Diagram of Kant's Transcendental Critique of Theoretical Reason

Kant module 2 diagram

[spinoza]

You used the whiteboard well. Clear and simple. Good to see old fashioned teaching.

[seanblackwell]

Absolutely brilliant presentation. Very easy to grasp, thank you.

[pvtests]

day 2 of telling matthew i m in love with his energy. i’ll do this until he notices.

[conferencereport]

Really clear outline, and much appreciated. Thanks Matt. I look forward to the rest of this series.

[k-Gonzo]

great video! This was my introduction to Kant. I really like learning about the German Idealists but reading them is intimidating since so much of their work systematizes older philosophers' theories. Makes me feel as if I should start with the Greeks lol

[johnmanno]

Hi! Randomly got your video on my feed. Excellent summation! A few things:

I'm currently desperately trying to read ye olde Critique of Pure Reason (again! My third attempt). Kant says what you said re space and time over and over again. And it's a cool idea.

But! Relativity seems to contradict that. Kant's space and time are fixed entities. But Einstein proved that they aren't, and therefore cannot be mere intuitions by which our experience is understandable. How do Kantians get around that?

He also is big on causality (yet another of our intuitions), but quantum mechanics explodes that notion too. Again, what's the Kantian response?

I bring these things up because Kant pooh poohs things like clairvoyance, "ESP" (in his 18th century way), and is "pro science" all the way, which is fine (muy Enlightenment), but that very discipline (science) seems to undermine his arguments.

[kingnevermore]

Kant actually said that categories *cannot* be applied to noumenal realm. "The doctrine of sensibility is at the same time the doctrine of noumena in the negative sense of the term; that is, the doctrine of things which the understanding must think without reference to our mode of intuition, and therefore not merely as appearances but as things in themselves. But the understanding, at the same time as thus separating them, knows that it must not, in this new aspect, apply its categories to them. For the categories have meaning only with reference to the unity of intuitions in space and time, and can therefore a priori determine this unity only on account of the mere ideality of space and time, by means of general concepts of combination. Where this unity of time cannot be found, as in the case of the noumenon, there the whole use, indeed, the whole meaning of categories comes to an end, because even the possibility of things that should correspond to the categories would then be incomprehensible"- (B308, page 309). Besides that Kant also added "If, therefore, we attempted to apply the categories to objects which are not considered as appearances, we should have to assume an intuition other than sensible one; and thus the object would become a noumenon in the positive sense. As, however, such an intuition, namely, an intellectual one, is entirely beyond our faculty of knowledge, the use of the categories can likewise never reach beyond the boundary of the objects of experience".

[zoran]

Kant is not up to anything for more than 200 years. Great video by the way!

[paulconn]

Have you commented on Thomas Aquainas?

[davidcockerham]

Matt: You seem to be taking sides with the post-Kantian idealists who accuse Kant of a systemic contradiction, i.e., a fundamental contradiction between phenomenal knowledge bound by sensory appearances and the a priori categories of the understanding, which together constitute the conditions for the possibility of any experience, on one hand, and what you are describing as the "noumenal realm" with things-in-themselves, on the other hand. But isn't it the case that Fichte, the early Schelling, and Hegel (among others) simply deny the reality of things-in-themselves and thereby attempt to extend the powers of reason (e.g., intellectual intuition) beyond warrant? This (or something like it) would be the response that Kantians would make, and that Kant did make to Fichte at one point. The noumenal is not an additional realm that houses things-in-themselves; rather, things-in-themselves constitute the "negative image" of appearances. To quote,
"If by 'noumenon' we mean a thing so far as it is not an object of our sensible intuition, and so abstract from our mode of intuiting it, this is a noumenon in the negative sense of the term" (A250/B307). In any case, there is considerable debate on this issue of "contradiction." My own view is that post-Kantian idealists were creative misinterpreters of Kant.

[zorororonoa]

i would like to add a critique here at the time of 7:30 in this video. i want to say i don't think kant contradicts himself but i think he is trying to say with all the madness of how we can only percieve space and time because it is in our intuition which is related to causality he is trying to say that it is not possible for us to imagine something out of space and time because it is intuited in us its built in us that we can only percieve spacetime or space and time. kant when he talks about the neumanal realm he is basically saying that God exists but we don't know how we can't percieve God of how he Exists because if we could than that would mean God doesn't exist so the neumenal realm is something very reasonable that kant puts out there.

[Iluvyourchannelhehe]

That was a very clear explanation! But why is Kant's method called 'transcendental'?

[amazovian]

Wonderful video. Thank you very much ♥️

[tomdaniels]

Couldn't we say that the noumenal realm is very similar to Plato's "heaven" with it's ideal forms?

[brynbstn]

Do people ever say Kant is a neo-platonist? It seems the Forms have simply moved from outside to inside the mind. We would also have to say that Aristotle’s categories are the second generation of Plato's Forms ... but Plato didn't elaborate on what the Forms are and what they are not, did he? Did he mean concepts like Beauty and Virtue, or did he mean concrete things - a man, a horse, a tree.

[averroesaverroes]

So clear and simple for them which is not

[DaveWasley]

Good video, but I’m going to argue that Kant DOESN’T in fact establish the existence of the thing-in-itself, or noumenal realm (and thereby apply a category to it, contradicting his whole system).

The full justification for this is found in Henry Allison’s “Kant’s Transcendental Idealism.”

Having reread the Critique recently, I can verify: he doesn’t establish its existence (or non-existence for that matter).

His point in the Transcendental Dialectic is that we can’t help BUT speculate about an object independent of our ability to sense it...but is constantly warning against doing so. THAT’S exactly the Critique: Reason wants to go beyond the bounds of the knowable, running into error because, less empirical intuitions about such a realm, its concepts are all empty and have no way of being verified.

The “two-worlds” interpretation of Kant is bogus.

The thing-in-itself is what we come up with when we apply the faculty of Reason to the unempirical.

There’s a deeper point to be made here: anyone claiming to make objective claims in an argument, stating that they know how the world is, or assuming you agree with them about “human nature” (as in, “people are greedy and self-serving, it’s just human nature!”) is talking about a thing-in-itself: they’ve arrived at conclusions without the necessary empirical conditions to do so because they’re speculating about a mind-independent world. They usually don’t understand they’re doing this.

This is compared to, say, Physics or Chemistry, where we already know their findings apply to phenomena.

In other words, Kant’s saying that, as far as we can tell by correctly applying Reason and in our Transcendential Deduction, phenomena and noumena are one and the same, and it’s only insofar as the mind begins to speculate about some unempirical essence or aspect of the object that we err and posit the existence of a thing-in-itself.

[alexandreskvirsky]

Locke thought we got concepts from sensation. Kant says that only the understanding thinks in concepts. Big revolution there too. The mind relates to experience only schematically, in fact it is the understanding dealing with intuition. Thing in itself is long gone. Example: The relation of cause and effect is for Kant an analogy of experience, and only determines phenomena of experience, and not things in themselves. Being a type of function or rule of the understanding, the relation of cause and effect applies to sensibility (intuition) alone, not to things. Concepts affect intuitions, that is the mind. The world as it is cannot be known. The mind imagines, anticipates, constructs phenomena according to its rules of possible phenomena. How did the mind get transcendental?

[johnszabo]

Would you say there's a difference between the "noumenal" and the "metaphysical"? Is one a sub-set of the other?

[petrainjordan]

He who wants to learn to philosophise (Verb) MUST regard ALL systems of philosophy ONLY as the history of the use of reason, AND as OBJECTS for exercising his philosophical talent - Obviously Kant had a different attitude to many of those who now study Philosophy ( Noun)