Transcendental idealism
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Transcendental idealism is a philosophical system founded by German philosopher Immanuel Kant in the 18th century. Kant's epistemological program is found throughout his Critique of Pure Reason (1781). By transcendental Kant means that his philosophical approach to knowledge transcends mere consideration of sensory evidence and requires an understanding of the mind's innate modes of processing that sensory evidence. |
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Transcendental aesthetic
Kant means that his philosophical approach to knowledge transcends mere consideration of sensory evidence and requires an understanding of the mind's innate modes of processing that sensory evidence.[4]
In the "Transcendental Aesthetic" section of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant outlines how space and time are pure forms of human intuition contributed by our own faculty of sensibility. Space and time do not have an existence "outside" of us, but are the "subjective" forms of our sensibility and hence the necessary a priori conditions under which the objects we encounter in our experience can appear to us at all. Kant describes time and space not only as "empirically real" but transcendentally ideal.[citation needed]
Kant argues that the conscious subject cognizes the objects of experience not as they are in themselves, but only the way they appear to us under the conditions of our sensibility. Thus Kant's doctrine restricts the scope of our cognition to appearances given to our sensibility and denies that we can possess cognition of things as they are in themselves, i.e. things as they are independently of how we experience them through our cognitive faculties.
Arthur Schopenhauer takes Kant's transcendental aesthetic as a starting point for his The World as Will and Representation
I think this sets up a good case for Universal grammar
- "So far as the faculty of sense may contain representations a priori, which form the conditions under which objects are given, in so far it belongs to transcendental philosophy. The transcendental doctrine of sense must form the first part of our science of elements, because the conditions under which alone the objects of human knowledge are given must precede those under which they are thought." (Location 715)
My synthesis
#form/thought/synthesis Of his transcendental aesthetic/philosophy, space and time, forms, metaphysics, etc.
- Space and time are the forms that our perceptions and raw sensations of reality - must come to us as, in virtue of our particular sensory physiology/faculties/machinery.
- This is his genius reversal of the intuition of trying to understand the nature of space and time as part of reality external to us. Ie, instead of asking how we come to know the world, he asks How does the world become known to us? And further, subverts routes of strictly mental phenomena, idealism, solipsism, Cartesian skepticism, etc. Instead It is both a reversal and synthesis of the mind and the world, whose reality is fully in neither. More like pure form or a "container" but one that is inherently connected to the things it contains - the full meaning of space and time and the matter and energy and entities in that "container" must be conceived together at once. It makes no sense to somehow conceive of a material object without the concept of space.
- It makes no sense that we build up the concept of space and time in parts, iteratively, aggregatively, separately, or it turns out, even externally to us or external to the very essence of our perception and sense experience. It is a necessary precondition in order for the possibility of the most basic perception of simple objects that we take/presume/hold a notion of a sort of background consisting of what we call (in the artificial freezing of our understanding) space and time. Space and time are pure forms.
- With the metaphysical consideration of space and time, it is easy to commit the classic philosophical blunder a la Wittgenstein's critique, in that we are extending and misusing the words space and time and creating philosophical problems that aren't there. But Kant's transcendental aesthetic can be used as Philosophical Therapy to correct the mistake/misunderstanding.