Post Theme 1

Reflections 

The last week was a hard plunge into the philosophy of Plato and Kant, nonetheless I found it very interesting to read more about their theories of knowledge and how we as humans should understand it.

Following the lecture on theme 1, I found it to be successful of giving me a broader background on these two philosophers and their disposition in time, especially in relation to the understanding of Empiricism.

In the Preface to the Second Edition of Critique of Pure Reason, Kant himself called his own philosophy a Copernican Revolution in Epistemology. Why? Because Copernicus once unable to explain the motion of heavenly bodies – in assumption that these bodies move around the earth, adopted to the alternative idea that these bodies actually move around the sun. Transferred to the philosophy of the 18th century, Kant changed the mind-set of knowledge forever by changing the human standpoint on how objects actually should be perceived.

In class, we also learned about Kant's ideal of objectivity, so to speak knowledge as God would perceive it and not as a human influenced by bodies, environment, stand in society etc. To be able to exercise this a priori ability to judge the world, Kant constructs the faculty of understanding, the framework of necessary forms and categories that can be judged as a priori. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy offers an insightful explanation. With these categories being "rules for making judgments about objects or an objective world, Kant arrives at his table of categories by considering how each logical function would structure judgments about objects (within our spatio-temporal forms of intuition)" (Rohlf, 2010).

In the seminar, this was discussed more deeply and in particular one metaphor I found to be very helpful: We generate this a priori knowledge on the same playground - a conceptualized playground with certain rules, the categorical framework in which we can quarrel with each other to get a posteriori knowledge of the world. If the playground changes, we can't compare the both types of knowledge anymore. So when scientists, for example, are empirically researching a certain topic, another scientist can versify or falsify this knowledge, because they are still playing on the same playground which is defined by space and time and conceived within the twelve categories.

Rohlf, M., 2010. Immanuel Kant [online]. Plato.stanford.edu. Available at: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant/#TraDed [Accessed at 13 Sept. 2015].