Proving What We Already "Know"

[Belacqua]

I Kant take it anymore! You are like the 3rd person this week to invoke Kant. And frankly I really hate reading or trying to interpret Kant...even if he was probabley second only to Aristotle as the GOAT philospher. Serendipity compels me to face my fear.

When I teach this stuff in Japanese, I write "Immanuel Kant" on the board, and then erase most of the letters to get "I Kant." And then I suggest that his full name should be "I Kant undahsutando."

I wonder if he wins the prize for the philosopher most referred to and least read. 

My suspicion is that he, in discussions like the one on this thread, stands as a kind of symbol for this whole problem of our disconnect between the world-in-itself and the world-as-it-appears. That issue would certainly be a major topic even without Kant, but it may be that he set the vocabulary (e.g. noumenon, phenomenon) or was the flagship philosopher in German Idealism, which did the most to tease out the ramifications of the epistemological divide. 

But people were aware much earlier on that our perceptions are not pure. Thomas Aquinas wrote that the world appears to us as it does because of the kind of animals we are, with particular kinds of bodies. He was aware that the same world appears very differently to bats. 

I think the article I linked to shows that our discussions of the topic here stay at a pretty elementary level. Personally I know that I haven't grasped even a fraction of what German Idealism has tried to explain. 

As I understand it, in histories of metaphysics, it's Galileo, Descartes, and Newton who are credited most with declaring that what's out there is fundamentally unavailable to us, and what we perceive is an interpretation of the mind. Kant added to this by proposing that what we perceive of the objects is largely a projection from what already exists in the mind. That is, the object appears to us as it does in large part because we make it appear that way.