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keda
[Sep 7, 2009 - 9:19 AM]: All kinds of bureaucrat as usual, so you get pennies out on the other end per dolalr
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keda
[Jul 11, 2009 - 1:03 PM]: If you mean by recourse and imbalance, that the matter is sumbsumed the form rather than some kind of interplay, then I suppose you are right, but both matter and form have independent standing in relation to one another. The question is, why is this a problem? We can choose whatever forms we like to employ, just because of this nice feature with Kantian episteomology. No tools are banned, except those that go beyond the senses watch, although Kant suggests that aesthetic idea of the beatiful has a role to play, making knowing somewhat of an art. I think it may be a mistake to suggest the outside world doesn't do something in the process of getting known, and that it cannot be really known. It does something, namely provide the matter, which is the real, through affection (while the mind is passive in this regard), while the mind provides the form (while the outside world is passive in this regard) so its really a two way street but where no interdependency is needed between them to unify them. The fundamentally one way street would be actually for the mind to also provide the matter of knowledge i.e. create the outside world, which is incidentally how Kant thinks the only way the things in themselves can be known. The world is not unkowable to us, just knowable to an extent. We can only know the phenomenal aspect of it, and it is real, not illusory. In fact the whole deal with form and matter distinction is necessary to avoid illusions. Regarding that Kant can't prove that we have self consciousness, I think the point is rather without it, we don't have much of an experience other than in a subjective sense. The location of the transcendental unity of apperception being located outside the mind sounds a bit odd. I have no idea how that's suppose to work. Lastly, regarding the idea of warrants, if Kant must make that leap of faith to have the notion of warrant in the first place (objective morality), isn't that a warrant enough? If there is no objective notion of warrant, who says Kant can't do it?
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keda
[Jul 11, 2009 - 6:45 AM]: According to Kant, objects forces (pushes) on the mind somehow, and I can't help but think the sensibility must have extension (=a size) so that different parts of it can be pushed differently in order to not push it uniformly so that there can be a change at all in it, or maybe thats just my interpretation. People are still looking for where the mind exactly is and it is quite elusive. Edit: Btw Tobias, started writing before your comment, maybe I'm a mind reader
 I just thougtht it weird to call the thing in itself "raw data" than something that we sensed. I'm still not sure why you think the form/matter division is problematic. Edit 2: Maybe I think I see the problem. If we were talking about the thing in itself, you are saying how can Kant know that its there, since it is unknowable? Well only form and matter together can form knowledge, so just having this unknowable something posited is not knowledge. Still you may say you know that it caused the appearance, and that's something and I would say that is a feature of the appearance rather than a feature of the thing in itself that wasn't even given in the experience. It is a necessary feature of hte appearance, maybe even definition of appearance that it is of "something that appears" as Kant put it. It is a transcendental feature of experience that our mode of knowledge imposes on its objects.
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keda
[Jul 11, 2009 - 6:36 AM]: According to Berkley the mind pushes its own state around and creates all kinds of illusions, but according to Kant, it is affected by something "out there", and I guess the simplest proof of that would be that there are some things you can't do anything about. Pain is pain. Maybe you could say that it the mind cannot help but do these things. In any case Kant asks, how is knowledge possible? He isn't asking do we know anything at all? In almost anything we do we assume the world is out there anyway and we have to deal with it, and hardly anyone would just retreat to a helpless everything is an illusion position, so from a pragmatic point of view it certainly makes sense to start from that first question rather than the second. Thus Kant looks for all the things needed for knowledge in the first place. Kant finds that those things needed impose their own restrictions on what can be known i.e. we don't have unlimited mode of knowledge (like God), such as space having certain properties that they impose on everything known, which is why I think what Tobias is refering to "the thing in itself" here or the properties of the thing independent of our ability to percieve it, remains unknown.
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keda
[Jul 11, 2009 - 6:02 AM]: the data I would say is a state of our ability to sense things (sensibility in Kants terminology) or rather how much an external object affects that state. When the state is altered, the mind has to figure out which object affected it, and that's why we have the mental representation of space so it can distinguish objects, but also distinguish them from itself.
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keda