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No Fancy.
Kant as plagiarist

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No Fancy.
quickly
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Posted 10/25/09 - 08:19 PM:
Subject: No Fancy.
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#1
In the Treatise, Hume is abundantly clear on the following point: objects are given by the imagination as a resolution to contradictions between the manner in which different faculties are presented with and reason about sensations. An object (for instance, a cup) is a collection of impressions, but is given substantial unity by the imagination; space and time are inferences, etc., etc. What seems lost is this notion that the Humean man wanders through a hallucinatory dream: rather, the Humean subject provides unity, prior to his actual experience of objects, to impressions, and as such, has a transcendental but non-Kantian ground for experience.

It seems Kant perhaps took more from Hume than I had realized. Can I interpret Hume as the "original transcendental idealist"? The original Kantian psychonaut, tunneling through experience to find that which must occur before the sentient experience?

Just a thought. But an interesting interpretive line.

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180 Proof
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Posted 10/26/09 - 09:11 AM:
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quickly wrote:
In the Treatise, Hume is abundantly clear on the following point: objects are given by the imagination as a resolution to contradictions between the manner in which different faculties are presented with and reason about sensations. An object (for instance, a cup) is a collection of impressions, but is given substantial unity by the imagination; space and time are inferences, etc., etc. What seems lost is this notion that the Humean man wanders through a hallucinatory dream: rather, the Humean subject provides unity, prior to his actual experience of objects, to impressions, and as such, has a transcendental but non-Kantian ground for experience.

It seems Kant perhaps took more from Hume than I had realized. Can I interpret Hume as the "original transcendental idealist"? The original Kantian psychonaut, tunneling through experience to find that which must occur before the sentient experience?

Just a thought. But an interesting interpretive line.

It may be "just a thought" but I've also thunk it. Hume's "habits and customs of mind" apparently were transformed by Kant into a platonic apparatus of "categories and transcendental ego" but, I think, moreso anticipated Wittgenstein's "grammar and forms of life". I'd answer your question "no", however, leaving that distinction to Kant since Hume is not making a transcendental argument that entails 'foundationalism' of any kind. Hume's skepticism (e.g. problem of induction) is a consequence of a lack of any foundation for, or in, experience, which Kant found problematic and sought to solve transcendentally.

Edited by 180 Proof on 10/28/09 - 02:59 PM. Reason: Not quite "pure" but ...

The question isn't "Which explanations do I believe?" but rather "Which explanations do I least disbelieve?"

Absence of evidence THAT MUST BE THERE (i.e. implied by any claim, concept, or (its) predicates, that affects changes in/to the world) entails evidence of absence.

[What cannot be done?[What cannot be hoped?[What cannot be known?]]]
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Posted 10/26/09 - 09:47 AM:
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I would answer a blunt "No!"

Hume's approach concerning ideas of objects is psychologist. There's a factual process by which we unify bundles of basic ideas into complex ones. The process, however, is not transcendental in the kantian sense, because Hume is not saying what is it that allows such unity. The closest that Hume comes to saying something similar to a "condition" is his habituation response to the induction problem. But that is not a cognitive reply, much less transcendental. It's pure psychology in its earliest form.

I think Kant recognises this when he differentiates between the "unity of apperception" as a factual process and as a transcendental condition for experience. For the first, he refers the reader to Locke and Hume, and refuses to provide further insights on that issue. He then proceeds to tackle the transcendental side by deducing the pure categories...

I don't think Hume could have really had an early transcendental kind-of philosophy. What mainly allows for that approach is the copernican "turn", a kantian original

"Neither Aristotelian nor Russellian rules give the exact logic of any expression of ordinary language; for ordinary language has no exact logic." P.F. Strawson
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Posted 10/26/09 - 10:07 PM:
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@180:
Hume's "habits and customs of mind" apparently were transformed by Kant into a platonic apparatus of "categories and transcendental ego" but, I think, moreso anticipated Wittgenstein's "grammar and forms of life". I'd answer your question "no", however, leaving that distinction to Kant since Hume is not making a transcendental argument that entails 'foundationalism' of any kind. Hume's skepticism (e.g. problem of induction) is a consequence of a lack of any foundation for, or in, experience, which Kant found problematic. and sought to solve transcendentally.


Yes, and in that sense, I agree with you; I was using "transcendental" rather loosely to mean "something necessary and presupposed," not "the formal subjective conditions of the sensibility and understanding." What's interesting is Kant's quote in the Prolegomena:

[Hume] concluded that reason completely and fully deceives herself with this concept, talksely taking it for her own child, when it is really nothing but a bastard of the imagination, which, impregnated by experience, and having brought certain representations under the law of association, passes off the resulting subjective necessity (i.e., habit) for an objective necessity (from insight).


In that sense, I think Kant did transform Hume's "habits and customs of the mind" into the "categories and transcendental ego." But at the same time, Hume's project also rests upon his reduction of the natural relations (viz., necessity can be explained by simple spatial and temporal relations causing the experience of a Kantian category, one of modality): "The imagnation is seduc'd into such an opinion as [of identity] only by means of resemblance." Hume is required to explain how empirically the subject can have the experience of a cup; Kant is required to explain how transcendentally the subject can have the experience of a cup. There are projects seem mutually complimentary, and Kant is in a sense correcting Hume's "concept empiricism."

@ both
The process, however, is not transcendental in the kantian sense, because Hume is not saying what is it that allows such unity. The closest that Hume comes to saying something similar to a "condition" is his habituation response to the induction problem. But that is not a cognitive reply, much less transcendental. It's pure psychology in its earliest form.


Yes, but I'm aware of that. Hume is doing psychology, Kant sharply delineates transcendental from genetic or empirical accounts of consciousness, etc. But in the section on induction and probability, it is necessary for Hume to explain an experience. Hume isn't saying the experience of causal necessity is false, but that it doesn't arise from the understanding. It is still, by Humean standards, coherent. Which is why Kant spends so much time discussing genetic or psychological accounts of an act; and may even agree that empirically something like a Humean process occurs in for the subject.

Edited by quickly on 10/26/09 - 10:32 PM

Sunt bona, sunt quaedam mediocria, sunt mala plura
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(cf., Martial, Epigrammata I.XVI)
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