PRE Seminar 1 Blogg

Kant - Critique of Pure Reason

Thus far it has been assumed that all our cognition must conform to objects. On that presupposition, however, all our attempts to establish something about them a priori, by means of concepts through which our cognition would be expanded, have come to nothing. Let us, therefore, try to find out by experiment whether we shall not make better progress in the problems of metaphysics if we assume that objects must conform to our cognition.

Kant wishes to change the way we think about the universe. Why things are what they are or percieved what they are. Time and space are what they are because of our experiance of them. Instead we must challenge the thoughts of how we see the world to see it from no ones point of view. I think what i am trying to say and what Kant is saying is that we have to consider the fact the we are human and all the things we see is because of our earlier impressions and senses. So when he talks about objects must conform to our cognition we should think about the object and bear in mind why we see it in that way because of our experiances. To see the true object as it is we must block out those experiances and let the object "conform to our cognition".

Plato - Theaetetus  

Socrates and Theatetus discuss if Knowledge is perception and Socrates argues that we do not see and hear "with" the eyes and the ears, but "through" the eyes and the ears. How are we to understand this?

I understand this as it's not the organs, the ears and eyes that that process the what they take in. It's only a tool for the brain to recieve information. Then it's up to the brain to make use of that information in what sense it will. And the way it operates is based on earlier perceptions of senses and is put to relative comparisons in terms of those.

And in what way is it correct to say that Soctrates argument is directed towards what we in modern terms call "empiricism"?
Empiricism is a theory which states that knowledge comes only or primarily from sensory experiance


I think it's directed in the way that since our own perception of what we see and hear is not knowledge we can't gather it through our own senses. It must come from the observation of gathered impartial perceptions like the result of empirical studies. However a question remains that if you can't say that your own perceptions is knowledge then why should another persons perceptions be? Even if a large amount of people have percieved the same thing it's still just a sum of perception. And if we gather all those perceptions we could only say what those large amount of people have percieved not if it's truly the truth.