I can't begin to fathom this book. Help Veeky Forums i am the retarded...

I can't begin to fathom this book. Help Veeky Forums i am the retarded. I've had a copy of it for a long time and it kicks me square in the dick every time I pic it up. Break it down for a simpleton.

>Break it down for a simpleton.
I would but im afraid i mess something up and Veeky Forums bullies me :(

We get bullied everywhere on Veeky Forums, don't we? I think I chose the wrong book and was better off with Nietzsche.

start with Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals.

Way shorter, and a little easier. I think it's just the German. Everytime I read something translated from German to English, I feel like I walked into a verbosity contest.

Sure thing op, here's that entire book in a nice picture form with squares and lines and everything. Too lazy to add happy clown faces and colors, sorry.

I appreciate it, nigga.

No bully pls
Uh good place to start with Kant is from the ground up, he examines to what extent the human mind can have a priori knowledge, through the distinction between sensuous phenomena of an object and its representation after mediation through a receptive subject. Kant divides the subject’s mediation into two “faculties,” the Intuitive faculty which apprehends the phenomena presented, and the Concept faculty which legislates and re-presents them as representation. The latter faculty implicitly requires a “combination” of singular phenomena, what Kant calls synthesis, during which the subject cognition bears synthetic a priori categories onto the phenomena, primarily time and space as the form of the object. As a result, reality is necessarily affected by subject cognition, so we can never have knowledge of either the supersensible, or the “thing in itself” separate from the subject’s representation.

...

There are things. When you look at something, your brain automatically places it somewhere in space and time, and senses it through the faculty of intuition. This sensuous phenomenon is then made into a concept, and is added to a manifold of concepts that are attached together to yourself and which make up your reality. The Understanding makes connections between the various concepts in this manifold according to the 12 categories Kant outlines.

Reason is the faculty which brings concepts into unity, or breaks them down into smaller components. Pure Reason is reason applied to purely a priori concepts like space and time. Kant's main argument in the book is that Pure Reason can only be used to make arguments about the existence of the self and for developing the categories; this is his Transcendental Analytic. Reason is incapable of engaging in a Transcendental Dialectic, and it falls into error once it attempts to go beyond the phenomenal experiences we have. He gives examples of some false reasoning about the soul, some logically sound but over-reaching reasoning regarding theism and atheism, and then he gives arguments against the ontological, cosmological, and teleological arguments for God.

Then there's his second book which basically says what the bounds Reason should operate in are.

there is no good reason to read this book. find the sparknotes version online or something.

protip: take notes while reading

Don't worry about it, its hard. I only understood because profs told me what to look for before I started.

except for it being the most important book of the past 300 years

In the discussion of "Feels VS Reals" Kant looked at all the people using reals and said "I'm not listening because this hurts my feelings".

Without the assistance of this book try to figure these things out (spend several hours doing this as if you were reading): what do we mean by understanding? what does it mean to know something? Is there a difference between understanding and knowing? What can we know? Are all types of knowledge of the same type? How does knowing the Pythagorean theorem differ from knowing that objects will obey gravity? Is there a difference between knowing that a quantity added to its inverse is zero and that a right triangle can only have one right angle? How is geometry possible? Is there a type of knowledge that is independent of any particular experience? How can Descartes take for granted that his thoughts are transparent? How is experience even possible? How do we as rational creatures make clear the sense data we receive from our organs? Do concepts come pre-formed into our minds, or do we form them in logical judgments? On what ground can a philosopher assert that he has access to things that are beyond his experience? On what ground can a philosopher stand when he claims that concepts are formed through experience; what can that even mean?

Buy the Cambridge guide and Allison's defense of transcendental idealism.
Without reading those at the same time as the critique, I'd never have been able to finish it.
It's way too complicated to just sum it up for you.

Thanks everyone. I am surprised that anyone here posted anything helpful as opposed to shitposting/trolling. Really, thank you. And may your waifus suck off your dicks with fervent, prodigious skill and you cum with such force that you regress into vegetative states that no medical science can mend.

Kant stop these feels

There is no good reason to read this book at all. It's like reading a text with no diagrams or pictures from the 1910s about how calculators might work. No matter how hard the author thought about it and worked on it, it's just meaningless and pointless.

This doesn't make your life better and doesn't make you a better thinker. It's just clever nothingness.

This was the book that convinced me to stop studying philosophy

Um, the categorical imperative.

>i am mathematically illiterate or not working in theoretical mathematics or quantum computing or theory of mind and I have opinions about things because i have a degree in CS/Eng
(You)

LOL the internet was built to discuss this stuff

>Allison's
But user, that's a woman?

Its a waste of time, don't bother. I was in here like last week arguing this... none of Kant's proponents can even describe what he was talking about, I've found.

reading books just cuz someone on the internet insisted you should is all fine and nice but Kant was working in thousands of years of tradition.

ooh somebody's been to youtube dot com and had a chuckle

if you can't fathom it now you never will

Get the Guyer version and read the hundred page introduction.

Kant has a few spots where everybody disagrees about what he meant, like the nature of the third critique or certain issues that preoccupied the fuck out of the post-Kantian generation, but really he isn't one of those philosophers for whom consensus is lacking on the basic outline.

And we're all Kantians anyway because of him.

bump for more answers maybe

Kant is turning the empiricist(knowledge comes from experience) and the rationalist(knowledge comes before experience) by turning the perspective of metaphysics that we are discovering truths by investing what is outside of us, when in reality we must turn inward to discover truths that appear as outside of us.

To do so, the true source of knowledge has to be retraced in consciousness as to what makes experience possible. To which his thesis, by examination of space and time, is that there are certain structures of such concepts that we come to know via intuition of these rational structures that allow for experience to be possible within them.(ex: this structure, for space allows the appearance of the object in relation to other objects in that space, and for time this would mean for the object to be perceived as alteration)

It is by this intuitive structures of these two intuitions of our sensibility that allow of the arrange and organize(via the categories) our experience in more complex forms.

Jesus my grammar and what not. Sorry this is my little fixer upper so its at the very least readable.


>Kant is turning the empiricist(knowledge comes from experience) and the rationalist(knowledge comes before experience) debate upon its head by turning the perspective of metaphysics that believes we are discovering truths by investigating what is already outside of us(the nature of the external world), when in reality we must turn inward to discover truths that appear as outside of us. In doing so, Kant points out that all of our knowledge is contingent on certain structures of the mind that presuppose experience in order to understand it.
>To do so, the true source of knowledge has to be retraced in consciousness as to what makes experience possible. To which his thesis, by examination of space and time, is that there are certain structures of such concepts that we come to know via intuition of these rational structures that allow for experience to be possible within them.(ex: this structure, for space allows the appearance of the object in relation to other objects in that space, and for time this would mean for the object to be perceived as alteration)
>It is by this intuitive structures of these two intuitions of our sensibility that allow of the arrange and organize(via the categories) our experience in more complex forms.

>Everytime I read something translated from German to English, I feel like I walked into a verbosity contest.
Nah, it's Kantian German. Nobody speaks that way but him, you only really get it when you're in the right mood and have enough concentration.

That's practical reason.

whos that cutie

>Break it down for a simpleton
If you try to use pure reason on the categories of your mind (f.e. like causation) you will necessarily run into so-called antinomies

>whos that cutie
Everything..

Read SEP page.
Read Sparkntoes.
Read some introductory book into Kant.

Seriously, read them. Sticking to source material when you are autodidact is a mistake. There are 140IQ+ people who need to be taught what this book is in top tier Ivy League schools.

ELI5:

Nigger Kant was pissed at the other bearded guys. He thought they're just wannabe smart guys who might as well suck their own dicks. To Kant their philosophy was nonscientific speculation (metaphysic) - but nigger Kant wanted to do it right.

But he could just do it, because before writing smart shit you actually have to understand what's "smart" and whats not. So his approach is one that starts with the things you're able to know (epistemology).

He starts with stating that you have (((sense))) and (((reason))) to get to know stuff. And then he starts calling the stuff you "get to know" (((a posteriori))).

Another big word is (((a priori))): meaning things that you "always" knew, like the law of *shit can't be like X and not like X at the same time*...

The goal in Critique of Pure Reason is to "scientifically" decide >whether< you're able to infer smart new stuff by what you already know a priori. This new stuff he calls (((synthetic shit a priori))).

Now Kant doesn't actually get to do the smart stuff (scientific philosophy) that he see's lacking with his colleagues, instead he thinks that he gave use the right initial toolset by analysing what we're able know. Therefore he calls his doing (((transcendental))) because it's the precondition for the actual thing.

>But he could just do it, because before writing smart shit you ...

Meant to write he COULDN'T

Other important big words to remember is that Kant uses pure" as in "pure from experience" = a priori

In his book he dissects sense and reason, looks at what's pure and non-pure and then infers a bunch of stuff from it.

>And we're all Kantians anyway because of him.

Fuck it, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein are the way.

If you understand meaning of space-time, space, time, you've already grasped the most important point of the book.

And uou have

Saying that in my final essay got me an A in Philosophy 101

Long answer: Start with the greeks.

Short answer: Hes basically trying to establish what assumptions we have to make when we say we know things.

you don't know what you'll come across but you know how you will

>implying Wittgenstein wasn't Kant 2.0

That's his last name. Although the Cambridge guide I suggested was actually written by a woman.

I've read a very good calculus book from this period of time, tho. Check the Veeky Forums list. Lord Sylvanus or so. However, Kant was 100 years before that.

>There is no good reason to read this book at all. It's like reading a text with no diagrams or pictures from the 1910s about how calculators might work. No matter how hard the author thought about it and worked on it, it's just meaningless and pointless.

This but unironic.

>And we're all Kantians anyway because of him.
*tips hegel*

Also just to discourage you even more, Kant is horribly simple compared to the philosophers that came after him, the German idealists especially; but also Phenomenology, Heidegger, the Frankfurt School etc.

You could just read Husserl because Husserl recaps the most important points of Kant that survived test of time, but with knowledge of at least 20th Century Science (1900-1940)

I thought Kant was difficult, but then I read Georg Simmel.
German idealism has nothing on formalists.