Now You Know

What are you doing at this moment? Well, of course, you’re reading my blog post. But, what were you doing yesterday at this time? Were you watching Netflix, reading a book? What will you be doing tomorrow at this time? Will you be eating some Easy Mac, doing homework? I’ll go out on a whim here and say your answers to each of these questions will be different. And even if I’m wrong, and you’ll be doing the same thing three days in a row, you’d agree that each of the instances of what you’re doing are different, right? Well, Hegel would sure have some things to say to you.

Continue reading

Hegel on Identity

Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit explores his views of identity. Like previous philosophers such as Kant and Descartes, he forms his own definition of what identity consists of. He deduces that the first knowledge we obtain is immediate and therefore the attempt to describe its identity is also immediate (90). He defines “sense-certainty” as the genuine feeling that comes from sensory experience. In Hegel’s view, sense-certainty seems to be the most certain form of gaining information because it provides the most truth to the individual. However, he attacks this “certainty” in the next sentence because he knows that out of this certainty, it makes it impossible to determine a deviance from this certainty. From this, Hegel also deduces that “consciousness, for its part, is in this certainty only as a pure ‘I’” (91), which means that the ability of self-consciousness is the purest form of knowing oneself. When you know yourself, you can place qualities on yourself. As you find out about the world around you, the objects in the environment can also contain qualities that you first learned by knowing yourself. He concludes his paragraph that “on the contrary, the thing is, and it is, merely because it is” (91). This statement sounds rather amusing and oversimplified but it provides a thought-provoking idea that the qualities of an object are present and that the reason the qualities are present is irrelevant.

Later in his philosophy paper, Hegel proposes a simple thought experiment to examine if qualities are universal. Suppose it is night time right now and “we write down this truth; a truth cannot lose anything by being written down, any more than it can lose anything through our preserving it. If now, this noon, we look again at the written truth we shall have to say that it has become stale” (95). In this thought experiment, Hegel proves that not every quality is everlasting or universal. Some things we label as qualities are not what someone else would consider. While it may be nighttime right now in this side of the world, it is bright and sunny on the other half of earth. Based on the perspective of the person, the qualities we give to objects around us can be contrary to the qualities based off of a different person’s perspective. Ultimately, this provides some relativism and uncertainty when we set out to define the qualities of the world around us.

Censoring AP

After reading the article about cutting funding to the AP US History program in Oklahoma, I did not know what to think. On the one hand, I was not surprised. As a native Georgian (where education is not a top priority), bills and laws like this seem to come up a lot. On the other, the justification for this law seemed to be particularly flimsy and transparent. Continue reading

The Here and Now

In Phenomenology of Spirit, G.W.F. Hegel discusses the meaning of “here” and “now” to determine how they relate to truth and “universality” (95, 96). Hegel indicates that at the exact moment of “now,” that is the “truest knowledge” because at that exact moment it is true that we are in the “now,” but he goes on to indicate how “now” simultaneously lacks all aspects of truth (91).  Continue reading

Heart of Darkness

My older brother and I had a discussion one night during Winter Break. Granted, I was ready to go to sleep and I was not ready to have a long discussion on philosophical matters. And what he said does not represent what we both thought at all. It was something that he thought was interesting and worth talking about, even though the topic itself was a little taboo.

Continue reading

The Implications of “Here”

“‘Here’ itself does not vanish; on the contrary, it abides constant in the vanishing of the house, the tree, etc., and is indifferently house or tree. Again, therefore, the ‘This’ shows itself to be a mediated simplicity, or a universality” (61).

I think that Hegel’s theory concerning “Here” is absolutely fascinating for its implications with regards to “universality” and “consciousness.” Hegel claims that “Here” is a term used to describe the placement or position in which a certain object resides. The word is constant. Just because its fixation changes, such as shifting from defining the placement of a dog to the placement of a cat, does not mean that “Here” “vanishes,” or takes on another meaning. It merely shifts focus from one object to another.

The theory of “Here” is imperative in the explanation of Hegel’s belief in universality, or the essence of a thing. Although “Here” can be used to describe many different objects, its meaning does not change based off of its fixation. With whatever object it references, “Here” refers to the placement of position of a thing not the thing in which is describes. Therefore, “Here” in itself never disappears or changes in meaning; rather, its focus shifts depending on the way in which it is being used to define the placement of an object. Its essence is never transformed.

The theories of “Here” and “universality” all tie into Hegel’s overarching theme of consciousness or cognitive awareness. As humans, we are constantly using our senses to gain knowledge and data from our environment. In order to quantify and then analyze such information, we need markers such as “This” and “Here.” These terms allow us to determine the meaning of and interpret the details our senses recognize. Such techniques provide us with the ability to ascertain the essence of the things we run into during our travels so that we may be cognitively aware of the environment surrounding and our placement in such an environment. Therefore, “Here” serves not only as a way in which to define the position of objects near and around us but also as a facilitator of the discovery of our own placement in the world.

I Kant Understand This

Immanuel Kant’s writing is very difficult to understand, as many unfamiliar terms and stipulative definitions are made within the passage which is used throughout the piece. In “On The Original Synthetic Unity of Apperception”, new concepts or stipulative definitions are given in italics. From what I read, these seem to be the key concepts:

  • Intuition: Presentation that can be given prior to all thought(B132)
  • Pure Apperception: A spontaneous act of presentation  not belonging to sensibility(B132)
  • a priori: knowledge obtained without experience(introduction)

 

The passage itself is a foundational piece in which terms are defined and used in order to argue a higher claim.

This was a very hard read, although the introduction to the “Critique of Pure Reason” helped.

From what I read, Kant is influenced by the philosopher Hume(Introduction XIV), where Hume denies any sort of unity between the senses in the human mind, Kant disagrees, saying that, “…the unity of the mind is necessary, because without such unity there would be no cognition at all”(Introduction XIV). By knowing this, it could follow that he writes in support of the unity if senses, as he says that “All presentations given to me are subject to this unity, but they must also be brought under it through a synthesis” (B136). In this, Kant argues about the unity of senses, that they come together to synthesize, or create the things we know around us.

Intro to Kant

Immanuel Kant is a complex philosopher to interpret. In his famous work Critique of Pure Reason, he seeks to answer the question of how to approach the act of learning through your senses. Kant likes to make his own words such as “apperception” to describe self-consciousness. He writes that “presentation that can be given prior to all thought is called intuition” (B132). Apperception according to Kant produces self-consciousness by recognizing the individual as a person who can make decisions. This is similar to Rene Descartes’s famous quote “I think, therefore I am” due to their assumptions that a thinking person is alive and is self-conscious of their existence.
Kant also touches on the topic of how the human body obtains knowledge and gains information about the world. He says that “our understanding can only think, and must seek intuition in the senses” (B135). This means that in our brain capacity we can process and interpret information but we get that information through our senses. This makes sense because we first need a source of information (the taste, smell, feel, look, and sounds of our environment) before we can process that information and gain ideas about the environment.
Kant is a difficult philosopher to read, as the introduction warned us. His use of philosophical jargon is difficult to decipher sometimes as it seems like he is making up a new term every line. He critiques pure reason by asking about epistemology (where and how do we obtain knowledge) and recognizes that our senses provide the first way of learning about the world. If our senses are wrong, it would be difficult to provide a proper interpretation of the world that everyone agrees on.

The Complexity of Intuition

The reading for this week is very difficult to understand and interpret from a vocabulary standpoint as well as from a conceptual view. Kant poses many important and complex ideas in his “Critique of Pure Reason” that delve into the elements of knowledge and thinking, particularly, the unification of self-consciousness. One particular term of interest that sticks out to me is his explanation of intuition, or “pure apperception”(B132), and its role in completing the conscious of self.

I think my confusion with his terminological breakdown of intuition is the fact that intuition is defined as “prior to all thought” (B132) or without the presence of conscious thinking and is yet a part of one’s self-consciousness. Can intuitions be a part of one’s conscious without being necessary thought of in a conscious matter but rather already being known? It seems as though the intuitions are connected in some sense to the “empirical apperceptions” Kant mentioned in the fact that they both include the “presentations that comprise the transcendental unity of apperception”(B132). I just think it’s hard to comprehend how an unconscious state of mind can dually comprise a conscious being.

Immanuel Kant on Intellectual Property

I was warned that Kant is difficult to read, but I was skeptical of these claims. Turns out, the warnings were pretty well founded. Here’s what I got from reading the first few pages of his Critique of Pure Reason. Continue reading