Not Really an Aside at All, But a Head On Collision

The fun with working with appearances, and assumptions in general, is that there is no emotional investment lost when we do ditch them.  Often times we do have to cast away facades when we are forced to, when we are wrong.  But if we end up being right, so much the better.  

I think that this is a pretty good argument for cognitive dissonance theory and studying its effects with justification.  

By the way, I do realize that I haven't posted on any actual Kant on this blog in a while, so I promise to type some primary or secondary source about Kant or from Kant in the near (like in the upcoming week) future.  

The nature of Kant's phenomenon (appearances from sense data) and noumenon (things-in-themselves) is actually arguable after what he wrote.  We (philosophy academia and me) are not entirely sure what he means by things in and themselves versus appearances.  By that I mean people stake careers on esoteric essays arguing for and against their positions.  There are two basic interpretations of Kant that Thomson notes, that I will offer up in another post.

This problem of appearances versus reality is one of the fundamentals of Kantian philosophy.  The reason why it is so important a distinction is because of the problem of skepticism.  Skepticism was not just the time your friend was bullshitting you about all those chicks he banged in high school and you didn't believe him, it is an actual school of thought in philosophy.  It basically means what you think it means:  doubt.  

The Moderns  are our main 6 or 7, by Kant's distinction:  Berkeley, Hume, Locke, Leibniz, Spinoza, and Descartes; give or take 10 more, out of a list of perhaps 100 thinkers who characterize the Enlightenment.  These philosophers were philosophers because they were creating science.  How do you go about saying, praytell, without any real authority except for the Church, Aristotle, and your own reasoning and experience, how we can know what we know?  Or that you know what you know?

Skepticism is the thing that all of these guys are battling. (School of thought is a complex idiom here.  I don't think that there are actually any skeptic Professors actually out there;  Pyrrho, one of the ancient philosophers, was a really really strict Skeptic;  Sextus Empiricus was a student of the Pyrrhonian School, and pretty good at espousing some classic Skeptical arguments, too).  But Skepticism is basically obvious: it's the really annoying doubt that all of us face.  It's also the complex doubts that you have to think about.  For example, while most of us can describe why we think the sky is blue, not all of us can describe why this is the absolutely correct view past all problems and potential problems.  Contemporary philosophy, which I use as a term to distinguish between the Moderns discussed in this blog and the present 100-ish years, Contemporary Philosophy actually has some pretty cool answers to this;  many of these contemporary papers are heavily indebted to Kant.  For example, the use of propositions are influenced by Kant's Transcendental Deduction (and I think but I'm not sure that they are specifically referring to the Transcendental Unity of Apperception).

  Kant focuses on the fact that we do have knowledge.  This is different from showing what knowledge is and displaying that you have it so that others will follow you.  Kant does not need to prove that knowledge can be known and is accessible without complicated genius-level philosophy.  This might explain why he did not seek to establish himself in anything except philosophy; although he did make a contribution to Cosmology.  Other Moderns, like Descartes and Leibniz, had contributions in Math (the coordinate plane for Descartes and Calculus for Leibniz), science (Descartes in Biology), politics (Leibniz in Habsburgs' Prussia), and even 20th century computers (Leibniz's binary).  Even Spinoza felt like he had to show he was a professional optician (from the looks of the biography Within Reason, he wasn't too good at it) and one of Berkeley's greatest philosophical works is on the medicinal uses of black tar.   

The Moderns!

Modern Philosophy began actually with Descartes(31 March 1596 – 11 February 1650 (who's name literally means "Some Maps" or "These Cards" if you took French, but reallly has the name from some land his family owned or something).

First off, Descartes rejected idiocy, which was basically the standard at the time. Of course things get more complicated then that, mainly when you're talking about the Roman Catholic Churh's monopoly on information, which meant systemized idiocy to some extent.

The Roman Catholic Church is an excellent bridge to Spinoza, but we'll get to that in a second.

The problem of Modern Philosophy that exists today, but to a lesser extent, was how things could be known. Descartes said to keep a firm foundation. In order to show that he knew stuff he made contributions to math (the coordinate graph and Snell's law) and biology, and basic-level physics. He had his hand in a couple of other puddings, too, but this is a good, albeit *very* rough sketch of the guy. The foundation business means that he had to subject everything to doubt.

Spinoza (November 24, 1632 – February 21, 1677) will be remembered as his own philosophy, truly, but also as a reaction to Descartes' doubt disaster, among other things. The method of doubt looks a lot like not knowing anything, when you get right down to that.

Spinoza was a foundationalist (read: believer (ist) in foundations (foundation). He thought that it was a big deal to react to religion, as well, because his family had been kicked out of Spain in a religion-based ethnic cleansing known as The Inquisition (the questioning until you get really annoyed). Other members of Spinoza's family were lucky enough to feel Roman Catholicism's "mercy" getting tortured, beaten, and murdered. It's cool though, Spinoza's distaste with religion eventually lead him to be rejected from Judaism, too.