Theme 1: Post theme post

This week I read both the preface of Critique of Pure Reason by Kant, Theaetetus by Plato, as well as a number of texts about what was brought up in the first two. To understand the two main texts I had to look up a lot of words and expressions I hadn’t heard or thought about before, such as metaphysics, a priori, a posteriori, dogmatic and more.

I read the texts all the way through once before writing about them, and then looked at portions of them more studiously when needed to answer some question I was supposed to answer/reflect over or if it was something I thought about and wanted to understand more clearly. 

In the seminar my fellow classmates and I talked about if there is a truly objective world outside of ourselves, if we even can imagine a world as it is without first it being perceived by a human. We also discussed how raw sense data can’t generate knowledge; it is first when that data is processed, by us humans, that knowledge is generated.

In lecture I learned about Kant’s forms of intuition and twelve categories, and the quote “Perception without conception is blind; conception without perception is empty.” by Kant stuck with me. We can’t understand what we experience if we don’t have a priori concepts, and concepts without experience are just empty.

Another quote by Kant I thought was good to have in mind, especially when doing research, was: “View nature with the intent of receiving information, not as a pupil who recites the teacher, but as a judge who compels the witnesses to reply to the questions he asks them.”

First after reading next week’s texts I learned that Socrates in Plato’s text was performing a dialectic through his dialogue. He brought up a thesis and then it’s contradictions to prove it wrong, and kept on doing this to reach an answer. 

I believe my perception of this week’s theme and terms as very hard to digest has changed a little after gaining some knowledge about them.