Monday, November 20, 2006

Kant yet again

According to Kant Philosophy is a system of rational cognition through concepts.

Cognition is knowing, perceveing, or conceiving, and is distinct from any from of emotion.
Concepts are abstract ideas

In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant is trying to outline this system i.e . Philosophy and so speaking is doing philosophy as well. The first primary parts of of the system, in so far as they are concepts, are:
  1. Logic - the form of thinking in a system
  2. Real - systematically considering the objects of thought
Kant gives the Real two further distinctions that form the two core philosophical road maps:
  1. Theoretical philosophy - Now Theoretical philosophy is the philosophy of nature, it is emperical at its core. It is primarily concerned with principles of the natural world. It studies the possibilities of things in accoarance to natural laws. For instance, physics in a theoretical philosophy as it solely deals with the natural world and is governed by laws of nature, and not my our own laws. There is a practical aspect Theoretical philosophy, namely, in the use of these laws.
  2. Practical philosophy - Practical philosophy is ethics, morals, morality. It deals and gives us humans freedom, it is the basis of our freedom. It is not a natural object of experince but is rather given to us a priori and is primarly concerned with consequences. The root of this philosophy lies in the will. It determines action as necessary through its own principles (the idea of freedom i.e. morals) without regard to the means, with the object of the will (the good thing to do) being only an indirect result of these morals.
Now, Kant claims that all other chocies made other than that out of freedom are Technical becuase they belong to the art of bringing about a wish into existence and fall under theoretical philosophy.

However, there are still judgements made on objects that fail to be either theoretical or practical since they do not dtermineanything about the object or the way in which to produce it. Instead, trough these objects, nature itself is judged in a subjective relation rather than the objective relation to the object. This judgement is grounded in the laws of the power of judgement which form a part of our cognitive faculties.

1 Comments:

Blogger Grand Puba said...

Nicely written, very concise. Must think a while.

10:50 PM  

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