To be perfectly honest, I had a really
hard time understanding Kant when I read the preface to Critique of
Pure Reason. Being totally uninitiated in the field of philosophy
combined with a heavy text proved challenging to say the least. I
tried to form some sort of understanding but never got to the point
where I felt like I actually knew what I was writing about.
Plato's text was actually relatively
pleasant to read, even though it was a lot of text. It gave me an
introduction and some understanding about dialectics, and I could see
some value in the method by looking at something from different
angles and not accepting your first answer that might fit the
question as correct.
I did however start reading way too
late and never gave myself the time to reflect, nor the chance to
re-read the passages I didn't understand. This can be seen in my
pre-theme reflection that I rightfully got some critique on. I agree
with it, and now over a week later I'm really not satisfied with that
performance.
The lecture brought me some clarity,
and I started to understand the “school book version” of Kant and
his trancendental idealism. However, while I noted during the whole
lecture and tried to understand what was being said, I'm still not
totally sure how I would analyze a substance myself using Kant's
cathegories and forms of intuition.
During the seminar our small group
spent a lot of time discussing how we understood the lecture of the
theme, and we asked ourselves the question related to the lecture “If
I look at a cup at a table, turn arround and look back. Is it the
same cup?”, we agreed on yes, because that is how we perceive the
world through our faculties of knowledge.
Unfortunately for everyone, we were the
biggest seminar group during week 1, due to me being part of the
problem by being a temp. This lead to only about half of the groups
had time to raise their questions before the whole class. Never the
less, some interesting discussions came up related to Kant's
statements “Perception without conception is blind” and
“Conception without perception is empty”.
To round this off I learned my lesson
and started with my preparation for theme 2 earlier, and I hope that
it can be seen in my pre-reflection. There are still things I don't
understand in that regard, but I feel like I was better prepared this
time arround.
Good that you've learned from that mistake, but really, I think that we are kind of supposed to be a little confused in the beginning since we have to rethink what we've learned before so it's only natural. You seem to have understood it quite well now! I also somewhat agree with you regarding the cup-example, but then again, someone else might think that it's in fact not the same cup, so perhaps there really is no true answer to that question, only perceptions :) Nice reflection!
SvaraRaderaHi!
SvaraRaderaGood job with this honest reflection. We all learn from mistakes, and it is refreshing to read that you own up to maybe not spending enough time preparing for this theme. It is nice to learn to the future themes! But yeah, the Kant text was veery extensive and I don't think anyone could prepare for the amount of time it took to try and understand it.
It is nice that you use the word dialectic, one of the main concepts from theme 2, when discussing this theme! Perhaps you already used that word, or perhaps you are connecting the themes to each other. Great work either way! ;)
Hello fellow blogger,
SvaraRaderaI also underestimated the amount of reading for this theme and got started to late. But you learn from your mistakes!
Fun reading that you did manage to get some clarity after the lecture and able to write this reflection based on that. I think that this reflection is a really opportunity to write about what you have learned. And it would've been interesting to know your reflections on what you think the point of this theme was. As an example what was the purpose with the texts we read and where do you stand on those points of view.
Really good question about the cup! Too bad you didn't get the opportunity to ask it during the seminar. Keep up the good work!
Great that you could pinpoint what you could've done better, I myself sometimes have a hard time figuring out why things went wrong. Was also in one of the larger groups and could feel the that there was too little time for questions, hopefully it won't happen too often.
SvaraRaderaI must agree that Plato´s text was easier to comprehend, there was a certain flow and he did explain roughly what he was after - Kant on the other hand used brute force and arguments to get his point across.
Considering you not re-reading the texts, I personally think you got a pretty good hang of the basics of the meaning of them in order to answer the questions. I do, however wish that you'd maybe talked about concepts like the categories of understanding, analytic/synthetic judgement and so on. Quite a fancy read nonetheless and it's good to see what you thought you were lacking in terms of preperations for the theme.
SvaraRaderaKeep it up!
Thanks for the comment, I actually don't know why I left out the analytic/synthetic judgements in my post reflection. Guess I was too focused on the negatives. I have however commented on other peoples blogs about it, and just for the sake of it I will paste it here:
RaderaWhat defines an analytic judgement is that the predicate of the judgement is part of the subjects concept. E.g. "All bachelors are unmaried".
A synthetic judgement could be "All bachelors are unhappy", the previous example was analytic because unmarried is part of the definition of a bachelor, but unhappy is not, hence why it's synthetic. In this case we can not know if the predicate is true without empirical facts that we get a posteriori.
The interesting part is when we come to synthetic a priori knowledge, according to Kant (as I understand it), "2+3 = 5" is synthetic, because the predicate "equals 5" is not part of the subjects "2" and "3"s concept. We still know that the equation is true, and as far as I know this is an example of synthetic a priori knowledge.
Hej :) I like how you compare Kant's way of thinking to your experience with empiricism in school. Actually finding an absolute truth might take more time than one person has to spend on it. But I think thats what Kant wanted to point out in his text. By changing the perspective you can reach high goals and learn something completely new about the world. Socrates way of thinking might not lead to empiricism, which in my opinion makes a lot of things difficult, because we need to describe our world in some way. By saying that everybody perceives things in their own way, nobody would ever feel the same about one particular thing. As you wrote in your text understanding the "schoolbook version of Kant" points out how difficult it actually is to really understand what he meant with his full version. The comparison to the schoolbook version made me understand how complex the topic is.
SvaraRaderaHi!
SvaraRaderaThank you for a great blog post. I do not think you were the only one that did not fully understand the text of Kant's the preface to the Critique of Pure Reason. I myself had difficulty understanding everything of what Kant says, I assume that as long as we understand the basic concept of what Kant tries to say, have we come a long way! I also agree that it was easier to understand Plato's text, Theaetetus. Good luck with the preparations of the rest of the themes.
/Paul