set theory.
>The claim Kant makes about math being synthetic a priori is disputed by many, but I hope the examples I gave kind of led you to a fuzzy approximation of what he means. It is simple new knowledge without any sort of sense experience.
In one sentence you have said what would take Kant 300 pages lmao. I find it interesting but I also feel that these enlightenment philosophers using logic as the basis for philosophy are almost part of a "trend". I find it hard to accept that humans are naturally rational creatures when we act so irrationally all the time even when faced with two options with one being 100% superior to the other. All in all though I just need to get through Kant so I can attack Schopenhauer's metaphysics. Thanks anon.
I actually do agree with Kant and Schopenhauer a lot, I think transcendental idealism is obviously true in the sense that we can only experience objects as they appear to us first. I agree with Schopenhauer in rejecting Kant’s table of categories as unfounded and mostly just a work of symmetry Kant wanted to make work.
Now, if you want to attack Schopenhauer’s metaphysics, I find that the biggest problem Schopenhauer has is his pathway to knowing the noumena. He claims that because we know what it is like to be an object and also see ourselves, we know the noumena and phenomena at the same time with our body. I don’t know how both knowledge is not necessarily being represented to us if we are observing it. Another route I would go is his hasty assumption that everything else must be like us, as Will. I believe his case is strong, it seems clear to us that everything seems to strive endlessly like us, but could this not just be another phenomenal observation and result of human perspective? Additionally he simply goes with this because the other alternative is egoism, and he can’t conceive of any other noumena except for what he thinks we immediately experience as Will. If the above seemed like word salad, please let me know and I can try to make it more comprehensible.
If you would like one more insight into why transcendental idealism makes the most sense of the world, simply observe the following argument Kant makes.
1. We either have our representation of space a priori or a posteriori.
2. If we have it a posteriori we would need to experience it from objects.
3. To experience an object, we need a concept of space for the object to appear to us.
4. Reductio ad absurdum: we must have the concept of space a priori to the appearance of objects.
The same logic applies toward time.
>I actually do agree with Kant and Schopenhauer a lot, I think transcendental idealism is obviously true in the sense that we can only experience objects as they appear to us first. I agree with Schopenhauer in rejecting Kant’s table of categories as unfounded and mostly just a work of symmetry Kant wanted to make work.
So do I actually, I find Schopenhauer's Will so simple yet definite and honestly much more applicable than Nietzsche's Will to Power. The thing-in-itself as a concept as well is something I agree with totally and I do have a half-baked thesis in the idea of language being a thing-in-itself which would have big implications for Wittgenstein.
>Now, if you want to attack Schopenhauer’s metaphysics,
I should say by "attack" I mean approach, I tend to focus on ethics and epistemology so when reading World as Will I find myself lost when it comes to his references to Kant so started backwards. Great posts though anon.
Honestly I read through Schopenhauer before any Kant and found afterwards I had understood it well enough, so don’t worry too much about learning Kant in and out like how Schopenhauer repeatedly proclaims in the Preface. The appendix on Kant went 50/50 over my head as well. I am glad you are engaging with Schopenhauer, he is easily one of the best philosophers to ever write and his style is so ridiculously clear it is like drinking glacier water from a prismatic glass chalice.
I read Nietzsche first as well and you will discover that Nietzsche is basically a Schopenhauer+, his Will-To-Power will actually make more sense after you finish Schopenhauer and you may find yourself returning back to Nietzsche. Not to get too ahead of you or influence you in any way (you seem thoughtful and intelligent enough based on the original concerns about Kant), Schopenhauer does ultimately fail at providing a solid enough metaphysics and I think Nietzsche is correct in fleshing out the Will more by making it a discharge of power and not simply a continual striving to exist. I also find that Nietzsche approaches the world more objectively and not like Schopenhauer who sees the world as malicious and painful in a very very very bad and hurtful way.
I hope your exploration of Kant, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche is fruitful, those three truly nailed philosophy and brought us closest to “truth”.
thoughts on heidegger?
I have not read any Heidegger yet, I am still mopping up some of Nietzsche’s smaller works by reading through him chronologically. He is actually the next in line though once I finish soon. Very interested to see how he builds upon Nietzsche.
Nice, friend.
I actually made a very similar route to yours.
I started with the greeks and went chronologically until Descartes, then I was very excited to read Schopenhauer and just went with it, absolutely loved it. Afterwards I went to Nietzsche which I'm still reading. In between I read Kant and Hegel. Finished Zarathustra yesterday, have Ecce Homo, Human, All too Human and The Will to Power to go. I'll finish Faust, read Ecce homosexual and jump into Being and Time which I am very excited to read, finally.
After that I intend to go back maybe as far as Descartes and work my way up to Kant again, I only read his stuff once and I need to get it clearer in my head, no way I could express what I go from him with eloquence like you here
.
>After that I intend to go back maybe as far as Descartes and work my way up to Kant again
How do you intend on going about that?
Essentially:
>Descartes
>Spinoza
>Leibniz
>Locke
>Berkeley
>Hume
I won't read everything by them, some works I'm very familiar with, others not much. I'll need to give special attention to Berkeley and Hume this time around.
What you laid out as your reading path is almost exactly mine. If you want to revisit Kant I would recommend Hume’s Enquiry, Descartes as you said, and Leibniz (I am sure you know all of this), but most crucial to my understanding was going absolutely crazy with free online lectures and reading the Prolegomena first. Kant borderlines wordrapes you in the beginning of the CPR if you have no idea what is going on, so the Prolegomena is a must.
I also totally got lost in Schopenhauer when I first read him. It was to better understand Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditation on him and Human, All too Human, and I ended up borderline going schizo obsessing over him all winter long until I read the last sentence of WAWAR I in spring as the sun held the sky in perfect rosy cloud stillness and was brought to tears by the horror and love of Schopenhauer. Unironically I have never read someone as intellectually impressive besides maybe Nietzsche.
>and his style is so ridiculously clear
I think every philosopher should've been like Schoppy. majesty in clarity. hegel is the worst culprit for that matter I think
I have been meaning to read Schopenhauer, as someone who knows a fair bit about his work, what is, in your judgment, the best order to read his work?
If you want to be brief, you are going to completely fine reading World as Will and Representation Vol. 1 without any background reading, as long as you familiarize yourself with Kant’s transcendental idealism in general and Plato’s world of forms. A very crucial concept to research is the Principle of Sufficient Reason, especially the way Schopenhauer lays it out, there is a really good video that actually reflects what the book says and is not just Wikipedia tier explanation from the channel Evers Brothers Productions on the PSR. He also has good videos on Kant and the WAWAR as well that are concise.
Schopenhauer himself will rattle on and on in his Preface how you NEED to know Kant and Plato, this is not true if you are able to be diligent with stopping and looking up terms and ideas while reading. Do listen to his instruction to read the Kant Appendix in the back of WAWAR Vol. I however, it is a total slog if you don’t know any Kant but he will walk you through Kant so it serves as a good introduction.
Once you read Schopenhauer there is no going back, the man was incredibly intelligent and profoundly touching.
What you guys think about Nietzsche's essay on Schopenhauer in his Untimely Meditations? I was considering reading it before getting into him, as an introduction.
I just read that last month and it was a heartwarming read. Nietzsche is fanboying over Schopenhauer in the beginning and he gives a thorough analysis of the “genius” and how the purpose of culture is to propagate the genius. It is worth reading, and he totally dunks on scholars and the rest of society as usual. Basically Nietzsche outlines how to not be a pseud, and it honestly is only roughly about Schopenhauer and more about society as a whole and its relationship to people like Schopenhauer.
The thing-in-itself is actually the weakest point of Kant's philosophy. He wanted to distance himself so much from Idealism, especially Berkeley, that he posited the thing in itself as a safeguard for realism. In the end it is as empty as his regulative moral concepts. Fichte is the necessary consequence of Kant's philosophy (and I don't say that positively).
The thing-in-itself is not that weak, without a thing-in-itself there would literally be nothing at all and everything would just be a completely empty illusion. The thing-in-itself is not proven but is supported by the fact that there seems to at least be some consistency in time ordered sensation, as things don’t randomly flicker about into different times but rather proceed consistently when we are conscious.
The point is that Kant faces a dilemma: affirming the existence of the thing in itself posits a problem to the dualistic nature of cognition with the understanding and the sensible intuition that is similar to the mind-body problem, how can do these two faculties operate together, is there a cause-effect relation in the process of cognition of an object with thing-in-itself and appearences? Now, to deny the existence of thing in themselves would be to vouch for a radical subjectivism (and I think that's the path Fichte takes). I think that is why Kant say repeatedly, despite making contradictory claims as well, that we must remain agnostic about them, that we cannot know them and all our thoughts about them are simply the natural inclination of reason to step beyond the limits the understanding impose. In the end it is just like his moral regulative ideas, God, soul, free will, etc.
You have presented a very very intriguing analysis of the thing-in-itself. I was also very concerned with the interaction between mind and thing-in-itself. Do you know where I could start with Fichte?
Try reading Beiser's chapter in his German Idealism, Schulze was very important to Fichte. There is Jacobi too, but nobody ever references his works, even though they were quite influential for Fichte. I myself haven't read Fichte yet, but I'd follow from Kant with Jacobi, Schulze, Beiser's chapter, Dieter Henrich's Between Kant and Hegel references Fichte all the way through the book, and obviously there's a chapter on him there. Then perhaps starting with Fichte's review of Aenesidemus.
We treat animals so horribly. They experience joy and love the same as us yet we keep them in bondage. Horrible.
I agree, I love cows so fricking much and wish most people would think beyond “haha le cheeseburger! vegan btfo!”. I am not a vegan currently because of my situation but I am looking forward to the day where cows roam free.
I think Nietzsche would have a field day with me as I feel intense love and compassion for cows yet have much less sympathy for Muslims or other people who seem stupid and “evil”. I recognize this is some sort of mental sickness or error as cows and “evil” people are both just doing what they are determined to do, but I cannot help but feel a love for picrel. I get extremely sad when I think of a cow’s innocence.
I’m the same way but for cats. I don’t really care for any other animal or human being but when I see a cat my heart just melts. I feel that there is so much of myself in the little guy I just can’t help it.
Haha what a cute cat, I wonder what his name is?
what is 176835864 + 14663324567544? Don't count. Don't use a calculator. Just analyse the concept of these numbers and the concept of addition and find the sum. pro tip: you can't. You have to count, and this means you have to go out beyond the concepts and add (synthesize) units using intuited representative units (dots, fingers, words representing numbers, etc.,), all of which are required to find the sum, and only then recognize the identity of the numerical value of the concepts on both sides of the equation.
This is essentially what I was saying in
, we are so used to the obvious idea that 7+5=12 that is almost seems definitional but in reality it takes a synthesis to find this out for the first time.
0+0=0 is synthetic a priori too. It's really just about the form of the mathematical judgement.
false. its analytic a priori.
False. It's literally synthesizing two things in an addition. You don't know what synthetic a priori means.
>You don't know what synthetic a priori means.
the irony
Took you 30 minutes to write this? Looks like you gave up on arguing.
Kant's a pussy and he's lucky I don't knock his metaphysical block off
Cringe
Hallo es ist mich, Kantposter. Wie geht es Ihnen?
what is a thing in itself
is it the noumenal correspondent to a 'thing' we experience
is it an abstract synthesized thing that we suppose 'must' exist to explain our experiencing of things in the world
is it a 'truer' thing below the thing but above noumena that can be researched to better understand, ie through scientific study
no I have not read kant and no I won't
>no I have not read kant and no I won't
Es tut mir leid.
>this is the greatest philosophical mind of all time according to IQfy
That would be Guenon actually.
I am find your lack of Hegelposting.. disturbing…
Lads can someone please explain wtf the trancendental deduction is trying to convey? The constant switch in terms is confusing the frick out of me.
>Sensibility is space and time connected in a string of points, it is entirely empty until we get sensory experience (seeing a table?)
>Understanding applies concepts/qualities to the sensory experience (the table is blue, it is tall/ it is in this particular area) and follows the table of judgements(?)
>Understanding also applies rules to sensibility in order to create knowledge(?)
Is this on the right track? Then we get to trancendental logic which has "pure concepts" which exist without sensory content?? He's so fricking dense bros I'm lost
He's trying to shoo you away at this point. He only really wants you to read him about halfway into the transcendental analytic.
>inb4 assmad
Not my problem
You are on the right track, keep pushing through bro.
Use this to double check, though the SEP isn’t the 100% correct interpretation of everything.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-transcendental/
Merci fren. At least I'm somewhat no track.
KANT IS NUMBA ONE!!!
Kant is moronic because the definition of arithmetic by necessity already presupposes all numbers, with calculations being merely derived from preconceived numbers. In other words, 12 comes first, then 7+5 follows. The numbers themselves are arbitrarily predefined as an accepted premise, meaning that calculations are only plausible a posteriori
midwit take and filtered
>Identity claims can be either analytic or synthetic.
Already this is absurd but to say A=B is analytic but B=A is synthetic is even more absurd.
Kant is a spook
The only philosophers you need to read are Nietzsche and Foucault but ignore all of Foucault’s politics and instead become a an ultra fascist since it’s the the only thing that makes sense (even if Foucault would be utterly horrified by this)
Can I adopt his fisting at least
I agree Nietzsche is the key to all of philosophy but you need to read Schopenhauer first and for that you need Kant etc. I think Nietzsche actually is a transcendental idealist though he is skeptical about the thing-in-itself. Do you have any recommendations for Foucault? I have already read all of Nietzsche.
You give me 7 and 5. You tell me I cannot find 12 in 7 and 5, but unfortunately I am schizophrenic.
7/5 = 1 2/5
2/5 = 0.*4*
in 2/5, there are 3 more 5ths requires to make 1(0)
3 is 7 away from 10.
3 x 4 = 12
There is one question. 5 and 7 are two numbers.
12.
So many bad answers in this thread.
Yes 5+7=12 is synthetic because 12 is not immediately contained in "5+7=". Kant makes it even more clearer, when he talks about sums with huge numbers. If, say, 52626+35278=87904 were to be analytic, just by merely understanding what 52626+3578 means, I would be able to IMMEDIATELY know that the result of the sum is 87904. But I don't immediately know that that is the result: to get to it I need to perform other synthetic mental operations (namely, as Kant himself states, I need to count and calculate). These operations would not be required if that sum were to be analytical. The reason we do not notice this when it comes to 5+7 is because it is an easy sum we've met countless times in our lives, so when we're presented with it we can easily remember the result of the sum. But the case of huge sums shows that this is just habit, and not a result of analyticity
What is the subject and the predicate of 5+7=12?
The subject is 5+7, the predicate is 12. It is synthetic because 12 is not contained in the subject 5+7.
The only thing “contained” in 5+7 is 7+5. Two quantities, one being 7 and one being 5, adding up to an unknown sum.
What if you already knew the outcome of any permutation of 5, 7, and their addition?
But you don’t until you synthetically deduce it. It has nothing to do with if you already know it or not, it is how you achieved the knowledge. You may be mistaken into thinking this is included in the definition because you have added 7 and 5 so many times you know it as a fact.
Another example would be the statement “There is a church in my town.” Neither contains each other and is synthetically discovered. Once you know this, it isn’t now an analytic truth.
How can any predicate be fully contained in its subject before some discovery? See for example:
>If I didn't know what a bachelor was prior to reading "Bachelors are unmarried men," then I would have learned something new from that statement, even if it is an a priori definition. There was a synthetic operation carried out.
uhhh... anon... you're so right. I don't know how I didn't realize this earlier! I concede. I will now proceed to hang myself out of shame.
Before you discovered that "bachelor" is "an unmarried man" you didnt know what "bachelor" meant, it was just a string of sounds to you. On the other hand, you can know the meaning of "5+7=" before knowing that it is "12", and to use the other guy's example, you can know the meaning of "church" and "my town" before knowing wether "there is a church in my town". As such, the bachelor example is not analogous.
Btw Im the guy who wrote
. The guy who responded to you was someone else
If you don't know the implication of "5+7=" then you don't know it. You may know it better than a mere string of sounds, as in, you know the individual numbers, the concept of addition, and the possibility that combined it is another number. But if you don't know the result of that statement, you don't know its full meaning.
Likewise with the town statement. You can know of churches in general, or towns in general, or even a sense of "that church" or "your town." But if you don't know that, in your particular town, there is a church, or perhaps even "that particular church", then you don't know the full meaning of your town.
Do you know what "543856+7363738=" mean? Is there any concept in this expression that is alien to you? Is it one of those two numbers? Is it the + or the =?
No, none of it is alien. But I won't know what it means until I crunch the numbers. It's not enough to be supplied the building materials. Some assembly is always required.
Yes, this is why that sum is synthetic. If it was analytic you would know the result just by virtue of understanding the meaning of the sum. It is exactly the necessity of crunching the numbers that guarantees the syntheticity of the sum
>Let's assume that Y gets destroyed. Does the town X stop being the town X?
Heraclitus.png
At the very least, anybody who formerly knew the town and was unaware of what happened to the town would no longer have sufficient knowledge of the town.
We are in full agreement on this point. But I don't understand why you asked me this. If I calculated the sum and remembered it, it would be an analytic truth, as the sum would be a necessary conclusion from its parts.
>At the very least, anybody who formerly knew the town and was unaware of what happened to the town would no longer have sufficient knowledge of the town.
They would have sufficient knowledge of the town, at best they would have lost knowledge of an accidental part of it (which is what you would expect, since "there is a church in my town" is a synthetic a posteriori judgement, which means that it would have to be validated from time to time – as in, you would have to check wethet it is still true). But even if Y gets destroyed, X would still stand (e.g. if the Duomo of Milan gets destroyed, Milan still remains Milan, which means that the presence of the Duomo is not an essential part of it).
>If I calculated the sum and remembered it, it would be an analytic truth, as the sum would be a necessary conclusion from its parts.
The necessity is given by the fact that it is a synthetic a priori judgement, and not from analiticity. Remembering a previous conclusion does not change the logical status (wrt transcendental logic, not formal logic) of that conclusion. This can also be seen from the fact that forgetting the result of the sum does not alter the meaning of said sum (while it would have to be so if the result was deduced analitically): the mere fact that you COULD think the sum without knowing the result is a proof of the fact that the result is derived synthetically.
>But even if Y gets destroyed, X would still stand (e.g. if the Duomo of Milan gets destroyed, Milan still remains Milan, which means that the presence of the Duomo is not an essential part of it).
Anglobox thinking. If you destroyed Notre Dame, bulldozed the Louvre, ripped up the Champs-Elysée, etc., but left the rest of “Paris” standing, you’d be hard-pressed to call what’s left Paris. It wouldn’t be the Paris people conceived of when people think of Paris. It would just be another shitty metropolis.
Would we? I would still call that Paris. Berlin is still Berlin, even tho it got firebombed to smithereens. There's nothing anglo about this kind of thinking (imho the anglo way to think about these things would be to gloss over transcendental logic and to focus entirely on formal logic).
I should add that the example concerning "towns" could give rise to some confusions, since it is a conventional concept (which means that its essential properties, of Milan for example, are determined by the way in which we decide to use that name, and this decision is obtained through stipulation). So, if we use the term "Berlin" in a way that does not depend on the presence of any of the monuments that got destroyed by those bombings (and I think pretty much everyone does), then we're referring to a concept of Berlin that does not contain the presence of those monuments as an essential deermination (which means that their presence can only be validated through synthetic a posteriori judgements). On the other hand there are non-conventional concepts (like the ones obtained through transcendental schemes, such as the one of "body") that are beyond stipulation (apart from choice of the name, which is arbitrary – for example different languages will use different names, like "corpo", "corp", "corpus", "körper", etc). In this case the essential traits of the concept do not depend on stipulation, but on the actual (transcendentally) logical constitution of the concept (which, for example, leads us to notice that "extension" is contained analitically, since, outside of metaphors, I cannot think about a body without said determination, while the determination of weight is added synthetically).
Close but no cigar. Paris is not real.
Not even going to address the Heraclitean argument?
This. It hasn’t been for years. There’s even a psychological syndrome based on this phenomenon when tourists arrive and it’s nothing like they expected.
>no! bad!
>it’s furr of brack peopre!
Moo! Cowanon here.
No, whether or not you as an individual know about the truth of a statement is irrelevant to what type of statement it is. The synthetic/analytic and a priori/a posteriori is about how we gain knowledge. All synthetic a posteriori truths are going to only be certain for the time and place where they were found, such as the church in the town example. Of course, in general conversation we can assume that the structure or appearance of the church in the town will change so little that we can colloquially call it the same church, while also recognizing Heraclitus is correct that there is no same church.
This is a good breakdown of the problem.
>No, whether or not you as an individual know about the truth of a statement is irrelevant to what type of statement it is. The synthetic/analytic and a priori/a posteriori is about how we gain knowledge.
Isn't how you gain knowledge dependent on what you already know? We already agreed that:
>All bachelors are unmarried men.
Is synthetic if this is the first time you ever encountered the term bachelor in your life. The predicate isn't contained in the subject until your mind receives the word's definition and synthesizes the meaning.
Not that guy, but weve already dealt with this issue. Before knowing that "bachelor" is "unmarried man" you have no notion of what "bachelor" means, which means that it is not a concept to you, but only a string of sounds. What you're describing is just the act of assigning a mere conceptless name to a concept. There is no relationship of conceptual inclusion here, and as such it is not pertinent to this conversation.
It's still a synthetic action of sorts because some assembly is required from the mind.
All that happens here is the assignation of a name to a definition. But the issue at hand regarded a synthetic conceptual inclusion, which has nothing to do with the example you've made (since "bachelor", without the knowledge that it means "unmarried man" is not a concept, but only a name).
In general I think the bachelor example is really dumb. I'm not blaming you for it, I know that it is widely used by people who talk about it (especially analytic philosophers, kantian specialists generally do not use it), but it really misses the point, since "bachelor" and "unmarried man" are not two distinct concepts, but two expressions for the same concept. It's no wonder that Kant never used an example of this sort (he used "body" and "extension" as an example of analiticity, and it made sense, since they're two distinct concepts, for which conceptual inclusion makes sense).
What's the difference between a bachelor party and an unmarried man party?
The former rolls on the tongue better
Cont. of
Similarly for the town example. Let's assume that in your town X there is a church Y. Let's assume that Y gets destroyed. Does the town X stop being the town X? If not, then the presence of Y was an accident, and not an essential determination of X. As such, you could think X without knowing of Y, meaning that "Y is in X" would be a synthetic judgement
/thread
More like Kouldn't
Seeing how Kant relies on definitions for analytic judgements, would it be possible for an analyitic judgement to be also synthetic? Let's say Cat had two definitions, the original one and also meaning three biscuits. Slowly overtime the latter definition dies out but some people still know it. If you did not know about the second definition would it be a synthetic judegement to you and analytic for some (who know of the biscuit definition)? Would this be a sort of strange synthetic judgement a priori since the meaning would be contained in the sentence "this cat has no hair" or do thse judegements rely on assuming you have universal knowledge on the object?
Kant is not Carnap, he doesn't rely on definition, but on conceptual inclusion. I have used a definition as an example only because I was responding to a person who used it.
As such your question is completely irrelevant to the issue at hand. It's not an issue concerning a name and a definition, rather it can concerns wether a given concept is immediately included in another (the example used by Kant to showcase it is the judgment "all bodies are extended", since extension is an immediate determination required for the intelligibility of the concept of "body").
its synthetic because you need time for adding 5 to 7... it is the weakest point in his theory besides the whole transcendental idealism being ridiculous
>no matter how long you analyse both 5 and 7 you will never arrive at the concept of 12.
You will if you define them in terms of the successor function.
Philosophers are brainlets who hide their lack of mathematical acuity under the veil of ambiguity afforded by natural language
You've actually made no progress with this objection, since to apply the successor function you have to perform a calculation, which is a synthetic operation. What is said about 5+7 applies equally to 1+1