Theme 1 - Post seminar

During the first theme I have read two texts: Plato’s Theaetetus and the preface of the second edition of Immanuel Kant's A Critique of Pure Reason. I have also participated on a lecture that mostly was about about Kant's A Critique of Pure Reason.

I found A Critique of Pure Reason much more complex and harder to truly grasp. Before the seminar I read the two text rather briefly and tried to find the important parts. I also did some research about Kant on the Internet. But just reading the text wasn't enough for me to understand what Kant actually is saying. The lecture did straighten some question marks but also created a lot of questions. But when all groups in the seminare had a joint discussion somethings finally cleared.

During the seminar we discussed a lot about how we interpreted Socrates statement "we see through our eyes and ears, not with our eyes and hears". Within the group we all had a similar understanding to this statement; that knowledge does not consist in impressions of sense, but in reasoning about them. Our senses alone are not enough to achieve knowledge, we need to process and reason with the raw sense data that we obtain from the outside world. We also discussed Kant's A Critique of Pure Reason. I brought up the topic of Copernicus and why his scientific discovery that we live in a heliocentric world is such a good example of our objects conforming to our cognition (and not the other way around). Copernicus disregarded the current beliefs (conceptions of history, society etc) and conformed the objects (scientific data) to his cognition of a heliocentric view of the world.

Now according to Kant there is a lot of knowledge in the world, that is his starting point and he never questions this. He doesn't care where this knowledge comes from. His big question is: how is this knowledge structured? He does so by examining the most basic things in the world (time and
space etc). According to Kant we cannot be truly objective in our understanding of the world. It is impossible and regarded as God's point of view. To gain knowledge we need to see the objects according to us. This leads us to a priory - attributes that can be assigned to objects without empirical knowledge.

Kant's phrase perception without conception is blind was discussed in the seminar.  The example of a pen came up. How do we define a "pen"? It is a physical object we write with. A pen is a common object so there exists a cultural context in the world that the pen lives in. But if you remove the world and the context - there is no such thing as a pen. There is an object with an extension in space. But the meaning “pen” is gone... Amazing.