When i first read the text i barely understand what the text was saying. After the lecture and the seminar i tried to go through the questions again. i find that i had misunderstood alot of things.
A Priori is an analytic judgment of things in the world without looking into the world for example ‘all bodies have extenstion. Therefore Kant questions this metaphysic ways of producing knowledge that can we really generate knowledge without looking into the world by this pure reason? The analytic judgments cannot be verified and does not truly answer questions about the world. Kant then suggested to investigate more into this pure reason, if there is other conditions or possibilities to get knowledge. Kants agreed that we could start by having knowledge of the world on how it is in itself. We can start by assuming of how we perceive the world with our experiences and then we need to investigate more into methodological process. Knowledge should be critical investigated. Only god can see the world and understand of how it is in itself. But for us human let us climb down from the objective view of the world, and structure our experiences through category and forms of space and time.
as for Socrates, he does not believe that knowledge is perception. Socrates was trying to give birth to the definition of knowledge. He doubted Theaetetus’ definition ‘knowledge is perception.’ If we producing knowledge with ears and ears, that is our perception. Perceptions are often ‘errant’ or can be false but Knowledge is unerring, cannot be false. Empiricism believed that knowledge originated from perception through sense of experience. Therefore Socrates is actually agreed with the concept of empiricism that we need to experience things through our eyes and ears first then together with our perception we produce knowledge. For example we see one cylinder shape of thing and then with our perception we know that it is a bottle.
In the seminar, we also discussed about how we have to put knowledge we have about the world into concepts so that it makes sense. Though one question was raised up in our group. Is there only 12 categories from Kant proposed concept ? then is our knowledge limited in these 12 categories only ? Kant’s catagories are actually very wide. Kant said that we can have knowledge of this world in our perception and also can question other concepts of the world itself apart from our perception. The knowledge that cannot put into these concepts considered nonsense eg. metaphysics. but this doesn't mean that metaphysics is not important either. According to Kant, to gain knowledge beyond this 12 categories is impossible. [?] Kant is an empirical realist and transcendental idealism. That means we have knowledge about the world but at the same time we know that we have to investigate them as well. we also discuss if "knowledge" eventually actually is the analysed piece of information as far as we know ? knowledge seem to be more of the piece of information which has a more provable theory ? of how we categorises the world with concept of the world, up until the time being ?
There are still terms that cause me confusion sometimes whether they are same or different like is priori, posteriori and synthetic & analytic judgement ?
philosophy is difficult :(
I also felt after the lecture there were a few points I didn't understand, so don't worry you're not the only one :-)
ReplyDeleteAs far as I know, I think a priori knowledge relies on analytic judgement in that it doesn't require any experience beforehand : for example, when you say "All bodies have extension", the predicate of extension is included in the concept of body, so you don't have to verify it to know that.
It's different from synthetic judgement where you have to investigate the world to verify it, and that's why this relates to a posteriori judgement.
Now in regards to what you said about the "world in itself", I agree with what you said: only God can have an unbiased understanding of it, and because of that I believe we can't really relate to anything "in itself". We can't transcend our position in the world, and thus I believe there's no point in discussing concepts "in themselves".
I like the fact that you raised the question of the 12 categories in your seminar groups : it's a really interesting discussion, and I'd love to hear more about it ! According to Johan, these categories are quite basic ones, so we don't really have to experience them to know them (so they're a priori), I wonder if there are any other categories he hasn't thought about and that are a priori as well!
I think that you have asked an interesting question with “is a priori = an analytical judgement?”
ReplyDeleteTo add to earlier comment I have an example:
During a lecture these words were discussed. And as far as I understand they mean the same thing, even though they are two different ways of saying the same thing. An example that was mentioned was:
“There are pupils in this class” = analytical judgement.
“There are 39 pupils in the class” = synthetic judgement.
An analytical judgement means that what is being stated does not need for someone to see if the statement is true. As in “there are pupils in this class”, because the word “class” is a word that in itself means “a group of pupils”. So we know without double checking that it is true that there are pupils in a class.
A synthetic judgement means that we can only know that the statement is true by experiencing/testing. To know if the statement “there are 39 pupils in the class” is true we have to calculate the pupils in the room to see if the statement is true.
Now I believe that to say “to have knowledge a priori” means the same as the knowledge being an analytical judgement. We do not have to have experience to know a priori to be true.
To say that a knowledge is “a posteriori” means that it is a knowledge that requires experience before we know the knowledge to be true. It is therefore equal to a synthetic judgement.
I hope I did not misunderstand your question!
I like the contrast between the post prior- and post theme 1. It really shows that you've understood more about what the texts were about, which is good! Nice to see you bring up the categories of understanding! I also see that others have tried to answer your question so I wont bother answering myself hehe.
ReplyDeleteMy point is basically that I like that you explained what you understood after the lecture/seminar in simpler terms rather than before when you just used words found in the text. You did a pretty good job then though, so keep it up!
Hi!
ReplyDeleteI can’t agree with you more that philosophy is not an easy subject, but I think you made a great summary on the key concepts for this theme. Such as ‘A Priori is an analytic judgment of things in the world without looking into the world’, and ‘Knowledge should be critical investigated through methodological process’ as well as you suggested that we should climb down from the objective view of the world, and structure our experiences through category and forms of space and time. Further, the discussion from your group is also very interesting and tightly related to the theme. Similar questions popped in my head too when I studied the 12 categories. Personally I think the 12 categories here are quite basic but its function is more important for its value. In my opinion, I will leave the question quite open and assume there would be other ones, but this kind of assumption is very hard to prove. Anyway, good job on your reflection. Thanks for sharing your insightful thoughts!