Kant: Math

According to Kant:

Math is analytic and synthetic.

Meaning you have to take two knowns and put them together to have math make sense. This doesn't make too much sense to the though. If someone had no knowledge of anything in the contemporary world, you still could teach them values and quantites of something. 1 egg and another egg is 2 eggs. Very simple. How is synthetic knowledge ever incorporated into that math problem? No knowledge of eggs, their producers or chickens are needed to understand that simple problem. Even if you were to know the information on the following, it would be useless to the subject of math.

Kant illusion

At one point, Kant goes into depth about illusions. Like all ideas, they originate from our minds and only our minds. If we witness something with our own eyes or visualize something someone tells us, we have our own images, kind of like a built in copyright. Noone could ever have the same interpretation. Illusions are these ideas in our own minds. He mentions time and space, space is the volume and capacity of our minds and ideas? how shallow or deep the thought is? how would you measure the shallowness of a thought though? and on what basis? Time could be the amount of time to put synthetic ideas together to formulate your...illusion. pretty cool if you ask me.

Kant is confusion

After reading Kant's book, I've realized that he is confusing like Descartes. Linking math and metaphysics, using sciences to prove the unproven in his own mind. He thinks cognition belongs all in a unified system with some type of organization. Whether or not we actually see this whole "unified" organized system is no mentioned in this book. Is it in our subconscience? I guess so because of his reasoning with totality, we go through life trying to stride for complete understanding of everything and the organization that goes with it.

Hume: Comparing notes with Locke

In this blog, I want to compare the existance of God between Locke and Hume because they're both empiricists. Locke claimed that all of our thoughts, ideas, concepts and actions came from perception and gained experience. All of these perceptions would add up to the proofs of our knowledge, like how you know the taste of lemonade is sweet and sometimes sour, because you tasted it for yourself. So back to the existance of god, I feel Locke completely shoots down the theory of god, we have no percetption of god its just a made up concept for people to believe in something, Hume seems to do the same exact thing. He might not link perception and the disbelief in god, but his arguments are similar to Lockes. I feel Hume is less convincing with his support. Locke makes more contemporary sense.

Hume: Existence of God

Hume mentions God, and how we think of one as perfect. If I read correctly, it seems Hume is disproving god because the world is imprefect. This quality of the world is something god cannot posess, therefore he does not exist? The thought of a god, or the concept of a god is a useless matter according to Hume. I beleive he brings up a good point, we do not need a god, if there is no god present. Challenging this problem more, Hume argues that we can infer a whole lot, for example one footprint in the sand infers that a whole man walked this path, not just some random human foot. So what proof do we have to infer today that there is some infinite being or god out there? Certainly nothing appearing to me. Unless you take into the account of the world, it might have been created by god, its his work in progress, science could be running the earth, his own creation, until it collapses and it needs to be started all over agian. Is god running a puppet show via the world? David Hume, you confuse me.

Unlike many philosophers, Kant believed that synthetic judgments could either be a posteriori or a priori, stating that however, analytic judgments are always a priori which holds the principle of contradiction. Kant uses the example, “all bodies are extended.” On the other hand, “all bodies have weight” would be counted as a synthetic judgment. To say all bodies do not have weight is not necessarily contradictory, although, it may be false.

Descartes and Kant are very similar. Descartes' cogito (think therefore I am) relates to Kant, in that we think with our minds, therefore we must exist. If we did not exist, there would be no way we could think, breath, or live with our minds. Kant also has a similar opinion. For example, we clearly know that 2+2=4 and willl always equal four no matter how you look at it. Mathematics and our minds would both appear to be existent, innate objects that we have.

Kant made a bold statement in believing that both rationalists and empiricists are mistaken, which would include our old buddies Hume, Descartes, and Locke . We already know that Kant believes in synthetic a priori knowledge, which ironically would be most likely challenged by the likes of Hume, Descartes, and Locke. Kant goes on to argue that geometry, science, arithmetic, and metaphysics are all synthetic a priori. He example 7 + 5 = 12 to demonstrate why arithmetic is synthetic a priori (there are no properties of 12 in 7 or 5). The empiricists on the other hand, which include Locke and Hume, would argue that the basis of all knowledge is a posteriori, but would agree that the basis of all knowledge is also synthetic, hence they believe knowledge is only obtained by observation and that the idea that synthetic knowledge is innate or a priori. Now, the rationalists, whom Descartes happens to be, would concur that the basis of all knowledge is a priori, but would dispute that synthetic knowledge is priori.

As cazy as it sounds, Kant believes the basis of all knowledge is synthetic a priori. Aren’t we taught all academic knowledge in school and all other knowledge by observation? Kant seems to think that teachers almost serve as guides and that they help bring out the knowledge that you already have. Kant also argues that natural sciences, namely physics, are synthetic a priori. However, I must bring up how Hume points out the pool ball example, which contradicts this statement. Hume claims we do not know a priorily which angle the ball will move at until we observe the action, thus deeming this knowledge to be synthetic a posteriori.

Kant believes that arithmetic and numbers hold no meaning. He points out that numbers can be replaced by any other sign or symbols, to which as long as there is a set, known pattern, one can calculate an answer. The action of addition is the succession of items. Kant argues that a similar operation occurs when one talks about time. Time is the succession of items as well, hence knowing what occurred chronologically. Kant goes on to argue that geometry is the relation of items, such as the concept of space. Time and space are not a posteriori but rather are a priori. If time relates to arithmetic and space relates to geometry, would that then mean geometry and arithmetic are also be a priori knowledge? Knowledge of time and space is clearly not analytic but instead is synthetic.

Kant claims that there are 2 different styles of judgements, which happen to be polarities. There are judgments caused by one's perception and judgments caused by one's experience. Judgments from perception are simple impressions usually brought on by the senses and are synthetic a posteriori. Hume feels these certain judgments act as the centerpiece of one's knowledge as they do not do any further investigative research. This would mean that a perceptive judgment is noncontroversial to the empiricist while judgments brought on through experience are controversial. Kant states that judgments through experience is the separation of sensory information into categories, which also is synthetic a priori.