So how the fuck do I read his obtuse and needlessly elaborate philosophy...

I would recommend reading hume before reading kant, personally. I didn't have much trouble with kant but I think I would have had i not read treatise and the enquiries first. lots of kant's work has foundations in hume's, and imo necessary reading begins with hume(though that doesn't mean it hurts to read descartes or the greeks).

Thank you, I will take your advice. Kant is certainly really hard, but with some reflection it's been rewarding so far.

I'm somewhat familiar with Hume, but reading Kant has encouraged me to read further into the Treatise specifically. I do tend to feel as though I'm missing some context for Kant's writing, even with the historical overviews in Kemp-Smith's commentary.

I just can't convince myself to read any german idealism aside from Descartes. The overly technical and obscure language in these texts make them so distant to everyday life, really hard and and so demand a lot of time, in which I could read other stuff, that would give me way deeper insights and delight. Even the whole "subject/object" dichotomy seems like a really retarded base for the whole thought. These retards really thought that the human being is overall a rational being, how fucking blind can you be?
Is it really worth it, Veeky Forums? What did you get from german idealism?
Are my doubts legit or should I just shut the fuck up and spend YEARS reading this wankery?

>Descartes
>German idealism

How is he not part of german idealism?
>cuz he aint german xd
He literally started all

It sounds like you jumped into Kant without having a solid foundation for what his ultimate task was. You will certainly learn a lot regardless of your background knowledge but you may miss a lot of his project on the same hand. I read about 120 pages of the critique and decided to reread all of modern philosophy and thats after I was very familiar with Hume too. Understanding modernist metaphysics is obscure no doubt, but it is enlightening and for me at least seemed to reopen a lot of philosophical questions that I regarded as dogmatic and circular but nonetheless are some of the most important questions regarding existence and the universe.

>descartes started idealism
Wew lad

You mean Heidegger?

Do I mean Heidegger what? Im not all too familiar with him. I thought his task was ending metaphysics and refocusing philosophy on being

No he didn't. If anybody started it would either be Heraklit or Plato, but even this is mostly false.
>The overly technical and obscure language in these texts make them so distant to everyday life, really hard and and so demand a lot of time, in which I could read other stuff, that would give me way deeper insights and delight.
I think you don't understand it fully, ever heared of the sterotype of Germans being honest, even to the point, where nearly nobody likes it? Many German Philosophers lay all their premises out with all definitions and explain why they chose to exept a premise. Those posters don't get it, but since the Frankfurt School this fact is missused by people, who want their thoughts seem deep and use complicated language structures not to explain their premises, but to hide them and thereby making them immune to critice. This phenomenon is far spread today and discredits the philosophers from earlier times wrongly, don't let anybody tell you, whom you should of shouldn't read. Read into the work and decide yourself.

THE BEST introductory exposition of the entire Critical philosophy is to be found in Paul de Man, Aesthetic Ideology, pp. 70-74. But it will only make sense if you've already read the extended introduction attached to most editions of the 3rd Critique, and understand the role of that Critique in the transcendental system at large, which anyone should be able to do after reading the regular introduction to the 3rd Critique. Kant is hard, but not because he's obscure. He is hard because he is too clear.

Has anyone read Adornos intro to CPR?

>but since the Frankfurt School this fact is missused by people, who want their thoughts seem deep and use complicated language structures not to explain their premises, but to hide them and thereby making them immune to critice.

let me borrow from German Idealism and refer you to Schiller, for whom failure to understand a work is almost always the fault of the reader, not the work. you're being lazy if you earnestly believe post-Frankfurt continental phil is obscure for obscurity's sake, and is not acting out the very dilemmas of language it tries to grapple with. it is easy now to summarize these theses because they were worked out by the structuralists and the post-structuralists, not because their work wasn't the revolution it felt itself to be at the time. and i use that word revolution judiciously, because structuralism is by and large a second Kantian turn to the subject, replicating the same problems but in language itself, a much denser, more encompassing medium than cognition.

please, user, Negative Dialectics is doing a little more work than that ;)

(no)

Wtf does this mean! I don't understand

Ok

>you're being lazy if you earnestly believe post-Frankfurt continental phil is obscure for obscurity's sake, and is not acting out the very dilemmas of language it tries to grapple with

Yeah this. It does make the works 'immune to critique' in a way, but just by being 'complete' rather than indecipherable

I certainly don't believe everything written after the 1920th is false (or better obscure) there are certainly honest people like Karl Otto Appelt and Hans-Georg Gadamer, I would even admit it for parts of Focaults work. I have pretty extensivly read mondern works and come to the conclusion that structuralism and post structuralism and even some Newkantian philosophers are argueing in a way, which isn't honest. Certainly there are exptions. I think most of the modern writting isn't that hard to understand, if you have a philosophical education and some knowledge of Freud.

I think the problem with the linguistic turn is, that if you work with language itself it's pretty easy to make errors, because you still need use the language to describe your operations. So some people deliberatly use this to abitray strip certain logical/synthax barriers away to make their position more creddible, while the truth is, if you accept their premise their argument couldn't be made at all. Also many of them are partly because they don't know better and some who certainly know better, also have the hidden or open axiom of the structure of the world and our lanugage being the same, which is often used to from conclusions that can't be subject to critical examination.

You're mostly correct. I plan on revisiting Kant and his philosophical progenitors from time to time (I'm majoring in philosophy) to deepen my understanding but for now I just want to get it done.

>I think the problem with the linguistic turn is, that if you work with language itself it's pretty easy to make errors, because you still need use the language to describe your operations

this is not the problem with the linguistic turn; it is the problem OF the linguistic turn. the post-structuralists found various ways of getting around it. in derrida it's taking advantage of punning, plays on words, connotations, to find language for thoughts that hadn't been formulated yet in the tradition. in foucault it takes a well-nigh empiricist turn that sets its sights on the statement itself, composing discourses out of these, rather than trying to describe abstract structures that exist "beyond" text

Honestly, if it gets too hard, read Schopenhauer's elaboration and critique of Kant in the World as Will and Representation, he made it clear enough for me.

This might help.

earlymoderntexts.com/authors/kant
This clears it up for you.

I don't think you got my argument. I said that the problems of the linguistic turn are also and especially effecting itself. The "paradoxes" Derrida tries to argue with are in fact antinomys and if you accept them they disprove his own arrguments, since they couldn't be made, if you accept the premises, it's a contradictio in adjecto of a certain type. So I don't think I know of a way the post structuralists really got beyond a meaning of text within a text and I have read plenty of them trying it. Focaults contribution is in my opion less his sanatisation of Nietzsche, which you mentioned, but a quiet elaborate discribtion of examples.

can you give a single example of a Derridean antinomy? And also the thesis that "accepting an antinomy disproves an argument" is in itself controversial, unless you're an analytic who earnestly believes reality and/or our knowledge of it is of itself non-contradictory, in which case you have to agree with Wittgenstein's axiom and stop speaking about post-structuralism.

>Quine wanting user not to read and understand Kant

>"accepting an antinomy disproves an argument"
Very dishonest, that's not, what I claimed at all. I'm not saying, that there can't be antinomys in the world, what I'm saying is he presents his clamis aus truth claims, but if you accept them there can't be truth, so it's dishonest. If our knowledge is free of contraditions is another question and I already disagree with the structuralist notion of language. Obviously the project of analytical philosophy failed a long time ago, because analytical philosophy is the try to create an ideal language of logic, what to my knowledge isn't really tried anymore.

>what I'm saying is he presents his clamis aus truth claims, but if you accept them there can't be truth, so it's dishonest

yeah, that's the kind of thin, logician's paraphrase that attempts to use the category of antinomy to undermine derrida's arguments, which I think you have misunderstood, and i'm asking you for actual examples of where that happens in his texts. the burden of proof is on you here.

What is called "objectivity," scientific for instance (in which I firmly believe, in a given situation) imposes itself only within a context which is extremely vast, old, firmly established, or rooted in a network of conventions … and yet which still remains a context.
Limited Inc
There are better cases, but I'm not going to read him all over again. Since that's a common theme in his work, I doubt your flipping the burden of prove on me is not sincere, especially since Derrida stays mostly vague on and it's not for good reasons. For the case that he isn't making a truth claim I would be right anyway. I didn't use a category it's to discredit him, I used the the term antinomy, because that's the terminus technicus for what I showed.

Don't worry, it just gibberish :ˆ)

limited inc is one of his clearest texts. and in it he clearly articulates that deconstruction is not the death of truth, not the complete arbitration of meaning you want it to be. the appendix, Ethics of Discussion, very clearly articulates the fact that the openness and indeterminacy of context is actually an intellectual burden to be more precise, not at all a pass to say whatever you like.

i do not really follow your objection that history "still remains a context." i am not sure what the ellipsis preceding this conclusion, and the drama they signify, are meant to imply. you haven't really said anything there that conflicts, for example, with derrida's comments in limited inc on the need to reproduce doubling commentary in order to guarantee a minima of comprehensibility cemented in the history of philosophical scholarship.

this 100%. This was the route that I went and I only had a little trouble with the Critique in a sticky spot towards the end of the analytic.

German anything is the scourge of the earth.

t. Jew

>What is called "objectivity," scientific for instance (in which I firmly believe, in a given situation) imposes itself only within a context which is extremely vast, old, firmly established, or rooted in a network of conventions … and yet which still remains a context. Source Limited Inc
It is a Quote by him, for some reason it didn't really work last time.
>which for some has become a sort of slogan, in general so badly understood, of deconstruction (...) means nothing else: there is nothing outside context. In this form, which says exactly the same thing, the formula would doubtless have been less shocking. Derrida, Afterword, 1988, p. 136.
He was constantly claiming that everybody is understanding him wrong, but what's more likley he is just immunizing himself from critics. If he is just saying, that we should be more precise and watch out for the context, it's more than fair to say his fail was grandiose. The sad truth is he is a dishonest intellectual and his deconstruction is little more than an attempt to smear others, while claiming his work is somehow not subject to the same problems.