Philosophy: Kant on Space Part 1

What is space? Kant's answer is a head-scratcher: space is merely a form of intuition. Scott Edgar (Saint Mary's) explains this rather perplexing answer in accessible, every-day language. He also lays out Kant's most famous argument for this view of space (the "Argument from Geometry"). Never before has it been so easy to get a handle on Kant's views on space!

Help us caption & translate this video!

[kennyg]

Kant was a mind monster. Even if we found out that an alien race existed somewhere in the universe, it doesn't take away the brilliance/intellect someone like Kant possessed.

[georgholden]

your videos are brilliant for visual learners like me :) thank you, helps a lot :) Reading Kant is some hardcore shit

[MrPabloguida]

This is one of the best philosophical videos I've ever seen.

[SuperGreatSphinx]

Space is the boundless three-dimensional extent in which objects and events have relative position and direction.

Physical space is often conceived in three linear dimensions, although modern physicists usually consider it, with time, to be part of a boundless four-dimensional continuum known as spacetime.

The concept of space is considered to be of fundamental importance to an understanding of the physical universe.

However, disagreement continues between philosophers over whether it is itself an entity, a relationship between entities, or part of a conceptual framework.

Debates concerning the nature, essence and the mode of existence of space date back to antiquity; namely, to treatises like the Timaeus of Plato, or Socrates in his reflections on what the Greeks called khôra (i.e. "space"), or in the Physics of Aristotle (Book IV, Delta) in the definition of topos (i.e. place), or in the later "geometrical conception of place" as "space qua extension" in the Discourse on Place (Qawl fi al-Makan) of the 11th-century Arab polymath Alhazen.

Many of these classical philosophical questions were discussed in the Renaissance and then reformulated in the 17th century, particularly during the early development of classical mechanics.

In Isaac Newton's view, space was absolute—in the sense that it existed permanently and independently of whether there was any matter in the space.

Other natural philosophers, notably Gottfried Leibniz, thought instead that space was in fact a collection of relations between objects, given by their distance and direction from one another.

In the 18th century, the philosopher and theologian George Berkeley attempted to refute the "visibility of spatial depth" in his Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision.

Later, the metaphysician Immanuel Kant said that the concepts of space and time are not empirical ones derived from experiences of the outside world — they are elements of an already given systematic framework that humans possess and use to structure all experiences.

Kant referred to the experience of "space" in his Critique of Pure Reason as being a subjective "pure a priori form of intuition".

In the 19th and 20th centuries, mathematicians began to examine geometries that are non-Euclidean, in which space is conceived as curved, rather than flat.

According to Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity, space around gravitational fields deviates from Euclidean space.

Experimental tests of general relativity have confirmed that non-Euclidean geometries provide a better model for the shape of space.

[joaodecarvalho]

Does the detection of gravitational waves change something? I wonder what Kant would think about string theory, particle physics and the fabric of space-time.

[trishnalekharu]

You are such a brilliant teacher. I can understand it so easily. Thank you.

[ryanbenson]

Isn’t the requirement of a triangle’s inner angles adding up to 180 also a definition of a triangle as a shape in as much as it having 3 sides?

[apostalote]

I take issue with the idea that space is 'imposed' onto experience by the mind. To say that the mind applies space to experience is to conflate space with a pure concept of the understanding which is actually imposed upon experience by the mind. I think what needs to be investigated further is Kant's notion of 'form of intuition' and whether this means a form we apply to intuition or rather a from of giveness. On the former view Kant's philosphy is able to reduced to a facile form/matter schema which would cause tremendous problems as you read through the transcendental analytic, on the latter view Space becomes a formal structure of a pre-given horizon in which Reason encounters objects. Reason, as the power of unifying representations, gets its definition from the spatio-temporal horizons in which it operates, this definition is simply the pure concepts of understanding which are applied on the basis of Space and Time without Spaxe and Time being some higher order concepts that are applied prior

[pengefikseret]

Thats great! Really helpful!! Willt you will you also do something about the transcendental analytic as well? ;) It would be really helpful, and Kant is so important to understand, for anyone wanting to study philosophy

[johnnycockatoo]

is this spacial structure a deconstruction - reverse-engineering - do trees have an idea of space

[ConceptHut]

Definition of a triangle: Form
About the interior angles: Function

[nostalgia]

Excellent video. And besides Philochrony is the theory that describes the nature of time and demonstrates its existence. Time is magnitive: objective, Imperceptible and measurable.

[GPirvulescu]

Honestly this has helped me so much when writing my essay, talking about the geometry etc I'm so happy I've included all of that, is there any way you could put references as to where you got the info though?

[jorgefigoeroa]

Without any doubt, I Kant was the best of any other modern philosopher, however, his influence with respect to the nature of the space was an epistemological obstacle in the development of the non-Euclidean Geometries, ( Bernhardt Riemann’s Elliptical and Lobachetsky Bolyai Hyperbolic )

[johncalligeros]

Why equate the brain with mind - which you do repeatedly in the visuals? For someone who refuses mind brain identity (theory) this is a no-brainer.

[moesypittounikos]

Amazing video, thanks!! Here is how clever Kant was.. Schopenhauer built on Kant and argued space and time are one, ancitipating relativity.

[abhishekdivecha]

I will tell you something, this was mind boggling and very few people have this skill of you know making complex things simple and clear. Loved it.

[getAliKhan]

Wow! So these must be the shoulders Einstein stood on when he came up with a theory of relativity.
Time and space are the same thing
If time is relative space is as well.
We've been able to see how time relativity works. Now if only we can see an example of space dilation. It must be out there, but I wonder if we're even biologically equipped to recognize it if we came across it.

[sterlingweston]

How can the knowledge that: the interior angles of a triangle equal 180°, be synthetic a priori? when there are exceptions; triangles on non-euclidean planes such as a sphere, do not always equal 180°. How would you reconcile this... Is it just that the mention of such triangles whose interior angles equal 180°, is missing the requisite precursor of their existence on a euclidean plane?

[mihneaurs]

The fact that the definition of a triangle doesn't literally say that it has the sum of all angles equal to 180 doesn't mean that BY DEFINITION a triangle doesn't have 180 the sum of all angles. It's just a matter of how you write down the definition. Also 5+7 really by definition is 12. It's 12 expressed in another way. So I wonder if those propositions are truly synthetic or not. But leaving that aside, how is the space a priori, so unrelated to our experience, and in the same time is just an intuition, an illusion made by our senses....which means we've experienced it?