>
> Here's just a few points from an essay on Kantian Metaphysics
> from . . .
>
>
http://mackiemesser.zoomshare.com/2.shtml
> --
> Kant was being given to understand, most especially with a view to
> Geometry, that by fixing upon certain indemonstrable First Principles
> intuited as being self-evident, if what follows from those things
> axiomatically is seen to be in accord with logic without fault, and as
> such produces results in the real world, then this is science just as
> surely as the empirical method is science. . .
>
> Unlike the facts and data of empiricism, these theorems cannot be
> proven by anything *prior* to themselves, or i.e. higher in priority
> of universality, causality, time, position, motion, category, genus,
> etc. This is the meaning of that which is *a priori*, better known, or
> previously known.
>
> Somewhere the process comes to that for which nothing is prior. And
> this is where we come to a concept, a theorem, a principle which like
> some star just radiates its truth self-evidently--but how?
>
> This paragraph will be somewhat confusing, but this is to speak of
> that which is in Kant's terms, "noumenal", the *thing in itself*,
> entire. The noumenal reality which stands within and behind all
> phenomena (the "subtle mind" and "subtle body" which Buddhists have
> always understood) is something that the human mind already,
> concretely, congenitally (albeit often unconsciously) knows, *a
> priori* as untutored by anything outside the figure/ground *gestalt*
> of itself and the thing contemplated.
>
> Something the mind sees naturally, in that thing, of what it is, in
> itself, *noumenatively*, it knows because something in the makeup of
> the mind is like that thing, or somehow, by Nature, *is* that thing
> and so has an affinity of understanding as to that thing.
>
> Both things being natural, reason and the object of reason, the mind
> knowing itself, ineffably knows its own nature, thinks its own nature,
> works according to its nature, by which it intuits an analog of itself
> to the thing of nature contemplated and understands what it is--mind
> to thing--without intervention of anything else.
>
> Here in the self-evident truth, the mind is in synthesis with its
> object.
> --
> The triumph of Kant was supreme, in realms of thought and study where
> empiricism can provide no useful data that would not be subject in its
> interpretation to the fallacies of what he proves to be the logical
> "antinomies" where the opposite of a proposition can be proven to be
> just as valid as the proposition itself. Hence the ethical, political,
> sociological and psychological arguments that go on ad infinitum, ad
> nauseam.
>
> Kant shows this to be the case whenever arguments from physical or
> statistical data (phenomena) are given to the nonphysical "noumena" of
> subjects such as God and Ethics, let alone politics, sociology, and as
> I would argue, psychology. Such arguments can only speciously
> analogize from phenomena to noumena whenever "thing in itself" under
> study can produce no data of itself.
>
> For example: no aspect of the law, "Thou shalt not commit adultery"
> can be brought into the laboratory for observation and experiment. You
> can't carbon date it, or subject it to spectral analysis, and you
> can't speciously analogize from the adulterous white lab rat to the
> skirt-chasing, philandering human--not unless you can dig up from the
> ground somewhere the original tablets of the "Lab Rat Ten
> Commandments" to show that there is consciousness of adultery in the
> rat. And when the betrayed wife is heard to shout, "So now you come
> home at three in the morning, you dirty, sneaking rat!" Will you
> suppose to have found a significant correspondence between the lab and
> the human condition?
>
> Hardly. And for this reason the very noumenal quality of things like
> adultery, murder, human kindness, the Oedipus complex, any alleged
> lies behind the War in Iraq cannot be touched by the empirical method,
> which is bound to turn up as much date for as against the endless
> argumentation. Rather! These things are all ethical and sociological
> geometries whose axioms may be arrived upon by no other approach than
> that of Pure Reason.
>
> And what are these but analyses and syntheses to and from self-
> evident, a priori judgments, which are only so by force of their being
> universal, absolute. As such, the analytically a priori is always
> general, and never at hazard of being only speciously, or i.e.
> specifically, anecdotally true.
>
> To argue from the specific anecdote to the general is to mistake, or
> dishonestly place the specious for the specific and to falsely
> identify the specific as the general, the species of Howler monkey for
> the whole genus of monkeys.
>
> In lieu of having some knowledge at first hand in the pioneering
> logical adventures and discoveries of Aristotle, there is little hope
> of ever understanding Kant at any hand--and certainly not mine.
> --
>
JMhttp://whosenose.blogspot.comhttp://jesusexegesis.blogspot.com
