Some discussion of the upcoming test. That’ll take place on March 10th, two weeks from today.Back to DesCartes. Founded Rationalism, which believes in certain knowledge apart from sense experience.
The rationalists were one major influence on Kant. The other major influence was the Empiricists. They believed in probable knowledge from sense experience. They believe that analytic knowledge is necessary. Hume was an empiricist. Empiricists don’t believe in causality, because causes cannot be observed, only sequences of events.
Lack of causality was a major sticking point for Kant. He concluded that causality must exist, and thus must be able to be sensed. To reconcile this, Kant redefined the concept of a sense experience. “The Manifold of Sensation” is the enormous quantity of sensory experience available to and immersing a person at all times. This manifold of sensation is never directly experienced. It is instead interpreted through “categories and intuition”, a cognitive framework of sorts which applies to all humans and produces the things and effects we observe. These categories and intuitions are inescapable. Kant maintains that causality is one of these categories; whether causes actually exist or not is uncertain, but humans function in such a way as to experience the world in a manner consistent with causality.
Kant divided the world into the Noumena, things as they really are, and the Phenomena, things as we sense and observe. It is impossible to truly and unambiguously know anything about the Noumena, because we are only able to observe the Phenomena. The one exception to this principle is ethical knowledge.
There are two primary problems with the Kantian Categorical Imperative. First, one can relatively easily construct examples which seem to contradict Kant’s idea of good. What if telling the truth about something will result in an evil? Second, there is an underlying epistimeological problem with the whole Noumena/Phenomena issue. If you cannot actually no anything about the Noumena, you cannot actually know whether the Noumena exists.
Fichte was a Kantian. Not long after Kant’s death, Fichte and other like-minded Kantians discarded the concept of the Noumena. All the world was Phenomena.
After Kant, there is a progression through Hegel and Marx to Nietzsche and then Freud.
Nietzsche put forth the theory that values were arbitrary. It was important to have values that would sustain a culture, but the substance of those values was irrelevant. However, if you believe that values are arbitrary, that belief undermines the ability of your values to sustain anything.
Freud has the idea of the Ego, the person you are; the Superego, the person you wish to be who lives in perfect accord with your values; and the Id, the subrational bundle of wants and desires which exists in humans.
After Freud comes Weber, who was a proponent of sociology. Was interested in values as an expression of cultures. What values does a society have, and what is the utility of those values? Weber has continued to be influential, while Freud has largely been discredited.
The Sophists were contemporaries of Socrates, and philosophical descendants of the original Skeptics. They were interested primarily in rhetoric. The supported themselves by hiring themselves out as teachers of argument. They held that rhetoric was THE science, since skepticism had proved that you could never know anything but appearances, and rhetoric was the science of manipulating appearances. Protagoras was the first major sophist. Claimed that humans were the measure of all things. Callicles followed him, and held that conventional morality was simply a set of conventions dreamed up by the weak to restrain the strong. The last sophist we’ll be taking a look at was Thrasymachus. He carried sophistry to its natural conclusion. He held that good and evil were not real; that good and evil were tied to an objective meaning which was itself arbitrary and meaningless. All that mattered was the will to power.