🧵 Does Kant hold up in the face of modern maths?
Anonymous at Fri, 21 Mar 2025 16:50:17 UTC No. 16625136
Kant considered mathematics to be "synthetic and a-priori". He believed that this class of knowledge is a description of the spacial and temporal structure that we must impose on reality in order to experience it. In this view, mathematics is accessible to us only because the mind has imposed it, not because it is true in the numenal, actual, or material world. Of course, he did not mean to say that we have imposed the language or notation of math onto reality, just that this language and notation was created to describe our impositions.
In his age of newtonian physics and euclidian geometry, this was unproblematic. The maths available were all descriptions of space and time as we experience it; and you can therefore make the type of claims that he does. In the contemporary age, which is one of multi-dimensional topology and non-causal physics, maths has grown to describe a reality far removed from our experience, and therefore, unrelated our impositions of space and causality.
Is this a problem for Kant, or more likely, have I misunderstand his beliefs?
Anonymous at Fri, 21 Mar 2025 17:04:02 UTC No. 16625141
>>16625136
The Categorical Imperative kan't solve the Trolley Problem.
Anonymous at Fri, 21 Mar 2025 17:28:35 UTC No. 16625153
>>16625141
this is epistemology not ethics retard
Anonymous at Sat, 22 Mar 2025 00:52:55 UTC No. 16625486
>>16625136
Kant, and any others that make a big problem out of empiricism and man-made construct, is blowing things out of proportion.
First of all, "synthetic and a-priori" is not somehow needed to experience reality; so long as you can have consciousness, you can experience reality. What definitions/constructs are needed for is empirical predictions, aka math and science. It's one thing to experience what is happening now, it's another to project what will happen given past experiences. To conduct the latter aka the empirical/scientific method, you would have to artifically group experiences into defined groups and seek out reproducible geometric ratios between them.
This applies to math of his time or modern math all the same.
Anonymous at Sat, 22 Mar 2025 02:13:50 UTC No. 16625522
>>16625136
It doesn't hold up. Like every other famous philosopher, Kant understood little to no mathematics and much or all of the things he said about it are totally worthless. That's why mathematicians don't bother reading Kant.
Anonymous at Sun, 23 Mar 2025 23:54:10 UTC No. 16627020
>>16625136
The solution to all philosophical quandaries about deep knowledge is degeneracy. Either the words you say contribute in some way to me earning money to spend on porn and an auto blow machine, or they are unworthy of any consideration.