« Religion and Philosophy Forum
alright fuck kant
ok his ethics are ok but dudes epistemology is cracked. heres an excerpt from an essay i wrote on him my junior year of high school:
" I do appreciate Kant’s efforts and attempts to organize how we perceive and think of the world into categories and such, but what I see him doing more aligns him into the field of semantics. Don’t get me wrong, semantics is a very interesting field to me, with how he try and organize how we communicate to each other, but I think something like “All bachelors are unmarried” is more of a semantical problem and not a metaphysical. It all depends on how we define words such as bachelor and unmarried and how our language works. I am reminded of the world of Tlön, a fictional world by the author Jorge Luis Borges, where one of it’s language families does not have any nouns. Both of Kant’s a priori and a posteriori statements become impossible here. In a language with no nouns, there can be no “things”, or words we can assign to objects. You may think it is impossible to communicate in this universe, but it is possible. Borges says the english statement “The moon rose above the water” becomes the Tlönic “upward behind the onstreaming it mooned”. Now with no nouns, you cannot state propositions, and thus you cannot deduce anything, which is a priori. In this noun-less world, its residents think that when you observe the same object at different times, it is not the same object. For example, if I look at a pen on my desk and then look at it again 5 minutes later, it is, in a Tlönic perspective, not the same pen because I don’t see this as a “thing”. With this, history itself becomes impossible, as everything is an independent act no way connected to each other. With no experiences to base anything on, a posteriori reasoning becomes impossible. Thus, Kant’s ideas only work in our own world, and may not be universal."
basically a priori and a posteriori are only a human concept and it's possible they don't exist universally. in fact, humans can create a language without a priori and a posteriori statements, but it probably ain't feasible because of our brains or whatever.