display all the ideas for this combination of philosophers
7 ideas
| 17616 | Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind [Kant] |
| Full Idea: Without sensibility no object would be given to us, and without understanding none would be thought. Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind. | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason [1781], B075/A51) | |
| A reaction: A famous assertion, which requires quite a lot of deconstruction. See MacDowell 1994 for example. Whatever the solution, it had better allow animals to cope with their world, because that's what they do. |
| 5553 | Either experience creates concepts, or concepts make experience possible [Kant] |
| Full Idea: There are only two ways in which a necessary agreement of experience with the concepts of its objects can be thought: either the experience makes these concepts possible or these concepts make the experience possible. | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason [1781], B166) | |
| A reaction: A nice clear statement of the big question about concepts. The extremes seem to be the 'tabula rasa' versus Fodor's strong 'nativism' (that most concepts are innate). Personally I want to be as empiricist as possible. Kant needs a theory of their origin. |
| 5593 | Reason generates no concepts, but frees them from their link to experience in the understanding [Kant] |
| Full Idea: Only from the understanding can pure concepts arise, and reason cannot generate any concept at all, but can only free a concept of the understanding from the unavoidable limitations of possible experience, and extend it beyond empirical boundaries. | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason [1781], B435/A409) | |
| A reaction: Presumably Descartes' 'natural light' should cover the understanding as much as the reason. This quotation brings out the empirical aspect of Kant's thought. It suggests that analysis is the main function of reason. |
| 22004 | Concepts are rules for combining representations [Kant, by Pinkard] |
| Full Idea: For Kant, concepts should be thought of as rules for the combination of representations. | |
| From: report of Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason [1781]) by Terry Pinkard - German Philosophy 1760-1860 01 | |
| A reaction: Kant seems to have thought that they are rules we decree for ourselves (like the categorical imperative). So think of private languages, and you get Hegel's much more social view of concepts (I think). |
| 5543 | All human cognition is through concepts [Kant] |
| Full Idea: The cognition of every, at least human, understanding is a cognition through concepts. ...A concept is a unity of the act of bringing various representations under one common representation. | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason [1781], B093/A68) | |
| A reaction: This puts concepts right at the heart of human understanding, as the building blocks for propositions and beliefs. Do gods and dogs use concepts? If artificial intelligence cannot program concepts, is it defeated? Are there non-conscious concepts? … |
| 16912 | Some concepts can be made a priori, which are general thoughts of objects, like quantity or cause [Kant] |
| Full Idea: Concepts are of such a nature that we can make some of them ourselves a priori, without standing in any immediate relation to the object; namely concepts that contain the thought of an object in general, such as quantity or cause. | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysic [1781], 282) | |
| A reaction: 'Quantity' seems to be the scholastic idea, of something having a magnitude (a big pebble, not six pebbles). |
| 8735 | Kant implies that concepts have analysable parts [Kant, by Shapiro] |
| Full Idea: Kant's definition of 'analyticity' presupposes that concepts have parts (at least metaphorically). | |
| From: report of Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason [1781]) by Stewart Shapiro - Thinking About Mathematics | |
| A reaction: The concept of a 'bachelor' seem undeniably to have parts. Others, however, seem to lack components, such as 'one', 'red', 'true'. Hence concepts must fall into two groups: primitive and composite. In any language. In any proposition. |