Kant's Prolegomena - Introduction & Section 1 - "Intuition" and the Possibility of "Pure Mathematics

welcome to day two of four for our discussion of Kant's prolegomena to any future metaphysic I'll be kind of bringing in some things from critique of Pure Reason I think I've mentioned already in this class that he's doing a very similar project he's the order of exposition is a little bit different and then we can see it's like it's clustered all around the same time he wrote the first version of the critique of Pure Reason in 1781 then in 1783 writes the prologue Anna and you guys have read the introductory rate the introduction already if you read the introduction you'll see that like he takes the prologue Anna to any future metaphysics to be a condensed sort of a recap version of what's going on the critique of Pure Reason if you read the two side-by-side that might be a little bit surprising but actually as a as a kind of an interpretive key it's really really helpful sometimes it's hard to see how what he's talking about in the critique of Pure Reason is the same as what's going on in the prologue aminah but like once you recognize that that's what he intends to be doing suddenly things kind of I don't know they emerges a little bit clearer and this is I think in large part because Kant rights and I think demands to be read in such a way that he's kind of and we'll see this definitely today as I try to explain some concepts including one key concept the concept of an intuition what the heck is an intuition for Kant that's going to be like our big order of business for today is like what is an intuition hmm and we may find at least I found thus far and I think a lot of other contemporary philosophers have found this as well and plenty of Khan's contemporaries which is to say people were alive when conference writing and those are great folks to go to when you're trying to figure out somebody figure out like what did their contemporaries have to say those are the people who were reading Kant Walcott was still around and they could ask him questions and get some feedback on those questions they understood the context a little better than us but even then they there are plenty of folks you could make a big club of people who say like just isn't clear when he talks about what an intuition it's he like never really quite pins it down and maybe that's okay maybe it's okay that he never really gets he's doing enough that you might hear me say that a couple of times today if you're like I wish he had done better at explaining what an intuition is like like yeah me too but he's first on the scene and like a completely brand new way of thinking a brand new way of doing metaphysics and it might not be surprising if not all of his concepts are like completely pinned down just yet you got to leave some work for the next generation of philosophers after all right so like wondering about like how come we didn't get into more detail about what an intuition is like well this is the book it's thick enough already let somebody else figure out what an intuition is yeah so we'll be frustrated but we're going to try to have to get like as good a picture of what it is as possible and one of the strategies for this is look at it one way look at it another way to look at it another way to look at it another way and try to keep in mind that these are all different perspectives on the same thing which is kind of what's going on in the critique of pure reason and the prolegomena two different sorts of treatments of the same basic idea and this idea well we'll represent this big idea that contests the same way that I was just talking about I'll throw a whole bunch of stuff at the board and see what sticks and we'll try to triangulate it between all of these things so the first thing that he takes up and we discussed this in our last meeting is this question of is metaphysics possible David Hume laid out a pretty formal channel formidable challenge that seemed to suggest that metaphysics was not possible and so Khan wants to say well is it really possible this deserves a little bit of a defense and in fact maybe the way that he frames this is not really quite is metaphysics possible because that seems like it only invites a yes or no answer but maybe this question of like how could metaphysics be possible which seems to maybe suggest a slightly different angle of attack which is not necessarily just take what metaphysics is take our concept of possibility asked as possibility match up with metaphysics but instead maybe says is there some way that we need to be re understanding rethinking what metaphysics is such that it might be possible if we're gonna try to figure out like not is metaphysics possible but maybe what would metaphysics have to be like if it were possible because it seems the way that that David Hume has described things suggest that it's not possible in confluence to offer some sort of genuine response to what humi saying so we've got that and it's not just whether or not pure math metaphysics it's possible it's not even like how would metaphysics be possible what would metaphysics have to be like in order for it to be possible but a couple of other things get roped in and come along for the ride so there's this question of Natural Science how would that be possible how would a pure natural science and we'll get to what that means maybe towards the end of class when we start talking about pure intuitions but if there's a pure natural science how would that be possible and it is natural science the sort of thing that could be grounded because again Hume seem to suggest that like nas is just not in the cards for you custom inhabit that's as good as we get when it comes to matters of fact and that's just natural science but also we're gonna see mathematics gets roped into things as well there's gonna be some conversation about pure mathematics and this is actually part one of the Prolog domino we get an introduction that sketches out what he's up to in the whole thing part one is all about the possibility of pure mathematics part two is about the possibility of pure natural science part three starts to get into whether in metaphysics is possible so we're going to kind of be working our way backwards up to metaphysics in our exposition following the way that continents things in the prolegomena so just keep in mind here that question about mathematics and that marker is done that question about mathematics is going to be the thing that we're talking about today and perhaps this isn't so much of a puzzle for those who are kind of coming on to the scene just post Hume Hume has given a description of relations between ideas things that are known a priori and analytically analytic knowledge that can be known a priori and it seems like maybe that's what mathematics is all about and content is perhaps unsurprisingly he's gonna say not quite let's Rios and perhaps what mathematics is up to and maybe we're gonna see that fitting into this sort of picture of mathematics natural science and metaphysics in a different way than we're accustomed to the possible solution that we've already sort of seen the big hint on on is method physics possible and Kant's going to be like yes I think so but it's going to be different than we thought all right well how well the answer to that how is going to involve synthetic a priori knowledge and at this point I think I've taken multiple classes where we stopped and talked about the analytics synthetic a priori a posteriori distinctions and the way they get paired up do I need to do this again is there anybody who's still feeling a little bit a little bit shaky on this I don't want to blow a lot of time if nobody's interested but it's kind of important so it bears repeating if we're still if we still have questions Corbin yeah something specific or just like I'm feeling fuzzy okay so Hume gave us that fork that said there's only two things possible this is relations between ideas and matters of fact well he doesn't exactly use this language once you kind of like get a sense of what it is that humans talking about is the difference between relations like between ideas and matters of fact it seems like relations between ideas are analytic knowledge and it's knowledge that can be known a priori and matters of fact are synthetic and can be known a posteriorly only ah posterior so what do these things mean well keep in mind also that the analytic synthetic distinction and the a priori a posterior distinction well they seem to be kind of pointing at roughly the same sort of things such that they pair up the way that you can see more it seems natural to pair them up the way that Hume is suggested they're getting up slightly different ideas analyticity and synthesis 'ti is almost a grammatical idea it's about whether or not the subject of a statement and so if I have some knowledge presumably this is gonna it's not going to be know-how or some other sort of like species of knowledge it's gonna be propositional knowledge knowing that something being able to tell whether or not a statement is true or false and all statements have some subject and some predicate to them so an analytic statement is one where the concept of the predicate is already contained within the concept of the subject for example what's our the example I've been going to every single time all bachelors are male and the concept of bachelor already contains maleness right so to be able to determine that this is true I just need to unpack the concepts that are in the subject if I understand the concept of the subject I already know that the predicate maleness is going to attach these are things that are true by definition are things that are analytic statements that are analytic or analytically true synthetic statements are ones where oh it's not the case that the predicate is already contained in the concept of the subject another way that we might think about this is we're joining together sort of like genuinely new concepts I'm kind of I'm synthesis and making a statement that doesn't necessarily have to be the case when here talks about analyticity he says the contradiction of an analytically true statement is self-contradictory so if instead of all bachelors are male we were to say something like some bachelors are not male we'd be saying some unmarried males are not male and there I just contradicted myself right so the the contradiction of an analytically true statement is self-contradictory and kind of perhaps even on its surface self contradictory the opposite of a synthetically true statement is not necessarily contradictory it's not the sort of so for example if it's like it's sunny outside today what if it's not sunny outside did I just contradict myself and saying that it's not sunny outside today no I didn't is today part of the concept of sunny outside is sunny outside part of the concept of today do these things have to go together no so this would be synthetic knowledge and this is why Hume is suggesting it matters a factor on this side and they have to be known through experience only after experience could you determine whether or not it's sunny outside today you can't figure that out just through reflection alone but you might be able to figure out that all bachelors are male just through reflection alone you can do analytic statements you can figure out that analytic statements are true just by analyzing them that's why they're called analytic right so is that good so far these two pairings so Conte says they don't have to go together like this one of the things that we're after here would be statements that are synthetic we is to say they're not just true by definition they're not just the unpacking of concepts from one idea to a net to the next they're not just things that are perhaps not new knowledge just elaborations on old knowledge the way that talking about the maleness of bachelors is just elaborating what it means to be a bachelor we're coming up with things that don't necessarily have to be true this would be things that are true perhaps about the world and compensating there might be some of these that we can know a priori without any experience and if that would be possible then perhaps metaphysics would be possible we talked about this a little bit at our last meeting - metaphysics seems to necessarily need to be the sort of body of knowledge if metaphysics were possible it would have to be a body of knowledge that admits that of like being known a priori because it's trying to get beyond experience it's not the sort of thing that's known through experience if it was known through experience it wouldn't be metaphysics and just be physics it'd just be Natural Science it'd be the way that we explore the world with our senses through experience right but conscious saying there's some things that it can be known perhaps prior to experience this is there gonna be prior to experience and they're not just going to be true by definition and this presumably is the sort of thing that the study of metaphysics is after and all about did that help at all good anybody else synthetic a priori this is the Golden Goose right this is the thing that we're after we're gonna get some today another way of looking at what concept you in this project is this whole idea of a Copernican revolution and it's not the literal Copernican revolution that had already happened quite a bit of time before cons that was old news this shift from a geocentric to a heliocentric model of the solar system what Conte is up to now is a kind of a something as momentous as earth-shaking as the Copernican revolution but it has to do with what we think about reality in its relationship to the mind and experiencing subjects so yeah let's go ahead and get this guy on the board why not set up a tree I'm gonna do a little daffodil today because the daffodils are starting to bloom there we go so there's our little daffodil thanks I practice a little bit before class I was like I'm a draw daffodil can I draw it after i googled how to draw a daffodil and most of it was just like so draw the daffodil stupid that's how okay I'm getting starting to get a little better at this little Alfred Hitchcock silhouette thing - all right so the way that we had been talking about this was that compt is seems to be following him they never quite put it this way but when we like read like Kant's take on here we're kind of like yeah that's him he read the same thing that I read where on this side we've got what Kant refers to as the noumenon or Neumann ah and on this side we've got phenomena new mana basically it just means like the objects have experience we use this phrase to to kind of get it what the noumenon is all about it's these are the things in themselves is the way that Kant refers to it the objects of experience with the correlates of experience that like don't get too attached to that language because Kant's going to say it kind of like well I don't really want to talk about that and that's actually his big point or that's here's a big point at least to say that this is off limits and like you can't really say anything about it except maybe that it's out there that there are there is a Newman ah there is a Newman already get more specific than that and things are gonna get really really weird because humans right you're trying to reach beyond experience to something behind the experience and you're gonna try to like talk about how that is necessary how it has to be the case and like oh it doesn't work it just won't work this is what section 4 of Humes inquiry is all about that's the problem that it raises is that this is now off limits and so canta saying like okay so what then would we be able to do and Khan says we're going to be able to talk about reality we're gonna be able to talk about objectivity we're gonna be able to do metaphysics but it's not going to be about things out here it's going to be about things in here and before when I said that like the only thing that you could say about the new mana is that it's out there even that we're gonna realize today is a little bit shaky because out there is going to get complicated a little bit today the whole idea of inner and outer and one of the ways that this kind of like gets broken down is this notion that like okay let's blow up what this process that's going on in the mind and I'll try to repeat as many times as possible that what I'm drawing on the board and when I describe this as a process that we're viewing from outside as if it's some sort of like mechanistic like first in time this thing happens and then the next thing that happens in time is this thing happens and then the next thing that happens time is this thing like it's some Rube Goldberg machine in my mind that like sensation comes in and it gets turned into ideas and thoughts and stuff like that that's not really quite right that can't can't be giving us this depiction because that would be a view from outside we'd be talking about phenomena as if it were some noumenon right as if it's the thing in itself how do minds in themselves actually work and one of Kant's big points and this is what's going to create a whole lot of difficulty and what requires a sort of Copernican revolution in thought is that you're always on the inside of phenomena you can't take a view of anything except from the inside of phenomena so there is no like even from this the kind of way that we're talking about like all right so the Newman I was out there and inside the phenomenon first this happens and this happens when this happens well constantly the only way that we can even talk about this the only way that we have any access to what's going on in here at all is not going to be from the outside it's gonna be from the inside and sometimes we're gonna have to work backwards we're gonna have to start with what's present to our mind and try to strip things away and the process the kind of big sketch of what's going on here in the content project or what kahn says is going on in our mind in his projects is that we start with intuitions and intuitions get organized by concepts and only after intuitions can get organized by concepts is it possible that we have any experience and the big trick in all this and when I say trick that makes it sound like it's cheap maybe a little bit like it's not cheap the big conceptual move or the kind of like the logical sort of thing that thing that Conte is doing and it looks like his thumb is detached but you see from the other side and it's like not really is that if experiences down here everything upstream in this process is prior to experience and prior to is going to be weird to just like outside and inside is gonna be weird as we're gonna see today because before and after is going to get really complicated but insofar as these things are what we might refer to as necessary conditions for experience they're going to be AA priori they're going to be things that have to be prior to experience because you can't have any experience without them so therefore they must be prior to experience and if that stuff is also synthetic then we've got our synthetic a priori we're going to get some or at least what Kant claims to be some today one more thing I want to get on the board in terms of kind of triangulating what it is that Kanta is up to here and that is this phrase oh right I totally forgot at the beginning of class to mention I don't know if you noticed exam one has been posted have you noticed that exam one that's been posted you have a week to do exam one starting today it's due midnight one week from today it's got three sections to it the first section is relatively easy the second section is a little bit harder but not much the third section is a little tougher and then the third section you have seven possible essay topics you only have to pick the two that you like the most maybe I don't even think about like in terms of the ones you like the most the ones that you think you're going to get the best grade on maybe I'll let you determine your own strategy for picking questions to answer on this exam but there are a couple of questions on Conte and one of them is about this so I'm going to kind of like play a little bit coy with explaining this one because it's an exam question it's that cot refers to himself as an empirical realist did I mention this at all last meeting okay he refers to himself as an empirical realist and a transcendental idealist and it's incredibly unlikely that I'm gonna explain what this means and today is meeting in fact it's almost impossible for me to explain what that is all about in today's meeting maybe at the next meeting and maybe I'll just keep it to myself to let you work it out on the exam but this refers to this kind of ambiguous question for Conte and I think most of these questions are ambiguous for Conte's manages to find himself in the middle of lots of debates or presumably maybe solving some debates this has to do with where Conte sits with respect to this debate between rationalism and empiricism the rationalist think that some sorts of knowledge are obtainable opry or are obtainable without recourse to experience whatsoever and the empiricists say well there is no knowledge of technology that's grounded in empirical experience and the sorts of experiences that you have through the senses and these two groups seem to be opposed to one another where we've been kind of sketching out a loose opposition throughout the history of early modernity starting with Descartes but seems pretty clearly a rationalist getting all the way to Hume who seems pretty clearly an empiricist and a sceptical empiricist at that in fact this was your last reflection draft right is like he was an empiricist and he also is a skeptic if you if anybody's an empiricist do they have to follow Hume to like skepticism so contests he's an empirical realist and transcendental idealist what does that mean I ain't going to tell you today but like keep all these things in mind try to like juggle in there all balls that need to stay in the air and what comp is up to is some sort of it's all of those things at once that gets us I think more or less to where we're gonna start today any questions about this so far this is recap they accept from that last piece which is now nope okay here we go intuitions intuitions what's an intuition short answer I don't know longer answer Corbin you want to take a stab this is slightly better than idk okay yeah let's hear it does it necessarily make him an idealist it makes him a very specific kind of idealist makes him a transcendental idealist yeah yeah that was easy alright what does that mean I'm not gonna say today maybe not ever okay intuitions what are these things did this kind of work well when I was just like let's throw a whole bunch of stuff a couple of people weakly nodding let's do it again I'll just throw a whole bunch of stuff and I'll say every single one of these is going to be kinda sorta maybe mostly or at least a little bit what an intuition is where we started with this I think at our last meeting where I was like well yeah what's a what our intuition is all about I said like well think of them at least in the first draft sort of way and is human sense impressions especially with respect to this notion that human of brought onto the scene that's a slight difference from Locke that sense impressions are not yet ideas since impressions have to be copied in order to be ideas and consequence a it's more complicated than just copying a sense impression you have to be able to start making some sense out of an idea but human sense impressions is kind of sort of what an intuition is all about we can think of some other sorts of approaches to this as well when I tell um this is kind of sort of similar if you want to try to read can't against Aristotle you can kind of find some similarities or some common ground between continent intuitions and our stowed helium treatments of this term noose kind of like if you want to make ancient philosophy really complicated you can say like well what do people think that noose is all about and one of the things that Aristotle says about noose and that's a complicated enough concept and that's maybe not going to clear up content intuitions at all but one of things that Aristotle says about news is it's an immediate sort of grasping of things with the mind when I say immediate I don't mean it happens really fast I mean it's not mediated by anything it's a direct sort of a grasping and I'm not sure how great an example this is but like for for example let's take something like this do you see it do you see this blue marker I gave it away it's a blue marker when you see this and you see it as a blue marker do you just grasp it immediately as like boom blue marker or do you say like well it's blue or it's like this shade of blue here and then it's a slightly darker blue on this kind of like shadowy side and then there's like a glare on this spot and then it's wide like are you piecing all of this stuff together and then inferring from that like therefore it's a blue marker or you just like boom blue marker the second one just boom blue marker if you did just grasp it immediately as blue marker and I'm not sure that we do I think maybe we kind of behind the scenes we're piecing stuff together and that's a big part of what Todd is trying to explain but if you were to immediately grasp something at all the way that we seem to be able to just boom like boom new state blue marker that's what we mean by an immediate grasping this is to be contrasted with the way that Conte is going to talk about this he's gonna say that this is and intuitions are this is non-discursive and that starts to get into territory that we're really not going to address we're gonna get at in our next meeting but when we say non-discursive it means that appearances aren't being brought underneath concepts they're not being organized by concepts I'm not bringing the appearances of sensation into conversation with concepts to try to figure out like how do I take this because that's sort of like one of the reasons why I'm skeptical that anybody just immediately grasps blue marker is that we have a concept of blue and a concept of marker and it's only after subsuming or the appearance of this thing underneath those two concepts that we can take it as a blue marker so that seems like it's a sort of a discursive knowledge and contents gonna say like yeah but not intuitions intuitions are not in discursive concepts haven't even come on the scene yet and that's why this has to be an immediate grasping yes where does Aristotle talk about new so you can find him talking about news in at least a little bit in book 3 of on the soul and I think in more detail in a slightly different context in what I think is book 5 of the Nicomachean ethics it's the book where he talks about intellectual virtues he shifts over from conversation about moral virtues to a conversation about intellectual virtues and one of the intellectual virtues are one of the the faculties of the mind that he discusses is news there are others like techne which is a kind of a technical know-how it's how do I like get from me and how to how to get to an end through some certain means there's Sophia which is wisdom there's septa stamie which is kind of like scientific knowledge and he discusses all those so nurse maybe or Aristotelian this gets a little bit of what Conte is talking about especially this notion that it's an immediate sort of a grasping and the way that Kant's got to say that is it's non-discursive kind of piggybacking on this a little bit we might say it's how we grasp particular or individual things neon that's like take that with a grain of salt I'm not sure how true that's gonna be for but it's getting close when I say it's how we grasp particular things think back to like what is this again blue marker wait if this is a blue marker it's not just grasped as a particular thing its grasped as a blue marker as if there are many blue markers and this is just one token of a type right to see this as a blue marker is not to take it as an individual it's take it as a member of a class the class of all blue things that are also markers so to grab something as an individual is just to say like I don't I don't know what it is it's just a thing and as we'll see even thing is gonna be like a little bit complicated thing might be a concept already yeah what's that the concepts are the classes yeah yeah think of a concept as basically it's just a class of things it's a box things either go in it or they go out it is a blue or is it not blue it's blue all right it's in the blue box is that a marker or is it not a marker it's a marker all right it's in the market box it's in both the blue and the marker box I at the blue marker so maybe what the thinking about its how we grasp things in there particularity not as they relate to some class of things or to a concept right and this is kind of we can see how these are gonna maybe play well together that it's non-discursive but then it's immediate this is why it's how we grasp particular things what else can we say about this oh yeah I can't makes a big fuss over how intuition is they're receptive and maybe we might call it passive although I'll put that in scare quotes because I'm not really feeling great about calling it passive but it's the receptive or passive aspect of experience you're gonna be parts of experience that are active it's kind of like the organizational process it's gonna happen later but intuition seems to be something that's passively received or at least its received I get it from the world I don't make which brings up kind of like another way of thinking about this we might think about intuition as the it's kind of like the fuel or it's the maybe it's the material for thought or it's the fuelers the material for experience our for mental activity your mind works on stuff but it doesn't work on anything unless you give it something to work on and the things that we give our minds to work on our intuitions which may be kind of I think gets us to something else Khan says this and the critique of pure reason there's a relatively famous trace can I erase this I might have I might have to draw it again not the flower all right I always this part that's not even what we're talking about today that's gonna happen later right Khan says the following and I'll put it in a different color he says thoughts thoughts without content are empty and intuitions without concepts are blind it says that and the critique of pure reason I want to say a 51 I think that's be 75 yep a 51b 75 or 76 he's anybody's looking stuff up try to like cite my sources a little bit better maybe you guys will learn how to cite your sources better and your writing five demonstrated a little more so yeah thoughts without content are empty intuitions without concepts are blind which I think maybe sums up kind of what's going on here thinking needs some sort of material if you don't give it something to work on it's just empty thought it's not a real thing it's not a genuine thought and intuitions without concepts well like we don't really know exactly what we're talking about just yet and this is maybe I think one of the crucial aspects of intuition that's really really difficult to wrap your head around because it never gets brought to your understanding we're talking about intuition and this is all prior to whether like prior to even having had an experience like the aspects of your mind were you like really grasp and understand things isn't even on the scene yet this is just raw Sensibility this is just the appearances as they present themselves to you and you never actually seem to have any direct access to that because it seems like all of your experiences presuppose that some work has already been done on them right so what are the intuitions like and we've talked about this a little bit before we've talked about this in terms of sense data that I haven't begun to organize yet that's just noise I can't even like pick things out of it yet it's just the firehose of experience I think the phrase that I used at our last meeting was one that William James uses talking about the blooming buzzing confusion of raw sensory experience or of appearances as they present themselves to me before I've begun to make any sense of them so that's what intuitions are kinda or it's a bunch of things that intuitions are like and I'll content I think for now to at least kind of step back and say any questions keeping in mind that I might say yeah I'm not going to answer that question right now but I might answer that question yeah Corbin oh there there intimately connected to it because there are necessary condition for it you can't have thoughts without content or empty the content is being provided by intuition right so it's totally connected to experience but it's just what I get in experience is not the intuition it's the intuition that's been worked on already by my mind are the more active aspects of my mind yeah it might be yeah I think it's it's quite close to to what Hume says in his inquiry and this is perhaps not surprising because Conte is following him quite closely with the exception of the thing that's going to come next that's gonna be the sort of thing that David Hume would have been like I can't believe you did that maybe you would have agreed maybe it would have disagreed but it's gonna be very very different from David Hume but yeah more or less yeah Charles yes yeah it like brain-in-a-vat right yeah yeah yeah maybe maybe it seems like the contine would be on the hook there to either say then intuition is coming in some other way besides the senses or yes somebody with no body could have no experiences so this kind of like shuts down conversations about like could you just be a brain and could you be like could you be a mind without a body the way that Descartes put it right could could your mind be separable from your body either as an immaterial soul or maybe as like well it's the part of the body but just none of the sensory apparatus of the body it's just the brain in a vat thinking thoughts and not like a brain harvested from somebody who's already had experiences a brand-new brain a newborn's brain don't eat in fact maybe it's had some experiences in the womb perhaps so I get it as Railly grow it from scratch in the vat and don't ever let any kind of like sights or sounds or smells or touches or tastes in then yeah it seems like cotton would say well then your thoughts without content or empty like it can't think it has nothing to think with yeah I don't know enough about the brain to know whether it like can tell whether its surroundings are warm or cold I know that sometimes my head feels hot or cold but I think that's the skin not my brain does anybody know more about this like obviously lots of people know more about this than I do is anybody in the room know more about this yeah I think you have you have no sensory nerve endings I don't know how true that is like across the brain but I do know yeah you can do certain kinds of brain surgery on people while they're awake with nothing but a local anesthetic on the skin and in fact it's the only way to do certain kinds of surgeries where you're wondering like I don't want to completely I don't want to just like take memories out of this person as I cut on their brain I want like stay more or less intact so well cut a little bit and we'll say like alright so say something and the person goes like lab and we're like okay that was the Language Center like back up a little bit alright okay how we feeling about these intuitions like you know they have some kind of intuition what intuition might be you feel like maybe you're kind of circling in on it yeah yeah it's okay to feel a little bit disappointed I think this is one of the weakest places in this work is trying to explain what an intuition is but that said that's not much of a criticism because for one he did enough already let's not fault him for not doing more and secondly it's really hard and it seems in principle really hard to pin this down because we're trying to get back to a stage of like what's happening in your mind before you eat have even become begun to make sense of sensation wait just saying it right there is almost a little bit peculiar right because to sense something it seems like I've already begun to make sense of it and it's like no no there's a there's a stage of sensation before you've made sense of it and that's what intuition is or at least that's what empirical intuition is yeah yeah intuitions and concepts are both necessary conditions for experience which means that in intuition and in concepts we're gonna find some likely candidates for things that we know that they're going to be a priori they're definitely any prior to experience insofar as they're necessary conditions for it and if we can find things that are synthetically known there then we're doing metaphysics yes I can't really because they're not differentiable from one another like I can't I can't say you've never had an experience of intuition alone because in order to have an experience the intuitions have to have been organized by concepts right intuitions without concepts are blind so yeah now I can't really give you an example or anything that you can kind of like find an experience that is an intuition but perhaps maybe we can know that like there has to be something before I've begun to like make sense of sensation before I began to make sense of appearances and think of them as an appearance of something as some certain way there has to be some some kind of like raw material first and is that seem plausible laughs he's not just like telling a story you're like that's one way to tell the story khat conscious saying like this is the only way for this to happen you cannot have experience unless some kind of raw material comes to your mind first and knows how it gets in yeah yeah yeah houston I heard the voice of God okay but yeah not like not like Moses heard the voice of God I don't know if he heard it with his ears near that window or maybe like the evil deceiver Descartes evil deceiver is going directly into but not direct like it's got there's got to be some sort of immediate introduction of whatever that is is what Princess Elizabeth was getting at like there's got to be some kind of explanation how things get caused in the mind how things go from outside of the mind to inside of your mind and if the mind is a completely different kind of substance then body is and that's a really really big cause of problem for how it is that Sense experience becomes mental ideas so compensation like okay first it comes in as intuition and that's just the fire hose that's just the raw feed nobody's made any sense of it yet you can't say it's a blue marker you can't say it's a red tablet case you might not even really be able to say it's a thing over there it's just something's happening and that's intuition perhaps paradoxically we might be able to make a little bit more sense out of a particular kind of intuition and maybe this is kind of what you were asking abut and I probably should you just said yes I can give you an example I'm gonna give you an example of two very specific kinds of intuitions and they're very special intuitions fact they're different than all of the other intuitions because they are what are known as pure intuitions pure as opposed to versus empirical intuitions and all of the rest of like Sense experience and the appearances that I get from my senses those are empirical intuitions that's that raw feed of sensation but pure intuitions are a little bit different in order to kind of start to make sense of what those are like we got to understand what it is that cond means when he says pure and anytime he uses this term pure and it's not just for intuitions we're gonna see he's going to talk about pure concepts of the understanding and he's going to be talking about like all other sorts of activities of the mind in their pure forms every time he says this word pure Conte means there is no empirical content so a peer intuition would be an intuition with no empirical content all of the sensory aspects of the intuition will not be there they have been stripped out I say this and I look around the room to see like if anybody's face looks like they ate a bug because like I if I were in your situation right now I'd be thinking to myself like what the is he talking about like how could there be a pure intuition we just said that human sense impressions was like a good start for thinking about what an intuition is and human sense impressions are just the sense data I've been talking this whole time out like intuitions they're kind of like they're the raw sense data ok so think about the raw sense data with all of the sensory aspects removed no empirical content that's nothing right is there anything left at all when you've stripped out all of the empirical content out of some sort of intuition is there anything left at all you see me right you have a site you have a site with sounds over time okay take all the sites out just kind of imagine Utley like strip that out all of the colors remove those all of the shapes remove those all of the sounds they're gone - are you thinking thoughts yeah get rid of those completely empty what are you left with are you left with nothing blacks of color so strip that guy out too so not even not even black and like what does it sound like it sounds like static yeah get rid of that it's like none of that is anything left there are two things that are left are too pure intuitions intuitions with no empirical content and they are very very special have you done the reading to pure intuitions space and time anybody was like yeah that's how I was gonna say that was gonna say space of time yeah Charles maybe and maybe not and this starts to get into this question about like to what extent would we say that is to what extent would we say that Conte is an empiricist because if we're gonna say something like ah the brain has to have some sort of sense experience in order to even have pure intuitions of space and time than we might kind of lean towards interpreting contests more or less the same as most empiricist which is to say some sort of empirical experience needs to happen in order for any sort of ideas to happen at all and that means all ideas are based on empirical sense experience but it's not entirely clear where contra is going to go on this whether space and time would be there before I think he might say like you have to start with having had some experience and then start stripping the things out and this is maybe one of the places where I think some folks might get a little bit itchy about calling this AA priori knowledge the sort of knowledge that I get I had an empirical experience or I had some kind of experience and then I said all right so strip away all of the concepts what am I left with and left with empirical intuition okay strip away all of the empirical content from that now what am I left with and Khan says you're not left with nothing you're left with empty space and time and these things must have been prior to experience but it seems all as Charles is pointing out that like I don't even really get on the trail of these things like I start by having experience and then I start wondering like how does experience possible and then I work backwards to the necessary conditions for experience and this is perhaps why Kahn plays a little bit a little bit loose with this the Opry or eNOS of the Opera or II knowledge that we're getting here is that like what kind of seems like maybe we had to have have had some experience to begin thinking about what the necessary conditions for that experience were but if we don't think that that's a problem and I think it's not necessarily a problem it's not clear that it's really a problem for Kant mostly because the whole prior part of AA priori just got really weird because time apparently is a pure intuition so the whole idea of like before and after that's all wrapped up here and for that matter inside and outside is going to be all wrapped up in here the way that he talks about space he says the pure intuition pertaining to or the pure intuition sometimes he might refer to this as the form of all outer sense which would make time the pure intuition pertaining to in the form of not outer sense but inner sense yeah you got it of innocence and we've seen that distinction before some form of it at least already we saw it as as far back as Locke right Locke made a difference between like reflection and sensation and Hume fall out on that maybe a little bit in his distinction between impressions and ideas alright so we have a pure intuition of inner sense and a pure intuition or the form of outer sense first of all before we start kind of cashing out what all this means did the route that we got to it through did that make sense it was there some kind of intuitive that's not the word I want to use was there kind of some sort of gut-level resonance when I said if you strip out all of the empirical content you're not left with nothing in intuition you're left with empty space and empty time can you imagine can you imagine empty spit like I was asking before like strip all the things out and some people close their eyes can you imagine empty space no maybe that's harder than it seems I think maybe maybe I could imagine empty space can you imagine time passing but no events happening this is maybe what empty time is can you imagine no time or no space not empty space but no space at all not empty time but no time if you can't if even after you've stripped out everything else space and time are left hanging out they're all empty and alone waiting to be filled up with things then maybe there's something to what conscious in here yeah current if you're floating in space you have no concept of time sure so they might have trouble measuring time I don't know if I it goes so far as to say they lose all sense of time because I bet you that person even no matter how dark it got how lonely they got and how crazy they started to go they could probably still count they probably still understood the difference between before and after since we're talking about inner sense by the way here like recognize that like your thoughts present themselves to you in a well-ordered sequence of before and after right you have one idea and then after that you have another idea and then after that you have another idea and they're all kind of lined up in this kind of before and after and before and after and after and after and after after this is time right it's the ordering of things into before and after in a well-ordered sequence and insofar as this is how your inner sense like presents ideas to you like one at a time in sequence this is time space is and again like you can be bad at gauging spaces like how far is that is that 100 meters 150 meters I don't know I'm not really good at that sort of thing but can you do like in front of behind to the right of to the left of above below further closer inner outer these are all like basic spatial concepts and it seems like we're not necessarily talking about like marking this off and measuring stuff just yet but this is to say when I say that space is the form of all outer sense we're noting that all outer sense comes in space it happens in some sort of sort like there's a to the right of end to the left of in all outer sense there's closer and farther in all outer sense at the very least insofar as we're talking about there's outer sense if I recognize it as outer sense already spatial because outer and inner are already spatial ideas as well and all of my inner sense all of my mental activity gets presented to me in this well-ordered sequence which is time that's the form of time the before and after of a well ordered sequence yeah well yeah if you're ever very very heavy or you're moving very quickly approaching the speed of light then you might then time and the experience of time and space that's not to say that like things go out of order when you start approaching the speed of light but time appears to slow down not to you but you compared to some other observer in a different inertial frame of reference so at the same time might be complicated this is what Einstein has to say but that doesn't seem to like threaten what's going on like time a seemed to pass more slowly for you than for somebody else but that doesn't stop it from being a well ordered sequence of before and after yeah also yeah so there might be and there might be here as well it seems like there would have to be inner sense I said like outer sense is already spatial so is inner already spatial when I talked about it before and after sequence did you think of this because that's spatial I don't know about you I think about like time sometimes in a spatially a spatial metaphor right I make a timeline and the before is always on the left and the after is always on the right so these things definitely like shuffle back and forth from one I think for between one another there seems to be some sort of relationship between them but I like your question for another reason in that it kind of suggests maybe we were talking about space and time just now as like our space and time out here our space and time like things in themselves maybe maybe facing time or things in stuff but not when Conn talks about them cuz he doesn't talk about the things in themselves because he read David Hume David Hume said don't talk about things in themselves and cotton was like why and then he read names like oh I get why yeah because they're off-limits because you can't touch them you can't say anything about them sensibly maybe the things in themselves maybe the Newman 'el world is also spatially ordered and temporarily ordered maybe it's not what I do know is that my mind is as intuitions come in the first thing that happens to them as they get organized according to space and time and even if like if it was the case that space and time were real things in themselves we're like that's where the spatial organization happens it happens out here not in here and would be like the mind would still have to be receptive to that organization the mind would still have to be able to take spatially arranged things and represent them to itself in a spatially arranged way or it's gonna have to do that in time as well time might be an actual thing out there and it might correspond to the passage of time in one's mind but in order for that to happen this pure intuition of time has to be at work in the mind as well so these things just like everything that Kahn talks about these are on the side of phenomena these are two very important aspects of intuitions we have our pure intuitions space and time that regardless of whether space and time are out here they're gonna have to be here does that make sense for Jack I think it'd just kill them yeah I'm sure it could be thought of as that but Kant's not thinking of it as as nothingness it's the something that's left when you strip all the empirical content out of outer sense yeah so like to the right up to the left of I don't know if that's nothing this you can have empty space but you don't have to have empty space in fact space is more interesting when it's not empty if space is the form of outer sense then we have to kind of like give something if you were in empty space if you were a brain-in-a-vat in empty space I don't know that you would say like oh there's space it's not like there's a grid just kind of like really out there right that says the kind of tracks how far away from the point of origin you are on the x axis or the y axis to the z axis that's an invention it's maybe there's actual space out there but and it's not nothingness though it's a way of organizing empirical content when empirical content comes through it it's the first filter of not really making sense of things just yet but making them the sorts of things that could be made sense of Khan talks about these pure intuitions as these these make appearances determinable is to say not yet determinate I haven't actually started to make sense of them yet but they're only the kinds of things that I could make sense of because they get organized according to space and time first I'm not going to be able to say like there's a blue marker if I can't arrange this spatially first like all of the the empirical intuitions all of the the sensory content that's coming at me if it doesn't get organized by space and time then it's not even going to be the sort of thing that I can begin to make sense of with concepts this step has to happen and when it happens I still don't yet have experience I haven't even gotten to that operation of concepts on intuition this is like the first thing that happens and it happens within intuition it has to otherwise what intuition gives to our mind wouldn't be the sort of thing that could be made sense of at all what about just like a snapshot of space in a moment of time yeah well no but time is this well-ordered sequence of before and after if I just pick a slice of it it's not really time is it yeah okay well I think the picture would still be spatial right it would have a top and a bottom on the left and a right don't thinking about it's like it's over here yeah yes so that's that's that's how you can think of that's how you can think of space without time it's space in just a moment of time and it never moves on from that moment to another like nothing ever changes you're like what was it like before that and like there is no before that there's no before and after there's just an eternal now and if you took if you took ancient philosophy what you did then I can say like go read Parmenides is Peri foo see us he'll give you a picture of like no space ad no time right and eternal now and eternal here that like never changes or anything like that yeah and Kant's gonna say like maybe and I don't even know why I'm putting up a fight on this I don't know that Kant is saying like no you can think about space as separate from time like maybe maybe not maybe he's named two things that are two sides of the same coin either way seems like something like this has to happen at the level of intuition otherwise we don't even move on to the next step and experiences can't happen yes Charles both space and time are ways of making order right so not just time time the ordering for time is before and after the ordering for space is a little more complicated it's in front of behind yeah yeah so we might we might be back to like yet we might be talking about thoughts without content or empty right if we're talking about like just empty space nothing in the space contests identifying this as like a conceptual possibility but it's not like you can have that experience it's not like you can just shut your eyes and shut your ears and like stop thinking thoughts and then you would experience just empty space and time I think talk would be of the opinion that like nah you only ever really get space of time with things in them and this is actually how you like how we know that there are space and time because everything always come everything all outer sense always comes in space all inner sense always comes in time these are things that have to have been there already they are necessary conditions for experience so they are if I don't know if anybody's keeping track of this synthetic a priori boys and girls might set this up for like the remainder of our two meetings after this every time you see a synthetic copper be like so that got brewery like these space and time aren't things that like nobody said experience has to be spatial nobody says experience has to be well conscious that experience has to be spatial and temporal but it's not in the definition of experience it's not analytic it's not that the that space and time are already contained within the concept of experience but they do seem necessary and they do seem like they have to be there in order for experience to be possible at all so they're all priori they're both synthetic and a priori boom space we just did some metaphysics right there we talked about the nature of space and time and again space and time are not things or they may or may not be things that are out here in the new mental world and the think they might be things in themselves but even if they were they would have to be pure intuitions as well otherwise I wouldn't be able to experience the spatially organized world as facially organized unless I had that apparatus already in my mind one more thing about this and this is what the actual heading in the prolegomena for this first section is all about he doesn't say let's talk about intuitions although in the critique of pure reason the section on this is kind of it's not about let's talk about intuitions or at least that's not the title it's called the transcendental aesthetic and aesthetic there is not about like beauty it's not it's not gonna like what makes things artistic or something like that it's not that kind of aesthetics it's coming from the Greek word I stasis kind of like phenomena comes from the Greek word Fane I which means appearances I stasis also means kind of like sensory appearances so the transcendental aesthetic is all about like what can we figure out about this step of like mental activity that we call sensation and it's a peculiar sort of mental activity because it's a sort of receptivity it's a it's a passive activity it's the way in which I receive either external or even internal material for my mind to work on and it turns out that like space and time are the pure intuitions at the at the bottom of all of this all outer sense is going to come in space all inner sense is going to come ordered in time so that's what's going on the critique of pure reason in the transcendence aesthetic section one of the prologue Domino to any future metaphysics is about not intuitions not the transcendental aesthetic it's about whether or not pure mathematics is possible and I meant even or I circled it over there in blue mathematics this comes roaring back into all of this like this is what makes pure mathematics possible there's such a thing as applied mathematics where I take actual empirical experiences and I apply mathematical concepts through them I might say something like I want to plant a vegetable garden in my backyard so I'm gonna rope off certain sorts of like portions of it and I'm gonna maybe do a little bit of math on a sheet of paper that would be applied mathematics perhaps but they're separate thing as pure mathematics which according to what we said purity was for Conte it's gonna be mathematics with no empirical content which is actually most of the mathematics that you've ever done in any math class do you guys have this experience when you were younger taking math clubs maybe even having it now we're like maybe not something that's simple but your teacher says like two plus two equals four and you're like yeah but - what's like what are the things that we're talking about in mathematics and if you ask a mathematician this they might give it variety of answers they might say like I'm talking about all any possible things - any things and - any things are gonna be four things so maybe this is about everything maybe it's about nothing or it's about nothing in particular yeah well not - nothing's but like - like - what's and you're like I'm not talking about - anything's it's just - what is - what is like the number of like what is mathematics all about and is there such a thing as pure mathematics and if you went to the math department and said is there such a thing as pure math that pure mathematics mathematics that has no empirical content whatsoever you might get a bunch of folks that be like yeah totally we do that but Kant has given us a very different way of thinking about how this is going to work most people think that pure mathematics is possible because it's analytic mathematics it's just a formal system and all you're doing is like describing the relations between ideas Tom takes a bit of a stand on this and says no no no no no no no these two synthetic a priori things that we just found and by the way when I'm talking about space and time here I'm not talking about a concept of space or a concept of time that's gonna come later we just got a concept of space as the pure intuition pertaining to our the form of all outer sense that's not what's here's the pure intuition isn't this idea this idea is a concept that's like way later in the chain that's when we're doing metaphysics so this is at work and discovering that it's at work is doing a little bit of metaphysics I got lost yeah pure mathematics so yeah so how is that going to be possible and is it related to this and concepts absolutely it's related to this space follows the rules of mathematics there's a whole branch of mathematics that's all about exploring the rules that space follows you know what it's called it's called geometry and there's a whole branch of mathematics that's just about the well word succession of maybe not before and after but the way that you can name all of the befores and afters and a well-ordered succession I mentioned it earlier when Corinne was asking about this and I said counting counting is just marking off time and I don't even have to like make sure that exactly one hippopotamus passes between each number I just need to say like one two the only thing about counting that needs to happen is that all the numbers have to come in the right order right so that's all that number is it's just an ordering of succession of like earlier and later with the bigger numbers coming later and the earlier numbers coming earlier and the smaller numbers coming earlier and this is the mathematical discipline of arithmetic and it was obvious to everybody including Immanuel Kant and the 1780s because they card had been on the scene for at least a hundred years that you could very easily shuttle back and forth between geometry and arithmetic this is des cartes big mathematical invention it was analytic geometry it was a way to go from numbers to shapes back and forth really really easily with this and a Cartesian coordinate plane system thing but these are nothing more than just exploring the rules of space and time and if you wanted a little bit of kind of like extra assurance that space and time are necessary that every experiencing subject must get their intuitions first and foremost as made determinable through the pure intuitions of space and time you can just reflect on the fact that like mathematics works for everybody we don't disagree about mathematics cons has given us a picture of mathematics where it's just the rules of space and time and where space and time aren't necessarily things in themselves maybe they are maybe they're not but we don't talk about that's it space sometimes are like the aspects of receptivity through which any intuition could be the sort of thing that could be made sense of at all and because they're necessary conditions for all possible experience everybody's mathematics is going to be the same if anybody were ever to say to you like something like isn't it amazing that math works all the time a conteiner response for them would be no mathematics make sense all the time because all of the things that come into my mind come through the rules of mathematics first and foremost they come through space and time and just cashing out with the like the how those things have to work is what pure mathematics is all about you can do empirical mathematics reuse those concepts on sensory information but you can also do pure mathematics and contrary to folks like almost anybody else but can't who are gonna say that mathematics is analytic conda's gonna say no no because it's based on all of this it's synthetic maybe there are aspects of doing mathematics that are analytic once we get all of our axioms in place it's just analysis after that there's certainly there's a whole branch of mathematics called mathematical analysis but it's not all mathematics so he thinks of mathematics for pure mathematics at least as another example of a synthetic a priori and that's going to give him a kind of a stepping-stone up to Natural Science and eventually to metaphysics as well so we got some synthetic a priori we got space and time which are cool a very weird version of space and time and we have maybe some sense of what happens at the level of intuition our next meeting is going to get into like alright so those intuitions need to be discursively organized according to concepts and that apparently is going to make natural science possible and we'll get into what those pure concepts might be you have any questions feel free to hang around after I'll talk to you otherwise you on Thursday

Channel: Adam Rosenfeld

Views: 4,589

Rating: 4.9298244 out of 5

Keywords: Early Modern Philosophy, Epistemology, Metaphysics, Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysic, Transcendental Aesthetic, Intuitions, Pure Intuitions, Space, Time, Pure Mathematics

Id: ohPGF6XrGs0

Length: 74min 27sec (4467 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 20 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/avant-garde_funhouse]

I was thinking about Now Eleanor's song in the fourth act of her opera and all the ideas about intuition. I think this video, which goes into Kant's ideas about intuition might be useful in unlocking some of those passages of the opera.