Now for my New Year's resolution: I am going to read the Critique of Pure Reason.
(Which translation? A Kant scholar told me, "Kemp Smith all the way.")
For help I have enlisted Gardner's Routledge guide.
I will post once per chapter.
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4 comments:
A) Don't tell Cutsinger!
B) Kemp Smith is the standard, but I prefer Pluhar. Pluhar translates "Vorstellung" as "presentation" instead of Smith's "representation," and I think Pluhar is surely correct. Vorstellungs can't be re-presenting something, since they're the original objects.
C) Read the Doctrine of Method first. I can't tell if it's just because I had already read the rest of the book first, but when I read the DoM, I felt like he was finally defining all the terms that he had been using for the whole length of the book. I feel as though the book would have been more clear if I had read that part first.
D) Remember that Kant caused the words "subjective" and "objective" to change from their ancient meaning to their contemporary meanings. As such, he can't be trusted to always use the terms in their contemporary senses.
E) Have fun.
I once went on a bike ride with Cutsinger and talked with him about the CPR. He knew it well and had (to my surprise) on the whole things to say about it that drew from Kant as much as he criticized Kant.
What was their ancient meaning, btw? How did they change?
I had thought Kant took representation as a primitive.
By the way, have you yourself spoken to the JC about Kant?
I haven't talked to Cutsinger about Kant or much of anything else, but I have read him dismiss critical philosophy as "We can't know what Kant can't." :-)
The "subject" in ancient times was the topic of a sentence. Kant thought all sentences were secretly of the form, "I think that X" so the I is the real "subject" of all sentences. In ancient times, the opposite of a subject shouldn't be an object but a predicate. The object was originally an object of thought only. Object wasn't used for physical objects until later. Here's some quick dictionary quotes:
Subject: Senses relating to philosophy, logic, and grammar are derived ultimately from Aristotle's use of to hupokeimenon meaning ‘material from which things are made’ and ‘subject of attributes and predicates.’
Object: ORIGIN late Middle English: from medieval Latin objectum ‘thing presented to the mind,’ neuter past participle (used as a noun) of Latin obicere, from ob- ‘in the way of’ + jacere ‘to throw’; the verb may also partly represent the Latin frequentative objectare.
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