On Thursday, January 23, 2020 at 9:33:23 AM UTC-6, Bruno Marchal wrote: > > > > Sean Carroll is right, we can only study the shadows on the cave wall, but > we can judge plausible the idea that they are only that: shadows of a > deeper reality, and not the fundamental reality itself. > > Bruno > > > >
Sean Carroll expresses a Platonist vs. Kantian view. Plato's Cave (Platonism) vs. Kant's Noumenon (Kantianism) *The allegory is probably related to Plato's theory of Forms, according to which the "Forms" (or "Ideas"), and not the material world known to us through sensation, possess the highest and most fundamental kind of reality. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_cave *Humans can make sense out of phenomena in these various ways, but in doing so can never know the "things-in-themselves", the actual objects and dynamics of the natural world in their noumenal dimension - this being the negative correlate to phenomena and that which escapes the limits of human understanding. By Kant's Critique, our minds may attempt to correlate in useful ways, perhaps even closely accurate ways, with the structure and order of the various aspects of the universe, but cannot know these "things-in-themselves" (noumena) directly. Rather, we must infer the extent to which the human rational faculties can reach the object of "things-in-themselves" by our observations of the manifestations of those things that can be perceived via the physical senses, that is, of phenomena, and by ordering these perceptions in the mind infer the validity of our perceptions to the rational categories used to understand them in a rational system, this rational system (transcendental analytic), being the categories of the understanding as free from empirical contingency.* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noumenon#Kant's_usage @philipthrift -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/bd024747-3d98-454e-abbf-a708afeebd63%40googlegroups.com.
