Immanuel Kant: Transcendental Aesthetic-Identifying the Forms of Perception by L Peikoff, part 43/50

[@DinkSmalwood]

I've read Kant and seen many lectures by other professors. This is the best and most concise explanation of Kant I've yet to encounter. Great work as always by Prof. Peikoff!

[@frankrockefeller3038]

Excellent, excellent. Read Kant, and Dr. Peikoff's illumination shines through.

[@YashArya01]

Start time: 6:10 pm [0:15] So far I haven't given you any nproof that the mind has an a priori structure that engages in all sorts of mental processing devices. The whole presentation has been hypothetical. [0:55] What aobut some proof that the mind has an a priori structure? What exactly are these a priori synthesizing activities that the mind performs? How do you know they exist? [1:18] Kant has an elaborate, complex, formal proof. Let's get clear what we want to prove. [2:00] Our world is a product of two factors, the data out there and the mental processing devices in our mind. What we want to discover is what are the a priori synthesizing activities performed by the mind? And we want to prove that these and only these are a priori synthesizing activities. [2:35] How will we fin thee a priori activitie? you might say, "well, just introspect." But even in principle, you'll never catch your mind performing these activities because all these activities are the precondition fo having any experience of any sort. [3:29] So, if we're to reach them, we have to reach them by reasoning; we have to deduce what they must be. [3:42] If we are to find these synthesizing activities systematically, we must, says Kant, recognize that there are two basic levels of conscious awareness: The perceptual and the conceptual. On this general point Kant agrees with Aristotle. He says the rationalists are wrong to deregade perception and the empiricists are wrong to deregade concepts (nominalists such as Hume did exactly that). Human knowledge involves both perception and conception, and our total knowledge is a result of both factors operating. [4:40] The faculty of sense perception Kant calls sensibility, and the faculty of conception he calls understanding. If we want to find what the mind contributes independently of experience, we have to break it up into two questions. Q1. Are there any a priori synthesizing activities contributed by the sensibility? Q2. Are there any a priori synthesizing activities performed by the understanding? In order to answer these questions we translate them further. 5:41 Kant's basic premise: Apart from the mind's act, there's no necessicity. If you challenge this premise you collapse both Kant's problem and his solution. But Kant accepts it. Therefore we can translate what we're looking for in this form. Q1. Are there any necessary ways of perceiving? Q2. Are there any necessary ways of conceiving? (Next lecture) If they're necessary, they must be mind-contributed. The very fact that we can't possibly perceive or conceive in any other way than X, is the proof for Kant that X is simply subjective, a product of the sturcutre of the mind. Let's look at these questions in turn. Q1. Are there any necessary ways of perceiving? [7:21] So, are there any necessary ways of perceiving, so that no matter what content we perceive, we perceive it in this particular form? Are there any ways of putting our percepts together - any "form" of perception - which si necessary and indispensable? [8:08] Most of the things we perceive are not necessary; we could imagine as different without any difficulty - such as colors. The same is true of sounds, smell, taste, temperature, etc. They're the content, not the form, of experience. [9:21] What would the form of experience be? There are only two kinds of sensory experience, and there happens to be one necessary form for each. The two kidns of sensory experiences are outer (extrospection) and inner (introspection). The necessary form for each is Space and Time respectively. [10:00] Space is the necessary form that our mind contributes to govern all our extrospection. Time is the necessary form that our mind contributes to govern all our introspection. (Kant is unclear about why time applies only to introspection. He later allows that time is applicable to both extrospection and introspection, so we can think of time as the universal form of all experience.) [10:20] Space Everything that comes to us through our five senes coems to us in a spatial form. He wants to prove 3 things about space: * That it's necessary * That it's an issue of form, not content (since mind only contributes form) * That you couldn't get the idea of "space" from experience. By "space", we mean spatial relationships. Position of one thing w.r.t another. * This type of relationship is necessary. All the content we perceive must be spatial. You could tak eany particualr content and imagine it away, but you couldn't imagine a content that wasn't spatially located somewhere. * Space is an issue of form rather than content. It isn't a content of experience; it's a way in which experiences are organized. Space designates a relationship among the data of experience. * Kant says you could never arrive at knowledge of space by experience, and that's further proof that we must have it innately. An Empiricist says "here's" one thing, "there's" another. Kant says we have to know in advance what space is to be able to perceive that one thing is here and another thing is there. We must have the knowledge of space independent of experience; we couldn't acquire it from experience. [15:20] Conclusion: Space is necessary, it's a relational phenomena, it's non-empirica, it must be an a priori contribution of the mind. It's a form governing our experience - a condition of our perceptual experience of objects. Now if you say that you can't conceive that in reality things are non-spatial, Kant would say: That's no argument against me, that further validation of my thesis that we can't know anything about the noumenal world. [16:24] How is it that prior to studying Kant, our minds knew how to do this? The answer is: it happens entirely witout your knowledge on the preconscious level. You don't have to know about it. As an analogy, just as you know how to breathe without knowing how exactly it works in your body. [17:25] In arguing that space was a mental contribution, Kant was trying to save geometry. Geometry is supposed to describe the nature of space. Geometrical theorems ares upposed to give us the laws governing spatial relations. Kant says that in geomerty we know that these theorems are necessary; we couldn't therefore have learned this information from experience. And yet they're not simply analytic conceptual manipulations. If they're not just conceptual manipulations, geometric propositions are not analytic. If they're necessary, then we couldn't get it by experience. They must be synthetic a priori, which means they must come from the mind's contribution. We guaratntee the laws of geometry the same way we guaranteed blue in the example of the blue spectacles (in that example, reality isn't blue, but it appears blue because you're wearing blue spectacles), because we bring space along with us. [19:08] Time Time is supposed to be the form of introspection. The proof is analogus to the proof of Space. By "Time", we mean time series. One event happened now, one before, another later, and so on. * Is this necessary to our experience? Yes. No matter what content you project, it takes place sometime. * Again, there's no special experience (contents) of time as such - time is a matter of relationships (form). * And, he argues, you couldn't derive the concept of "time" from experience if you didn't have that time filter in you in advance. (Before you can say one thing happened "now", you must already have the concept of time) [21:35] Time and space, therefore, are strictly forms of human sensibility. They have no metaphysical objectivity. If you ask, "would all species that are conscious have to have time and space?" his answer is, certainly not. There may be species that don't smear out their data in time and space. (Peikoff) They may do it by "iddle" and "triddle". Don't ask me what "iddle" and "triddle" is because being a human I have to think spatially and temporally and cannot understand iddle and triddle.

[@zardozcys2912]

Note that this lesson and the playlist are out of sync with each other. This is lesson 43 but it is 42 in the playlist and number 50 in the playlist is actually lesson 41 so everything past this point is numbered incorrectly.

[@Primitarian]

Ah, the Transcendental Anaesthetic, a great way to float away into a euphoric refuge from reality. Warning: side effects may include disorientation, stupor, drowsiness, hallucinations, delusions, unconsciousness, and schizophrenia.

[@bingbong3643]

You’re uploading videos that already exist on the channel.