06.14.11
Kantian framework persists despite endless ‘refutations’
http://darwiniana.com/2011/06/13/korner-book-on-kant/comment-page-1/#comment-358078
People have been taking potshots at Kant for over two centuries. Every would be philosopher, to prove himself against the main gunslinger in town, finds a series of quibbles that refutes him once and for all. Rorty is one of the latest here. It is hard to think he understood Kant at all.
Kant has been ‘refuted’ more times than anyone in the history of philosophy. But he always springs back to life. The reason is elusive, but is related to the fact that Schopenhauer, who eliminated all the pesky details in Kant’s formulation, nonetheless persisted in the bare bones assertion of the truth of transcendental idealism with its clarifying distinction of representation and thing in itself. That made it obvious that Kant’s framework is like a giant sketch used to animate something behind it, a deeper truth. The point then was to apprehend the basic intuition about phenomenon/noumenon and see the whole structure at a glance.
The issue of the categories was transformed by Shopenhauer, but the basic framework remained.
We can thus see that the details in Kant don’t really determine the cogency of the overall result.
The most striking case of this lies in Schopenhauer’s realization that the Upansishads were really an early form of the same set of insights.
The Gurdjieff Con » From Kant to the Upanishads said,
June 14, 2011 at 11:50 am
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