iKant

99

Now it may be noted as a sure and useful warning, that general logic, if viewed as an organon, is always a logic of illusion, that is, dialectical.  For logic teaches us nothing whatsoever regarding the content of knowledge, but lays down only the formal conditions of agreement with the understanding; and since these conditions can tell us nothing at all as to the objects concerned, any attempt to use this logic as an instrument (organon) that professes to extend and enlarge our knowledge can end in nothing but mere talk — in which, with a certain plausibility, we maintain, or, if such be our choice, attack, any and every possible assertion.

Such instruction is quite unbecoming the dignity of philosophy.  The title ‘dialectic’ has therefore come to be otherwise employed, and has been assigned to logic, as a critique of dialectical illusion. This is the sense in which it is to be understood in this work.  


Comments
Comments

To know what questions may reasonably be asked is already a great and necessary proof of sagacity and insight.

– For if a question is absurd in itself and calls for an answer where none is required, it not only brings shame on the propounder of the question, but may betray an incautious listener into absurd answers, thus presenting, as the ancients said, the ludicrous spectacle of one man milking a he-goat and the other holding a sieve underneath.
Comments
Comments

Notes

General Logic deals with both empirical and pure knowledge of reason

Transcendental Logic concerns itself with the laws of understanding and of reason solely in so far as they relate a priori to objects


Comments
Comments

The understanding can intuit nothing, the senses can think nothing. Only through their union can knowledge arise. But that is no reason for confounding the contribution of either with that of the other; rather is it a strong reason for carefully separating and distinguishing the one from the other. We therefore distinguish the science of the rules of sensibility in general, that is, aesthetic, from the science of the rules of the understanding in general, that is, logic.


Comments
Comments

Thoughts without content are empty, intuition without concepts are blind.


Comments
Comments

And sometimes - just sometimes - Kant goes easy on you. Haha

Our knowledge springs from two fundamental sources of the mind; the first is the capacity of receiving representations (receptivity for impressions), the second is the power of knowing an object through these representations (spontaneity [in the production] of concepts).

Through the first an object is given to us, through the second the object is thought in relation to that given representation (which is a mere determination of the mind).

Intuition and concepts constitute, therefore, the elements of all our knowledge, os that neither concepts without an intuition in some way corresponding to them, nor intuition without concepts, can yield knowledge.

Both may be either pure or empirical. When they contain sensation (which presupposes the actual presence of the object), they are empirical. When there is no mingling of sensation with the representation, they are pure.

Sensation may be entitled the material of sensible knowledge. Pure intuition, therefore, contains only the form under which something is intuited; the pure concept only the form of the thought of an object in general. Pure intuitions or pure concepts alone are possible a priori, empirical intuitions and empirical concepts only a posteriori.


Comments
Comments
Just taking a little break in between chapters ;p

Just taking a little break in between chapters ;p


Comments
Comments

Conclusion of the Transcendental Aesthetic

Here, then, in pure a priori intuitions, space and time, we have one of the factors required for solution of the general problem of transcendental philosophy: how are synthetic a priori judgments possible? When in a priori judgment we seek to go out beyond the given concept, we come in the a priori intuitions upon that which cannot be discovered in the concept but which is certainly found a priori in the intuition corresponding to the concept, and can be connected with it synthetically.  Such judgments, however, thus based on intuition, can never extend beyond objects of possible experience.


Comments
Comments

In natural theology, in thinking an object [God], who not only can never be an object of intuition to us but cannot be an object of sensible intuition to himself, we are careful to remove the conditions of time and space from his intuition - for all his knowledge must be intuition, and not thought, which always involves limitations. But with what right can we do this if we have previously made time and space forms of things in themselves, and such as would remain, as a priori conditions of the existence of things, even though the things themselves be removed? As conditions of all existence in general, they must also be conditions of the existence of God.

from General Observations on Transcendental Aesthetic (IV) 


Comments
Comments

For if we regard space and time as properties which, if they are to be possible at all, must be found in things in themselves, and if we reflect on the absurdities in which we are then involved, in that two infinite things, which are not substances, nor anything actually inhering in substances, must yet have existence, nay, must be the necessary condition of the existence of all things, and moreover must continue to exist, even although all existing things be removed, - we cannot blame the good Berkeley for degrading bodies to mere illusion.  Nay, even our own existence, in being made thus dependent upon the self-subsistent reality of a non-entity, such as time, would necessarily be changed with it into sheer illusion - an absurdity of which no one has yet been guilty.

from General Observations on Transcendental Aesthetic (III)


Comments
Comments
15
To Tumblr, Love Metalab