TheCoolinator - 31 August 2012 10:48 PM Why does this name still generate respect when it is invoked? Why would the author of such unadulterated drivel still be informing some the greatest moral thinkers of our age? One need not read past book one of his Critique to read a full admission that all of his ideas are bogus. He first attempts to prove the existence of a priori knowledge via the human perceptions of space and time. He offers no further proof, being satisfied to rest upon that. He then postulates without attempting to offer proof that a priori supersedes empirical knowledge. Finally, he states that if you haven’t followed him this far you may disregard all that follows and throws in a dig that the only reason you could have for not having followed him is a lack of intellectual capacity. The problem he has, it that we now know that space and time are actually different dimensions of the same empirical phenomenon and we have studied them empirically with fruitful results. Yet here we stand in the year 2012, and people still pay lip service to a philosophy that had its foundation shattered by Einstein over a century ago. Kant is irrelevant. He is sophistry founded upon a bad guess and we can never profit an iota by considering a problem through the lens he proposed. I keep my copy of the Critique of Pure Reason in my gym bag where it serves as a spacer between my shoes and the end of the bag to prevent contents from shifting. So long as I never lack for cooking fuel, this the highest use I will ever derive from my ownership of those pages.

Let me answer your questions:

“Why does this name still generate respect when it is invoked?” Because he is generally considered the greatest philosopher of the age of enlightenment and one of the greatest philosophers of all time.

“Why would the author of such unadulterated drivel still be informing some the greatest moral thinkers of our age?”

Because his writing is not “unadulterated drivel”

“One need not read past book one of his Critique to read a full admission that all of his ideas are bogus.”

Which critique are you talking about? Kant wrote several critiques!

“He first attempts to prove the existence of a priori knowledge via the human perceptions of space and time.”

So you must be talking about the critique of pure reason.

Wrong, he proves that space and time are a priory concepts of our mind. Why? Because we cannot image any event to take place outside space and time. Every event takes place at some point in time and space. Therefore, space and time are necessarily part of all of our experience. So this is a limitiation of our human mode of thinking and is not derived from experience.

“He offers no further proof, being satisfied to rest upon that. ” Wrong, read the critique. He offers several arguments.

“He then postulates without attempting to offer proof that a priori supersedes empirical knowledge.” Now that’s unadulterated drivel. Let me state the opening statements of the critique of pure reason.

“I. Of the difference between Pure and Empirical Knowledge

That all our knowledge begins with experience there can be no doubt. For how is it possible that the faculty of cognition should be awakened into exercise otherwise than by means of objects which affect our senses, and partly of themselves produce representations, partly rouse our powers of understanding into activity, to compare to connect, or to separate these, and so to convert the raw material of our sensuous impressions into a knowledge of objects, which is called experience? In respect of time, therefore, no knowledge of ours is antecedent to experience, but begins with it.

But, though all our knowledge begins with experience, it by no means follows that all arises out of experience. For, on the contrary, it is quite possible that our empirical knowledge is a compound of that which we receive through impressions, and that which the faculty of cognition supplies from itself (sensuous impressions giving merely the occasion), an addition which we cannot distinguish from the original element given by sense, till long practice has made us attentive to, and skilful in separating it. It is, therefore, a question which requires close investigation, and not to be answered at first sight, whether there exists a knowledge altogether independent of experience, and even of all sensuous impressions? Knowledge of this kind is called a priori, in contradistinction to empirical knowledge, which has its sources a posteriori, that is, in experience.”

Apparently, you didn’t read or understand the very beginning of the critique of pure reason.

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/4280/4280-h/4280-h.htm

“Yet here we stand in the year 2012, and people still pay lip service to a philosophy that had its foundation shattered by Einstein over a century ago.”

But Einstein does not do away with space and time. He has a different concept for space and time!? If Einstein had provided a physical theory devoid of any concepts of space and time, then that would have been a refutation that all our experience must take place in space and time. Kant definitely thought differently about space and time than Einstein. But, his arguments for the a priori nature of space and time do not rest on these particular concepts.

So maybe you should just read Kant and not reject him on the basis of ignorance.

Regards

Kikl