Introduction to German Philosophy - From Kant to Habermas

Andrew Bowie

下面主要是摘录。正好想找一些英文文本看，看到这本作者是英国人，没听过。总之还是对第三者写的概括性的文本保持怀疑。初步感想是并不好读，长句很夸张。

Kant

批判

The title Critique of Pure Reason indicates Kant's desire to question the basis of such debatespure reason is ... about the nature of God and being, which did not rely on empirical evidence)

For Kant something is spontaneous when it takes place 'of its own accord', rather than being caused by something else. Kant's three 'Critiques' can be seen as concerning themselves with:

in the first, how we arrive at natural laws and what that means for our descriptions of our place in the universe;
in the second, how we understand human freedom;
and, in the third, how we might connect the realms of natural necessity and freedom via the fact that we can also apprehend nature as beautiful and create beauty ourselves in art.4

知识的来源

Kant claims that knowledge must have two sources: 'intuition', what is 'given to us' in specific perceptual experience of the world, and 'categories' and 'concepts', the mental rules according to which we link intuitions together into judgements.

使用概念来描述可感知的对象，本质上是人是否能重新描述其所感知的东西的问题：The use of concepts to describe perceivable objects inherently involves the possibility of re-describing what is perceived.

同一性？

For Kant, the essential factor in knowledge is the ability to say something is the same as something else. there must, though, be a way of coming to terms with the fact that the sources of knowledge are of a different order from each other.

莱布尼茨觉得没有完全相同的东西，如果借用外部语言总能找到不同。事物仅仅be what it is, and would never be identical with anything else.... Leibniz's conception of identity would, though, render all scientific knowledge based on observation liable to the sceptical objection that, because things are never really the same, one could not assert that they obey laws. This is precisely what Kant wishes to avoid.

Things... may, of course, also appear to be completely different, even though they are the same with regard to the laws which govern them....subjective experiences are both contingent and also never identical ... Kant consequently argues that the identity required for informative knowledge must be a built-in function of our thought.
The vital factor here will be the identity across time of the subject that apprehends in terms of these forms, without which experience would merely disintegrate into random particularity.

知性

The Transcendental Logic is Kant's account of what he calls the 'understanding', our capacity for law-bound knowledge. If it is the case that experience has an irreducibly contingent element, there must be an element in knowledge which overcomes contingency. As Kant puts it, 'an "I think" must be able to accompany all my representations'. These moments are not subject to my will, even though the linking itself must take place via my 'spontaneity' in judgement.

第一批判

The first Critique is divided up into three main sections.

The first is the 'Transcendental Aesthetic', the theory of space and time as the 'forms of intuition'.
The second is the 'Transcendental Logic', the account of the necessary forms of thought.
The third is the 'Transcendental Dialectic', the account of what occurs if concepts that are only supposed to apply to the world of experience are applied to what is beyond the limitations inherent in experience.
- (1) that experience has to take place in a specific time and place,
- (2) that experience requires certain a priori notions to be intelligible at all.
  - In this latter part of the Critique Kant is referring to what one does if, for example, one moves from using the notion of causality to explain a specific regular occurrence in nature based on empirical evidence, to asserting that the whole of nature is causally determined.

范畴

The kinds of linkage which are a priori rules for organizing experience are termed the 'categories', or 'pure forms of understanding'. Kant lists twelve of these, under four headings: Quantity, Quality, Relation, Modality. These forms divide up how things exist in terms of ways of thinking which cannot be derived from observing the world. Two points should, though, be noted. An important issue for subsequent philosophy is how these forms of thought relate to natural languages: do they remain the same even in languages which do not possess the same distinctions as Kant is making? The other point concerns how these distinctions came to emerge at all in human thinking.

The next stage of the Critique, the 'Transcendental Deduction of the Categories', is about justifying the use of these a priori forms of thought in relation to objects encountered in the world. 'Deduction' is used in an old German legal sense, where it means 'legitimation'.

判断

Kant' describes knowledge in terms of a 'threefold synthesis', in which something is first 'apprehended' as affecting the mind, then is 'reproduced' in the imagination and finally is 'recognized' via a concept which classifies it. This all depends on the ability of self-consciousness to 'synthesize' identity from multiplicity. We order appearances by the 'power of judgement'.

判断的行为本身与判断规则可以无限嵌套，因而判断的终点/例外就是范畴
Even though the understanding is the source of rules, judgements applied to things encountered in the world cannot themselves be rule-bound. Judgement involves an element of ineliminable contingency, and yet is required in any concrete knowledge claim.

现象与实体，实体的积极意义与消极意义

Kant makes a further distinction concerning the relationship between mind and world. He claims that we must think of objects of knowledge in two respects: as they appear to us, as 'phenomena', and as they exist independently of our thinking of them, as 'noumena'. Kant makes a distinction between two notions of noumena. In the 'negative' sense the idea of the noumenon is what we arrive at by abstracting from the object as an object of perception. We assume it exists, but can say nothing specific about it, because all determinacy relies on perceptual input. In the 'positive' sense we assume a special kind of access to objects which does not rely on their being given in 'intuition'. This access, of course, is precisely what Kant regards as impossible.

理性-知性-数据

Reason creates unity among the rules of the understanding, whereas the understanding creates unity among empirical data.

二律背反

The antinomies (which means 'opposed laws') arise if one tries positively to think the unconditioned as though it were an object of thought like any other.

辩证的（康德式无限切近的完美主义色彩的辩证法？）

There are three classes of 'transcendental ideas': (1) the absolute unity of the thinking subject; (2) the absolute unity of the sequence of conditions of a phenomenon; and (3) the absolute unity of the condition of all objects of thought. None of these could be termed an object in Kant's terms, and they are therefore the result of a subjective necessity in thought. The three classes lead to three forms of 'dialectical conclusions of reason': the first to 'paralogisms', the second to 'antinomies', the third to the 'Ideal of pure reason'. The first two of these forms make the significance of the argument clear.

有责任的行动，并不是出于对这个行动所能带来利益的渴望，这种利益也包括避免法律制裁： ... duty is only present when an action cannot be understood to follow from a desire to perform the action because it brings one some benefit, even including the benefit of avoiding the sanctions the law may demand.

康德意义上最高的自由并不是在可以拜托后果的情况下或者在合法的情况下去做任何我想做的事情。当我们给自己以法律准则并认为那就是我们应当做的，我们就是自由的，而且自由意志和道德准则下的意志就达到了统一。 The liberty to do whatever I want if I can get away with it, or if it is legal, is not seen as the highest form of freedom by Kant. Instead, we are free if we give the law to ourselves because we accept that this is what we ought to do: 'Thus a free will and a will under moral laws are one and the same'.(ibid. BA 99).

道德伦理（人是目的而非手段。不要衡量人的价值）

Deciding what one ought to do is, then, to be achieved in terms of the categorical imperative: do I think all people should have the right to decide to do what I decide to do in this situation?9 If I think in this way I must regard others not as means to my ends, but as 'ends in themselves', as beings who share the capacity for self-determination.

第三批判

How ... does the spontaneity(the basis both of knowledge and of action) affect nature, if spontaneity exists in a wholly different realm from nature?

Kant's Critique of Judgement, the 'third Critique', considers nature and our relationship to it in terms not of knowledge, but of pleasure. Our pleasure in aspects of nature is in one respect subjective, but it also involves judgement in the same way as do knowledge and morality...The relationship between part and whole, and the relationship between particular and general, form the focus of the third Critique.

归纳的问题
The problem of induction is the problem that moving from particular phenomena to a general law can always involve bringing the particulars under a general law which may not characterize what they really have in common.

康德把关于自然系统构成的观念和审美享受的能力联系了起来
When reflective judgement is freed from the task of establishing cognitive laws it can also combine parts into wholes in a non-directed manner. This gives rise to a pleasure which Kant thinks was initially attached to cognition's synthesizing of different phenomena. The same pleasure also allows us to enjoy the different ways that parts of a work of art can be interrelated.

有机物的存在似乎说明自然的目的性/有组织性，而不是停留在混沌
Kant's thought is that we need to understand how the capacity of the mind to organize phenomena into coherent systematic forms is linked to the fact that nature itself organizes its elements in ways which are not merely the result of particular laws.

Aesthetic judgements look at nature as though nature itself aimed at being appropriate to our cognition.

康德认为通过自然给我们的non-cognitive pleasure，我们可以 have a kind of access to nature that takes us beyond what we can know... nature might communicate with us beyond the bounds of cognition

One is the contention that aesthetic judgements are not randomly subjective. ... Kant therefore ponders the possibility of a 'common sense', a shared capacity for feeling, which would unite rational beings, despite their empirical differences in matters of taste... The common sense is not something which can be said really to exist, but is another regulative idea that orients our thinking when we accept that it is worth arguing with others about beauty.
The other important factor is the way in which Kant talks about the significant artist, the genius... 'genius is the innate aptitude [ingenium] through which nature gives the rule to art' ... art involves moving beyond existing rules

Kant's ultimate aim is to find a way of showing how the existence of rational beings who can transcend nature by their self-determining freedom is the final purpose of creation.

flineca / blog

Introduction to German Philosophy #3