How did Kant's epistemological considerations play a role in his political philosophy ?
>>771658
He was never really 'politically involved' in the same way you would consider many of philosophers at the time. Kant's philosophy fell out of his golden rule, and the politics fell out of that by extenston. As Kant believed knowledge claims could be synthetic apriori, he was much more interested in proving these and letting the political analytic apriori claims fall out of that
He wasn't really a political philosopher
>>771780
That's bollocks- his system of right was political. It was about the creation of a state that respected the primary law, freedom- which then protects the universal autonomy of its citizens. Don't post if you don't know anything.
>>771728
>>771780
yes yes yes, but didn't he advocate a combining of kratos and ethos in political activity and condemned the highly Machiavellian view of a strictly Kratos system as it would prove to be self-defeating. in other terms, he advocated for limiting the conditions of politics so that it wouldn't turn into states constantly competing for power? Furthermore, did he not stress the importance of universal rational moral duty on the international scene?
>>771806
thanks
this is more what I was interested in discussing
>>771826
Yes to all those points, but he was political? You've just pointed out he commented on nationhood. Kant was different from political philosophers we generally consider, as he believed in a universal maxim that necessarily would entail a very precise state set-up. It doesn't have the flexibility that Hegel and Fichte later tried to inject into the nation that held freedom as its highest ideal. Hence why Kant is so easy to attack with the axe murder scenario- as that concerns a universal law by extension the state would have to act in the same way- it's not practical at all.
>>771658
dude autonomy lmao
>>771826
>highly Machiavellian view of a strictly Kratos system
People are never going to stop attributing views to Machiavelli he didn't actually hold, will they?
>>771922
So first off- Machiavelli isn't worth taking seriously- he was the self-help guide of the age, or a cutting satire (historians are split)- but he wasn't a philosopher of any worth.
Second, you've got to start by reading Kant's Doctrine of Right. His most powerful surviving idea was that the individual's absolute freedom was an absolute right and that the government must be prevented in arbitrarily attacking this right. Where a lot of people think Kant failed was in his explanation how this restriction could be imposed.
Fichte later picked it up in the Wissenshaftshlere, and created this idea of an ephorate- an opposing council to check the state- but it falls down to the problem of 'who watches the watchers'. Also his 19th century ID cards kek.
>>771962
Actually Machiavelli did write works other than The Prince, was a serious philosopher by anyone's standard, and you're an ignorant faggot.
>>771998
No he isn't considered a serious philosopher- his work is far too arbitrary and contains no epistemology, ontology, logic- anything really, beyond political advise/satire. Everyone knows the Prince as that book you buy and put on your shelf to get dusty, like the art of war. But it's short enough for plebs like you to read it and post constant threads on it.
>>771658
Since he held that our several mental faculties (the various innate powers of our mind that cooperate to yield the representation of the external physical world) all have a priori forms (characteristic regularities of function), he argued that the formal laws governing a coherent ethical order among human agents (thus any laws of politics) must derive from the same form-generating mental faculties that provide natural laws governing a coherent physical order among spatiotemporal objects.
More specifically, the faculty of understanding generates the laws of thinking (categories) that allow us to be conscious of the physical universe, and the faculty of reason generates the laws of rational inference that allow us to scientifically explore the physical universe; the latter is reason in its theoretical use. One difference that occurs with the transition from theoretical philosophy of nature to practical philosophy of morals/politics is that in theoretical cognition, another faculty (called "sensibility") provides spatiotemporal sensory appearances, representations of inner and outer sense, for the understanding to think about; this cooperation of sensilibility with understanding yields knowledge of those appearances, so "human knowledge" in the strict sense is restricted to what is sensibly represented in space and time (externally perceptive knowledge and personally introspective knowledge).
>>771658
>>772063
But in practical cognition, sensibility does not have the same indispensible role; moral principles are based on the rules that could govern all moral agents equally, respecting the same degree of autonomy, freedom, in each person due to each person's ability to reason (that is, due to each person's ability to set goals and plan out the steps rationally required to attain those goals, and due to each person's ability to consent to/come up with the laws that would consistently, coherently govern an interacting system of such goal-pursuers); moral principles are *not* determined by the sensuous pleasures that arise within sensibility (whether they're base pleasures of gratification or refined pleasures amounting to happiness) because people differ too greatly regarding what pleases them, and people are prone to conflicts and abuses when they're all pursuing what they imagine will bring pleasure to themselves and to their loved ones. So morals, ethics, politics, is not determined by the faculty of sensibility, but rather by the faculty of reason; in these domains of practical behavior, sensuous representations and desires have to be subordinated to the dictates of reason. Empirical data from sensibility can let us understand how the natural world and human behavior *is* - but this isn't enough to tell us what *ought to be.* Reason instead declares this *ought* from its own resources, by inferring what would be the maximally just organization of intelligent beings like ourselves.
>>772063
>>772064
brilliant. thank you anon. Much of what you said I was able to infer (to a lesser degree) from my own research on the topic today, but you articulated and touched on particulars I had not touched on in a very gracious way granting me further understanding. I appreciate the response greatly.
>>772465
I'm happy to contribute!
>>772063
>>More specifically, the faculty of understanding generates the laws of thinking (categories) that allow us to be conscious of the physical universe, and the faculty of reason generates the laws of rational inference that allow us to scientifically explore the physical universe; the latter is reason in its theoretical use.
can you tell me if this is true:
so this says that we have
-the consciousness of objects
-the mind which outputs inferences, speculations, fantasies built on what we are conscious.
-the sensibility which is the ending points of consciousness, of the subject, just before the object begins ??
the normative reason is the discrimination amongst all these fantasies stemming from the mind.
>>774677
> so this says we have
> -the consciousness of objects
Yes; raw sense data arises within the mind's faculty of sensibility, so that sense data appears as ordered into sensibility's a priori forms of space and time. On its own, this sensuous representation, this appearance in the mind, would not produce consciousness in that mind; the sensuous appearance needs to be thought of, needs to be conceived, by the mind's faculty of understanding, otherwise the sensuous appearance would be like the image on a movie screen with no audience to be aware of it - sensations are what's known, but the understanding is the knower.
So sensory appearances, already ordered by sensibility's spatiotemporal forms, are recognized by the understanding - in other words, the understanding's own forms (pure concepts, pure forms of thinking) take up the spatiotemporal sensory content given by sensibility. If the understanding were never given sensory content to think of, then (as I said above about sensibility functioning alone) consciousness would never arise; there would only be empty patterns of thinking, like a factory machine spinning away idly without any materials to form into a product. When the understanding imposes its higher level of order, form, onto the appearance, the sensory appearance becomes an object.
>>776432
In the above case, since there is sensory content (redness or blueness, heat or cold, brightness or dimness, fuzziness or sharpness, etc.) in the representation given from sensibility, the object is an empirical object, encountered in earthly experience. But after we've lived for a while in the physical world (the domain of being-as-representation) and have thus had our thinking consciousness activated by raw sense data that provide the colors/temperatures/sounds etc. (the empirical determinations) of this world, we can imagine removing all those sensations, and can thus conceive of pure objects, rather than of empirical objects. Such are the objects of geometry - perfect circles, triangles, cubes, that we could never encounter in the world, but can "visualize" (though this isn't a perfect word, since we don't actually see colors or edges when we imagine geometrical shapes). We construct those pure objects in imagination when we combine our understanding with merely the pure forms of sensibility, empty of all sensory content.
In either case, when the faculties of sensibility and understanding cooperate, the result is consciousness. The subject of consciousness and the object of consciousness, the knower and the known, are bound up with one another - consciousness is only consciousness-of-something.
>>774677
-the mind which outputs inferences, speculations, fantasies built on what we are conscious.
This isn't bad, but could be better phrased. The mind's faculty of reason generates its own a priori forms,and these are the forms of valid logical infence. When you think of the forms of syllogisms, for example, you're thinking of the a priori structure of reason. What's more, the faculty of reason seeks to organize all of the mind's experiences into one giant chain of rational inferences, a sorites of the whole of the individual's knowledge, in which every object can be explained by the physical forces/states/conditions that came together to make it what it is - so that everything can be explained as rationally following from prior pemises. That is, reason seeks not only consistency, but completeness in its account of the world, striving always to finish off the series of inferences by tracing the current moment of our conscious experience to some first premise, some unconditioned condition, from which the series of conditioned conditions follows.
But reason can't fulfill this innate need *within* the physical world, because the forms of space and time are infinitely given - which means no matter how far in space our body travels, and no matter how far backwards or forwards in time we try to imagine, there will always be more space and more time for us to explore. Space and time are not actually infinite, but an empirical regression through them woulde unending, so there will always be some condition for a fact of nature - some space outside of the object/event, and some time before and after it. This is why the mind must think of a thing-in-itself that grounds, accounts for, gives a *reason* for the sense data that arises within sensibility; since reason can't arrive at an unconditioned condition within the phenomenal world, it must conceive of an unconditioned condition that is independent of phenomena.
>>776627
But since consciousness requires the cooperation of understanding and sensibility - requires not just concepts, but percepts - we cannot have knowledege of any thing-in-itself, cannot be conscious of what any thing-in-itself is like. At best, we can merely think of "thing-in-itself," which is just to use empty concepts, to think via forms like "some X that is not a consequence of a more fundamental ground," and "some X that is not an attribute of some more fundamental thing" without any sensory data or sensible forms to constitute an actually known object.
Something similar happens in Kant's philosophy of morals, where reason in its practical use recognizes an insufficiency, a moral incompleteness, in the earthly world; reason postulates that humans have immortal souls, and that there is a god, in order to form the representation of what a morally perfect system would be - a system in which all rational agents unendingly approach perfect moral purity, and in which an omnipotent and omniscient intelligence distributes happiness in proportion to each agent's worthiness to be happy - which a living human onviously couldn't experience in the physical world. (When reason forms its own concepts like this, those concepts are called "ideas" to distinguish them from representations of the undrstanding, which are "concepts" in a more ordinary sense.)
So when you say
> based on what we are conscious
it's important to recognize that what we can know, and what we can imagine in fantasies, depends on the sensory data given in our conscious experience of the natural world (unless we're conscious of pure objects, like those of mathematics, in which there is no senosry content, only sensible forms being thought about). But the mind also has a limited ability to represent things we couldn't be conscious of; but such representations, once again, are not representations amounting to knowledge - they're representations of understanding and reason alone.
>>776717
Not any of the previous people you were replying to, but thanks a lot anon.
>>774677
>-the sensibility which is the ending points of consciousness, of the subject, just before the object begins ??
The object that is independent of sensibility, and independent of the conscious human's mind, is the object-in-itself, the thing-in-itself. A human mind only knows its own representation *of* this object-in-itself, and this mental representation is the empirical object.
When a human's mind is in relation to some object-in-itself, the immediate consequence of this relation is that raw sense data arises within the faculty of sensibility; since this sensory data is correlated with something independent of the human's mind, this sensory data can't be known a priori, predicted in advance, unlike the a priori forms which are innate to the human's mind (these forms are in fact the mind's natural ways of functioning). This means we can know in advance what the basic, unchanging laws of the natural world will be, but we can't know in advance exactly what we will encounter in the natural world - what kinds of species we'll discover, what shapes and heights and weights we'll have to confront in the empirical objects we navigate, what exact colors and tastes and textures we'll experience tomorrow.etc.
So the initial sensory data appears ordered in sensibility's spatiotemporal forms, which is then taken up into the higher forms of the understanding to yield knowledge of empirical objects and events, and this knowledge is itself taken up into the highest forms of human representation: the forms of reason. Reason infers that there must be something to account for the arising of the initial raw sense data; as with any logical consequence, there must be a logical ground, and reason concludes that this ground is some thing-in-itself.
>>777192
>>774677
But this is not to say that the thing-in-itself "causes" raw sense data to arise in our mind, because causality involves the sensible form of time, and thus only pertains to the phenomenal world of representation, preventing us from attributing causality to anything independent of that world. Since the thing-in-itself is independent of the human mind's representations, and can merely be conceived, we can only represent the thing-in-itself by the mind's merely logical functions of judgement; such a purely conceptual form of judgement is the ground/consequent relation, which only becomes the cause/effect relation when rendered into the form of time, and thus becomes valid for the knowledge of empirical objects - that is, the knowledge of how the object-in-itself appears.
So when we use terms like "ending point" and "just before the object begins" in this context, we have to recognize that those terms are only metaphors for a relation that is not spatial or temporal; spatiotemporal descriptions can only properly characterize the phenomenal world, but the object-in-itself is independent of the phenomenal world (it is, to use another metaphor commonly applied to Kant's philosophy, "outside" of space and time).
> the normative reason is the discrimination amongst all these fantasies stemming from the mind.
If you mean that reason recognizes the different faculties of the human mind (including itself, since it's the rational faculty) and the different kinds of representations belonging to each faculty, then yes, this is what Kant indicates. But when his language is a bit more precise, he uses the term "transcendental reflection" for the mind's ability to detect and separate the formal elements of its own representations from the material (contentful) elements of those representations.
And I wouldn't call all these kinds of representations "fantasies" - in english, that word is more indicative of a mere fiction of imagination.
>>777968
You're welcome - glad you enjoyed!
there is a nice course on logic, philosophy and mathematics at Cambridge
http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/curr-students/II/II-lecture-notes/
for the theorems by Godel,
http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/curr-students/II/II-lecture-notes/ii-gwt5.pdf
where you increase the number in the name ''gwt5'', to get all the pdfs of the lecture.
>>771728
> the political analytic apriori claims
Does Kant ever say that political judgements are not synthetic a priori? I would expect them to be, since he says that judgements about moral earthly behavior are synthetic a priori.
him and Hegel helped propagate dialectics and Kant made reason and mysticism stand on the same ground. (very bad)
>>781092
>Kant made reason and mysticism stand on the same ground
In what way?
as in he said that faith and reason were both equally valid, especially in the realm of morality (morality to be defined by faith as opposed to reason.) This led to his morality being sickeningly altruistic. (pic epistemological related but not part of the argument, just a place holder)
>>781205
Are you basing this on Objectivist criticisms of Kant?
>he said that faith and reason were both equally valid, especially in the realm of morality
He didn't. He said that reason in its theoretical use (that is, its application to the physical world) is capable of producing knowledge in the strict sense, whereas reason in its practical use (its application to accomplishing goals, including goals of moral action) can produce faith, which is *not* equal to knowledge. The things that reason has faith in can merely be conceived; such conceptions are sufficient for practical action - not sufficient for theoretical knowledge. So it's not the case that, for Kant, faith is different from (but equal to) reason; rather, faith is one particular application of reason, and there are strict limits on the instances in which faith is justified and on what faith reveals to us in those instances.
> morality to be defined by faith as opposed to reason.
This is also incorrect. Reason provides the moral law, generating the orderly forms that allow many interacting agents to each exercise their individual rational autonomy. Reason produces a representation of a perfect moral society - but also recognizes that such a society will always fail to be realized in the physical world (given human weakness and given the indifference of the forces of nature). Reason then fixes this imbalance by postulating things that could not be in the physical world: immortality of the soul, which allows each moral agent to approach perfection unendingly, and god, who perfectly distributes happiness in accordance with worthiness to be happy, as blind nature never could. These things are what we have faith in - thus faith is derived from morality, not vice versa; Kant thought atheists had just as much reason to obey the moral law as did theists - only that atheists were less rationally consistent in following the implications of human morality, which instead lead to theism, so Kant argued.
