For the sake of not repeating things already posted, I wont.
What I will say is, this reading was interesting! I found that I was comparing Kant and Hegel to Herodotus and Thucydides; and asking myself not which of the two was the father of science or philosophy, but which of the two would be considered the more relevant and progressive. It seems like a simple question to ask, and it kind of is. But during a time where science and philosophy were intersecting in a beautiful way, AND during the time of the Renaissance, it seems like a good question to think about.
With that in mind, I also began to think about how the time period of which Kant and Hegel were contemporaries played into the grand scheme of things. The concept of a "new science" came up, which also stuck with me. Also, I was intrigued by the recognition of the decreasing distance between man and nature, which Fred had brought up in class on Friday. This whole reading really had me asking myself, during a time of intellectual rebirth, how do science and philosophy fit in? What standards do they have to meet? What precedents do they have to go against?
The eighteenth-century philosophers use "a priori" for knowlegde that is common to all men without being based on observation or experience. This seems to make such knowledge innat or inborn.
Kant believed that there must be cetain a priori knowledge for people to be able to know the world around them at all. He thought a basic sense of time and space was innate, and necessary for people to understand everything that they saw and experienced. The advances in mathematics and physics since Kant have shown that both space and time are more complex than we once thought, but philosophers are still trying to decide if Kant was right about the existence of certain a priori knowledge that enables us to gain further knowledge.
Hegel's ideas were similar to Kant's in one way. He thought that the knower had an intimate relationship with what is known. But in many ways Hgel was quite different from Kant, and more extreme. He did not believe, as Kant did, that there was a reality behind or independent of man's perception of reality, a "thing in itself." Instead, Hegel believed that man's thoughts and perceptipns about reality created reality. And he pressed this to claim that mankind's constantly evolving thoughts, from a thesis, opposed by an antithesis, to create a synthesis, meant that history was a process of progress, to ever higher levels of synthesis. And for Hegel, the purest expression of this evolving synthesis was the evolving and improving state.
Kant's system was more static than Hegel's He sought to discover both physical and moral constants that were a priori, before knowledge or experience, and was relatively uninterested in history. For hegel, however, it was history itself that created valuablel knowledge and behavior.
to Christians: "But during a time where science and philosophy were intersecting in a beautiful way" they still are! I think the fact we can discuss history and science for an entire mod is proof of this.
I had a question to ask on page 59 the word connection was being used a lot, but but it wasn't really clear what he meant by it, if someone could explain that passage to me so it makes sense that would be sort of nice.
I thought the part about Hegel being called and old man when he was young was interesting because it goes to show that people who devote their lives to asking why, and professions like this really were interested since birth, it also makes me think of all the people I know who are old mentally, by the time they die they could be considered genius' and their work may become famous.
I also wanted to ask who actively read this before the photo copy was made, the underlining is so random...
I'm afraid this is coming very late, but, some things I thought were interesting and not too repetitive:
- Kant: Priori are the necessary context for the human mind to grapple with the whats and whys. Reason and morality are inherent instruments for humans to interact with and understand the world, and morality/dignity is not a constraint but "natural conditions for human freedom" (61).
- In conjunction with Hegel and the schools of thoughts that came from his philosophy: history was a "great transformer" (64) and that it was in an ongoing dialectic process that was moving to a higher, better synthesis-- something more complex, more integrated, fuller. But that implies that there is an end to be reached, yes? And that is where fascism and communism hit a wall, because "there is no final form of society". (490)
To Grace-- as far as I could understand, the "connections" the writer meant were between cause and effect, and what Kant believed was that "nature must conform to causality because to understand what is happening in nature humans need a framework of cause-to-effect in the context of priori (space and time).
If anybody else wants to clear that up anymore, that would be very welcome. I had to read those pages (59-61) multiple times.
Also! The idea that really stuck with me was Hegel's extension of Decartes's "I think therefore I am" to an I-think-therefore-what-I-think-about-exists ("the real is the rational and the rational is the real"), and the obliteration of man as "simply a passive receiver". Which implies a secular existence of everything, relaying the responsibility of creation not to a deity but to humankind.
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