Critique of Pure Reason
Immanuel Kant's Critique of pure reason is one of the most rewarding and difficult of all philosophical works. Norman Kemp Smith's translation is immensely valuable, not simply because he rendered Kant's language into readable English, but also because his own extensive understanding of the Critique made him acutely aware of the pitfalls of translation. This text is that of the second edition of 1787, with an additional translation of all first edition passages which in the second edition were either altered or omitted. For this reissue of Norman Kemp Smith's classic 1929 edition, Howard Caygill has contributed a new Preface, setting this translation into the context both of Kemp Smith's own life and work, and of his influence on Kant scholarship.
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- Logic is the study of what is true, and also what is provable.
In the most ideal circumstances, these are the same. Logic has been decomposed into model theory (the study of what is true) and proof theory (the study of what is provable). So much of modern day rationalism is unmoored proof theory. Many of them would do well to read Kant's "The Critique of Pure Reason."
Unfortunately, in the very complex systems we often deal with, what is true may not be provable and many things which are provable may not be true. This is why it's equally as important to hone your skills of discernment, and practice reckoning as well as reasoning. I think of it as hearing "a ring of truth," but this is obviously unfalsifiable and I must remain skeptical against myself when I believe I hear this. It should be a guide toward deeper investigation, not the final destination.
Many people are led astray by thinking. It is seductive. It should be more commonly said that thinking is but a conscious stumbling block on the way to unconscious perfection.
- 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.
- It has become imperative, if anyone wants to seriously critique Land, that they gain a strong familiarity with the work of Immanuel Kant. Land's reading of Kant is perhaps the most interesting, and certainly the most politically crucial, of our generation. Start with the Critique of Pure Reason.
I don't think Curtis Yarvin is as complex or interesting as Land anyway. Unless someone can share an article of his that comes remotely close to the brilliance of Land's work.
- As per Kant:
Time: inner sense, intuition of continuity, unity
Space: outer sense, intuition of objects
Its a bit more complex but that’s a basic summary from the guy who came up with the “space and time” thing. Read the “Transcendental Aesthetic” in the Critique of Pure Reason for more.
- It can be a grand number of things, but lack of the highschool curriculum is unlikely to be one of them, in my opinion. Rest assured, you're far from the only one struggling, I'd say most people I've encountered in academic philosophy tend to struggle a tad more with it than (their) other fields of studies. It is what it is, really, it sort of comes with the territory.
Of course there are just some that are less accessible than others, due to writing style or size of their philosophical project (Hegel is an example of both of those qualities). A lot of French philosophy since the second world war, Baudrillard being no exception, is generally characterized as such as well amongst the anglo audience, although I don't think that this is entirely fair.
I'd say the best thing you can do is never attempt to understand it through Wikipedia, but pick up a full book instead and read it a second time if the argument doesn't make sense the first time. Of course there are some authors I would avoid as a beginner, but someone like Kant is fine for even your first philosopher, and is amongst the biggest names in modern philosophy. Prolegomena and Critique of Pure Reason are two books of his about the same thing written in two opposite ways, the former from easy to difficult, the latter vice versa, I always recommend those.
Sartre and Wittgenstein are both somewhat odd for a contemporary philosophy course. I'm curious why they chose that arrangement. Nevertheless, being able to hold a conversation about either of them is already quite solid, plus you get three philosophers for the price of two! :)
- My favorite, and what I still think is the best Benjamin essay, is On the Concept of History[0], but that one is a bit tough as a first essay, perhaps a better starting place (and where most people start with him) is Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction[1]. There's a pretty big gap between those two essays, not intellectually but theoretically, as in it will take you a while, probably, before you understand how they're related.
In general, if you want an actual "start" to studying any modern philosophy, you've got to go with Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (go with the NK Smith or Guyer-Woods translations, though I prefer the former). Then you can start reading forward, Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, then, of course, Marx's Capital, vol 1. Then from there, I think you would do well to read Nietzsche's Geneaology of Morals and/or Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and after that really you should read Freud, at the very least the Interpretation of Dreams, and Heidegger, either the Origin of the Work of Art or The Question Concerning Technology. And from there, you can basically just read whatever you want and you'll understand it.
My only further advice is to study all those texts first, before trying anything else, otherwise you'll end up like the people in this comments section.
[0]https://www.sfu.ca/~andrewf/CONCEPT2.html [1]https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/benjamin.pdf
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