Strict Realism is a school of art, Marcus!!!
HPO Jury = America
vomited:
> i can maybe come back to some of your other points,
> but first i am interested in what you mean by 'the
> deduction is true for all rational beings and not
> just
> humans, thus objective.' Also, I did not claim that
> 'the aesthetic' is subjective. And I am also not
> interested in claiming this. The Transcendental
> Aesthetic is a representation of argument, and
> determining the scope of the argument's validity is
> very difficult. Presumably Kant intends it, along
> with the argument of the Deduction, to be
> universally
> valid. Whether it is further 'objective,' is not
> something I am sure about. In any case, my position
> is that both the arguments of the Aesthetic and the
> Transcendental Deduction are intended to possess the
> same level of validity.
>
> Now one could also take 'the Deduction' to refer to
> the scope of the Categories. One might say that the
> Categories are valid for all beings, not merely
> humans. And in a way, this must be true. But since
> they only apply to the human realm--the phenomenal
> realm, that is--this doesn't tell us very much.
> They
> still don't apply to the thing-in-itself. Thus the
> status of the Deduction dooes not bring us any
> closer
> to the 'strict realism' I outlined in my last two
> posts.
(http://www.marcus-philosophy.com "prepare to avert thine eyes!")
The deduction must be valid for all rational beings,
since the categories are also laws of nature, and all
rational beings inhabit the same natural universe.
Causality is a law of nature, not just a category or
concept. It is a kind of concept which is objectively
and eternally valid for all causal relationships. The
scope of the categories is universal, that is, they
will be encountered throughout the universe. That this
is the human universe, or the universe of rational
beings in general, is relevant to the extant that Kant
is arguing that it is rationally impossible to apply
these concepts outside of nature; or to put it another
way, all that to which the concepts apply Kant termed
"nature."
But that is another level of discussion altogether, it
is beyond the aesthetic which, as I said, is
subjective. It is not, however, a subjectivism unless
the forms of space and time are claimed to be
categories, that is, laws of nature or rules governing
or underlying phenomena. A phenomenon is not a
representation, and phenomena were not the subject of
the aesthetic (unless you are a Smith fan, with all
his confused and misapplied terminologies). Phenomena
and appearance are two different notions, the latter
being mere representations, the former being the
things themselves. The only purpose for considering
phenomena in the deduction is to take them apart from
the concepts, those laws of nature with which they are
governed, and deal, deductively, only with those laws.
That's why the argument in the deduction is considered
pure, thus transcendental; it references phenomena,
but it doesn't relate to phenomena until the analytic
of principles.
I don't know what you meant by "the Transcendental
Aesthetic is a representation of argument." But the TA
only involves our human form of sensibility;
otherwise, it would treat the forms of space and time
as concepts requiring a deduction which universalizes
them as valid for all of nature, and not just for our
form of representing nature. So when I call them
"subjective," it is only to say that, since
representations are subjective, they are elements of
and only of the subject of the things being
represented, and the forms are also such elements,
albeit purely as formal intuitions and not just forms
of intuition.
When you asked about the level of their validity, I
would have to say that there is a subjective level of
validity, although it is not subjective to the point
of solipsism. And besides, solipsism conflates the
appearance with the thing-in-itself, it knows no
transcendental distinction. If you investigate the
forms of representation for one human you investigate
them for all humans generally. But the investigation
doesn't stop there, or else, once again, one may as
well declare the forms to be categorial in nature, and
as categorial, merely ruling over representations of
phenomena as the only possible phenomena for us in the
Cartesian sense, all else being problematic. That is
why the two arguments, the TA and the TD, cannot be on
the same level of validity. One may as well toss out
the word "transcendental" and forget that Kant made
any distinction, and treat the subject empirically as
a Cartesian might.
--- Marcus Verhaegh <aftert...@rocketmail.com>
vomited:
> i can maybe come back to some of your other points,
> but first i am interested in what you mean by 'the
> deduction is true for all rational beings and not
> just
> humans, thus objective.' Also, I did not claim that
> 'the aesthetic' is subjective. And I am also not
> interested in claiming this. The Transcendental
> Aesthetic is a representation of argument, and
> determining the scope of the argument's validity is
> very difficult. Presumably Kant intends it, along
> with the argument of the Deduction, to be
> universally
> valid. Whether it is further 'objective,' is not
> something I am sure about. In any case, my position
> is that both the arguments of the Aesthetic and the
> Transcendental Deduction are intended to possess the
> same level of validity.
>
> Now one could also take 'the Deduction' to refer to
> the scope of the Categories. One might say that the
> Categories are valid for all beings, not merely
> humans. And in a way, this must be true. But since
> they only apply to the human realm--the phenomenal
> realm, that is--this doesn't tell us very much.
> They
> still don't apply to the thing-in-itself. Thus the
> status of the Deduction dooes not bring us any
> closer
> to the 'strict realism' I outlined in my last two
> posts.