display all the ideas for this combination of texts
5 ideas
| 23697 | I exist just as an intelligence aware of its faculty for combination [Kant] |
| Full Idea: I exist as an intelligence that is merely conscious of its faculty for combination. | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason [1781], B158) | |
| A reaction: [plucked from a complex context!] This thought seems to have its origins in Hume's account of associations, and is a fairly accurate piece of introspection, I would say. I could think of my Self simply as the thing which unites some diverse experiences. |
| 22005 | Associations and causes cannot explain content, which needs norms of judgement [Kant, by Pinkard] |
| Full Idea: Kant said the representational content of thought could not be explained by patterns of association or by naturalistically understood causal patterns; the cognitive content of thought is constituted entirely by the norms governing judgemental synthesis. | |
| From: report of Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason [1781]) by Terry Pinkard - German Philosophy 1760-1860 01 | |
| A reaction: I'd be inclined to say that it needs a concept of truth, rather than Kant's tangle of norms and categories. Maybe the content is there before the associations get to work. |
| 6577 | For Kant, our conceptual scheme is disastrous when it reaches beyond experience [Kant, by Fogelin] |
| Full Idea: For Kant, the conceptual apparatus that structures our experience for us will inevitably lead to intellectual disasters when it is applied to matters completely beyond experience. | |
| From: report of Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason [1781]) by Robert Fogelin - Walking the Tightrope of Reason Ch.3 | |
| A reaction: This is the empiricist side of Kant, influenced by Hume. I don't agree with Kant on this. I just think that speculation and abstract theory are much more difficult and error-prone than science, because you can't keep checking against raw facts. |
| 5538 | Understanding has no intuitions, and senses no thought, so knowledge needs their unity [Kant] |
| Full Idea: The understanding is not capable of intuiting anything, and the senses are not capable of thinking anything. Only from their unification can cognition arise. | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason [1781], B075/A51) | |
| A reaction: At first glance this seems to settle the rationalist-empiricist debate at a stroke, by rejecting the rationalist dream of knowledge arising from pure intuitions, and the empiricist dream of knowledge from pure sensation. It can't be that simple, though… |
| 5559 | Sensations are a posteriori, but that they come in degrees is known a priori [Kant] |
| Full Idea: All sensations are given only a posteriori, but their property of have a degree can be cognised only a priori. | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason [1781], B218/A176) | |
| A reaction: Study the context to be fair to Kant, but this seems very unconvincing. If we were constructed in some more digital way, our sensations might be binary, so their 'degree' can hardly be a necessity. |