Theme 1 (pre)

1. In the preface to the second edition of "Critique of Pure Reason" (page B xvi) Kant says: "Thus far it has been assumed that all our cognition must conform to objects. On that presupposition, however, all our attempts to establish something about them a priori, by means of concepts through which our cognition would be expanded, have come to nothing. Let us, therefore, try to find out by experiment whether we shall not make better progress in the problems of metaphysics if we assume that objects must conform to our cognition." How are we to understand this?

I think this is all about knowledge and how we should view knowledge itself. There are two different kinds of knowledge and we know them as a priori and posteriori. A priori is knowledge you know is correct and true without exploring or testing it any further. An example of this is the statement “All chickens are birds”. An example of a posteriori statement is “It’s raining outside”  since you can’t know this before you’ve gathered more information by, for example, going outside and take a look.

Kants says that it has been assumed that our cognition must conform to objects, in other words we can’t know something about a object before we have some sort of experience of said object. He then states that this might now be the best way of looking at things and that we should instead assume that the objects themselves must conform to our cognition. What he means by this or atleast what I think he means is that we should look at the objects experience or from the objects perspective. An example of this would be how Copernicus changed the way we look at cosmology. If we look at the sun it looks like the sun is orbiting us. But if we look at us from the suns perspective we see that in reality we orbit the sun. It’s a way of thinking outside the box and I think we should look at knowledge as a combination of the two. We should always explore things from different perspectives in search for the “true” knowledge of that object or experience.

2. At the end of the discussion of the definition "Knowledge is perception", Socrates argues that we do not see and hear "with" the eyes and the ears, but "through" the eyes and the ears. How are we to understand this? And in what way is it correct to say that Socrates argument is directed towards what we in modern terms call "empiricism"?

When Socrates says that we do not see and hear “with” the eyes and the ears but “through” them I understand it like this: What we see and hear is not absolute. We are all different and thus we see and hear different from eachother. We do not have the exact same eyes and ears and what I see through my eyes doesn’t necessarily mean that someone else see the exact same thing, even if we are looking at the same object. Our eyes are organs, a part of our body, and Socrates clearly states that we do not see with our eyes but through them. What he says is that we use our senses and not organs to interpret and understand the world around us. We all interpret things differently and when we see or hear something our interpretations doesn’t match everyone elses. This argument is directed towards what we today call “empiricism” in the way that empiricism states that knowledge is based on experience and senses. This means that the “knowledge” and “truths” we take in with, in this example, eyes and ears or sight and hearing are based on our own experiences. Since no person have the exact same experiences as someone else that means that we all see things differently and no one knows what the “true” knowledge of something is because an experience can not be correct or incorrect.


PS. I didn't know if you were supposed to highlight single words or sentences so I just highlighted what I thought was good.