Prolegomena to any future metaphysics

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1. psteitzOct 2022
   This is a hard. Books that made me a better thinker have to be the hard ones / ones that made me change. Top two would be

   Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, Immanuel Kant. Supposedly more accessible version of Critique of Pure Reason but still very hard and mind-bending for me at least. Not just philosophy was easier after wrestling with this content.

   The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Tomas Kuhn. Made me self-aware about what scientific thinking actually is.

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2. pxcOct 2021
   My recollection from some extracurricular study of Schopenhauer in college is that he rejects Kant's metaphysical libertarianism. We can't transport the self across the division between the phenomenal and the noumenal, so even if we can exert that free will exists, we don't have epistemic grounds for meaningfully identifying ourselves with the thing in itself which we can assert has free will.

   It's been a long time, though. Maybe it's time to reread and then pick up this book!

   For those interested, the two source texts to consider in light of this book if you don't want to dig too deep, Kant's Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics and Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation are both public domain and relatively accessible/clear for the subject matter.

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3. coldteaDec 2020
   Here's a quick, fun, path, that goes all over the place, but covers lots of areas, while being accessible to a tech guy:

   1) Plato's dialogues. They are easy to find, including online, and easy to read.

   A.N Whitehead once commented on Plato’s thought: “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. I do not mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubtfully extracted from his writings. I allude to the wealth of general ideas scattered through them”.

   And that's not some liberal arts philosopher that doesn't understand science. That's the genius writer and mathematician A.N Whitehead that worked with Bertrand Russell on Principia Mathematica.

   2) Aristotle, The Metaphysics

   3) Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics

   4) David Hume's: A Treatise of Human Nature and/or An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

   5) Nietchze, The gay science (meaning "the joyful science")

   6) Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

   7) Existentialism Is a Humanism, Sartre

   8) The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Karl Popper

   9) Against Method, Paul Feyerabend

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4. mbatemanJul 2010
   Hi, I'm an ABD philosopher.

   The deepest and most interesting philosophical books are generally difficult and best accompanied by some form of instruction. This is true regardless of how clearly (e.g. Plato) or esoterically (e.g. Kant) written they are. There are some good secondary sources that can help but it's far preferable to be able to talk to an expert in a one-on-one or smallish setting. It would take a long time to explain why this is the case, so I'll just leave it as an assertion here.

   Okay, that being said, I wouldn't want to dissuade anyone from reading philosophy on their own. Here are some recommendations for books and articles that can be (more) fruitfully read on one's own. Anything marked with a + is a secondary source. Ideally I'd be giving you excerpts from each of these in a reader for a course. I'm going to skip some people like Aristotle who should be approached in carefully selected excerpts or with a guide, and also some more obvious things that almost everyone with a college education has read, like Descartes' Meditations or Plato's Republic.

   On Fate, Alexander of Aphrodisias

   + Problems from Locke, Mackie

   Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, Spinoza

   + The Courtier and the Heretic, Stewart (on Spinoza and Leibniz)

   Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Hume

   Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant

   Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, Kant

   On Liberty, Mill

   "Modern Moral Philosophy", Anscombe

   "What is Capitalism?", Rand

   The Bounds of Sense, Strawson

   + "Rawls on Justice", Nagel

   "The Naturalists Return", Kitcher

   Sources of Normativity, Korsgaard

   This crowd in particular might be interested in some of Frege's work as well, e.g. "What is a Function?" and "Sense and Reference."

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5. viccisMay 2025
   This gives a good survey: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hume/#CopyPrin

   >All our simple ideas in their first appearance are deriv’d from simple impressions, which are correspondent to them, and which they exactly represent.

   >...he is so confident the correspondence holds that he challenges anyone who doubts it to produce an example of a simple impression without a corresponding simple idea, or a simple idea without a corresponding simple impression...

   In other words, Hume thought that your ideas about things are a result, and only a result, of your impression of the thing. Knowledge must be, then, a posteriori. Indeed he reduces our "selves" into "bundles", which is to say nothing more than an accumulation of the various impressions we've received while living.

   The problem with this is that it raises the question: How do we come up with novel thoughts that are not just reproducing things we have observed? (This is called synthetic a priori knowledge)

   You can see at this point that this question is very similar to the one posed to AI right now. If it's nothing more than a bundle of information related to impressions it has received (by way of either text or image corpora), then can it really ever create anything novel that doesn't draw directly from an impression?

   Kant delivered a decisive response to this with his Critique of Pure Reason and his Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics. He focused initially on Hume's biggest skepticism (about causality). Hume claimed that when we expect an effect from a cause, it's not because we're truly understanding how an effect can proceed from a cause, but rather because we've just observed it often enough that we expect it out of habit. Kant addresses this and expands it to any synthetic a priori statements.

   He does so by dispensing with the idea that we can truly know everything there is to know about concepts. We simply schematize an understanding of the objects after observing them over time and use our sense of reason to generalize that collection of impressions into objects in our mind. From there, we can apply categorical reasoning that can be applied without the need for empirical evidence, and then produce synthetic a priori statements, to include expecting a specific effect from a specific cause. This is opposed to Hume, who said:

   >It is far better, Hume concludes, to rely on “the ordinary wisdom of nature”, which ensures that we form beliefs “by some instinct or mechanical tendency”, rather than trusting it to “the fallacious deductions of our reason”

   Hume's position was somewhat of a dead end, and Kant rescued philosophy (particularly epistemology and metaphysics) from it in many peoples' estimation.

   The big difference between us and LLMs is that (right now), LLMs don't have a thinking component that transcends their empirical data modeling. It is conceivable that someone might produce an "AI" system that uses the LLM as a sensory apparatus and combines it with some kind of pure logic reasoning system (ironically, the kind of thing that old school AI focused on) to give it that kind of reasoning power. Because without something applying reasoning, all we have is some statistical patterns that we hope can give the best answer, but which can't guarantee anything.

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6. ethnJun 2021
   Hume would not have considered the analytical response as adequate indeed neither does Kant. Only a synthetic treatment of the subject of logic and causality itself could resolve the Scottish Skepticism--that's why these books do not have a comparable degree of profundity. It is the synthetic movement from experience to intuition and back to concept which is the great achievement. The analytical treatment provided by Prolegomena does not afford this.

   It is not intended as an introduction to Critique of Pure Reason it works from the conclusions of that work and why those conclusions are necessary.

   We can remember the title isn't Prolegomena to Critique of Pure Reason but instead Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics.

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