Ron,
Does an independent thing exist? Was my question somehow incorrect?
Marsha
----- Original Message -----
From: "Ron Kulp" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Thursday, July 24, 2008 9:28 AM
Subject: Re: [MD] Tit's
Marsha:
I remember a while back you ardently defending tit's. I think maybe you
have softened your view. Are tit's independent, autonomous entities, or
not? Example? Are tit's patterns? Or something different?
Or maybe this post should wait until the levels post has come to a
finite conclusion. But then, can anything comprised of patterns have a
finite conclusion? Useful? Yes. Absolute? No way, Jose.
Ron:
I think what Krimmel needs to distinguish, and I'm not sure that Kant
does,
is differentiate between noumena and things in themselves.
Roughly, a noumenon may be distinguished from the following concepts,
although there is debate of the synonymity between them:
Thing-in-itself, an actual object and its properties independent of any
observer.
the Absolute, the totality of things; all that is, whether it has been
discovered or not.
For instance, the philosopher Immanuel Kant used the term noumenon
synonymously with the phrase thing in itself.
A phenomenon is that which is perceived; A noumenon is the actual object
that emits the phenomenon in question.
these both use the classical terms of Objecthood. No doubt Kant was
headed in the right direction but still under the analytical SOM
assumption of independent objects.
Kant's writings show points of difference between noumena and
things-themselves. For instance, he regards things-in-themselves as
existing:
"...though we cannot know these objects as things in themselves, we must
yet be in a position at least to think them as things in themselves;
otherwise we should be landed in the absurd conclusion that there can be
appearance without anything that appears."
Schopenhauer's critique
Schopenhauer claimed that Kant used the word incorrectly. He explained
in "Criticism of the Kantian Philosophy", which first appeared as an
appendix to The World as Will and Representation:
"But it was just this difference between abstract knowledge and
knowledge of perception, entirely overlooked by Kant, which the ancient
philosophers denoted by noumena and phenomena. (See Sextus Empiricus,
Outlines of Pyrrhonism, Book I, Chapter 13, ' What is thought (noumena)
is opposed to what appears or is perceived (phenomena).' ) This contrast
and utter disproportion greatly occupied these philosophers in the
philosophemes of the Eleatics, in Plato's doctrine of the Ideas, in the
dialectic of the Megarics, and later the scholastics in the dispute
between nominalism and realism, whose seed, so late in developing, was
already contained in the opposite mental tendencies of Plato and
Aristotle. But Kant who, in an unwarrantable manner, entirely neglected
the thing for the expression of which those words phenomena and noumena
had already been taken, now takes possession of the words, as if they
were still unclaimed, in order to denote by them his
things-in-themselves and his phenomena." [26]
The Noumenon's original meaning of "that which is thought" is not
compatible with the "thing-in-itself," which signifies things as they
exist apart from being images in the mind of an observer.
-wiki
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