Tag: Kant

kantian moving violation???…//Brian Miller: The Physics of God | Evolution News

The religious obsession with the Big Bang goes on and on, as does the related debate among scientists.
But the issues of metaphyics lurk to undermine certainties here. And here we have a direct connection to Kant and his famous antinomies, one of which relates directly to the issue of the Big Bang: there is a beginning in time, there is no beginning in time. This antinomy pertains directly to the Big Bang theory. This contradiction is intractable and sure enough the theory itself has reflected the antinomial background by generating larger theories in which the Big Bang is only a relative beginning (with our without the puzzling multiverse theory). Related to the antinomial issue is the most basic puzzle that attends the whole discourse: If the Big Bang is the ‘beginning of time’ what came before? We cannot think our way out of this kind of confusion. In fact, in the Kantian resolution we see the logical dilemma as insoluble leads to transcendental idealism (which is not transcendental nor really an idealism a la Hegel) which seems to suggest that space-time are constructs of mind. This is problematical and a much detested ‘non-conclusion’ scorned by hard materialists. There is a consolation prize here, apparently: if TI is right then we seem to have a simpler approach to space travel that the complications of rocket science. For that we may be locked in a Zen monastery, for keeps.

In just 18 minutes, Miller lays to rest any reasonable doubts that our universe must have had a beginning. As in, “In the beginning.”

Source: Brian Miller: The Physics of God | Evolution News

“Kantian Ethics and Socialism” by Harry van der Linden

Here is a link to a classic by van der Linden. It reviews the history of the Marburg school that produced a Kantian approach to socialism.
Because of Hegel, Marxists became enemies of all forms of idealism, a gross self-limiting confusion. Look at physics: it studies matter, but its mathematics is idealist.

Continue reading ““Kantian Ethics and Socialism” by Harry van der Linden” →

Is the stupidity of the professoriat beyond repair?

https://nemonemini.files.wordpress.com/2021/02/kants_challenge_resolved_natures-secret_plan7xa_web.pdf

I am often critical of the realm of professors, given the evidence of academic confusion over Darwinism, but beyond that I am simply baffled at what appears to be an ingrained and closed mindset.
Among others of Kant scholars. My thinking on what I call Kant’s Challenge in World History and the Eonic Effect, and then in a separate book as above, remains de facto censored (canceled) by academic circles. These books point to a clear answer, I would say more, ‘solution’ to the challenge he raised in his classic essay on history.
In the twenty-one years since this book was self-published via POD, not a single historian or Kant scholar has commented on this clearly outlined solution. Zero. That’s remarkable. It says something about Kant scholarship and historians in general, but finally on academic structures. It shows the way peer-reviewed publication as an academic monopoly backfires and keeps thinking enclosed in rigidly closed mindset. Apparently that’s even true of Kant scholars in Germany who seem to consider independent scholars as vermin apparently and wouldn’t descend to mention my work in any way, let alone comment. The result here is that professors closed in their system can’t think anymore, and that results in slow but steady distortion of general opinion. Here the grave dignity of the professors is mere Tom Sawyer to the yankee Huck Finn, making faces, and about to tend to his dead possum.
And it leaves the field in some ways to outsiders. Strangely, in many cases, professionals can’t compete with amateurs and can’t above all acknowledge that.

Let me say at once that I am not as such a Kantian, and have never taken a college course in Kant: I am self-taught in Kant’s thinking and find his Critique of Pure Reason needs a slow reading course in a university. The sections on the transcendental deduction are difficult, although a simple glimpse is possible: it is a distant relative of Advaita thinking. With that Kant is all the more remarkable. Let me note that a figure like Schopenhauer tries to simplify. But this is not our topic. None of this difficulty is needed for our discussion. But I have a rough outline understanding of his work find his work on the antinomies essential. And in any case not much Kant is required to read, and explicate his essay on history. The solution to what he is saying is to see he is asking a question. Unfortunately, Kant subtly blunders by suggesting his own answer, apparently, in the concept of ‘asocial sociability’. But the question Kant is asking requires a far broader range of thinking. And the eonic effect begins to answer that. It should be said that without a larger data set including the Neolithic, no solution can be considered final. But the eonic effect is a good start, and you will find slowly but surely that there is probably no other solution, granting that in such a vast subject that it is hard to even reference the whole data set, let alone explain it. But the solution to Kant’s question is actually rather simple, because it seems to succeed by default.
Here, by all means, disagree. But in this environment, since you can’t even mention certain people you can’t reference their work, and probably won’t ever hear about it, and cannot deign to comment in any way. A fatal trap in this case.
But there are reasons for all this, as I can only guess. The reign of professorial authority via peer review etc is not able to contradict reigning paradigms. For starters, no professor as far as I can see (as a Kant scholar) can disagree with Kant’s own view, which is almost incidental in any case, and wrong. He in fact is asking a question. Kant is pre-Darwin, and any comment is likely to challenge Darwin, not least for its teleological query. Kant of course had his own problems: he is harsh on Machiavelli and dislikes lying in politicians and ended in a debate over that, with Benjamin Constant. That’s a tough one and requires careful assessment of his classic ethics, but in the age of Trump, one has to wonder at Kant’s insistence or prescience here. But none of this pertains to his question which requires no Kant at all (although I have wondered in the eonic model if some macro  mechanized evolutionary process doesn’t do something resembling the categorical imperative at the level of evolutionary directionality????) But one can cite this to acknowledge that challenging Kant is entirely possible, but mostly forgotten in the tide of Marx, Hegel, Darwin, Nietsche, Heidegger, etc…
Leave that aside and we see that the eonic effect shows a directional system, an evolutionary creativity, a clear outline of the transitional driver of civilizations in sequence and parallel, etc…
As an empirical demonstration, the result is on solid footing even if incomplete. An incomplete table puzzle often shows its overall pattern even if partially completed. The solution is too simple and too obvious to reject completely.

At this point, one needs to give up on professors if only to laugh instead of hate, and only contempt for academic structures remains. This is unkind but such people would kill critics if they could. This kind of confusion in the end is dangerous to society.

I think that as the Darwin paradigm starts to collapse the world will have to ask, how could so many experts be so idiotic? The social construct could collapse. Perhaps then the issue of Kant’s challenge might come to the surface. But it need not wait and takes a half hour of your time. In the classic saith-he of Patton, nuts! Oh well, try again, another email to the journal Kant-Studien.

The debate over idealism/materialism is futile

This essay is obstinate in its defense of the classic Marxist formulas and dismissive of any and all criticisms, etc…
Let’s be clear: the issue is socialism and its passage into social realization. The question of Marx’s theories is secondary. Those formulas aim to establish socialism/communism but in reality they have the opposite effect now. And the questions of philosophy can’t be packaged in the way Marxists wish. Materialism in the age of quantum field theory is problematical.
The traditional opposition to idealism is a set piece of the nineteenth-century era of Hegel and is misleading as a generalization. The idea that idealists are reactionaries and materialists revolutionary is nonsense now, whatever sense it had in the era of the early modern. The issue of Hegel misses the point and neglects the far more foundational figure of Kant, whose work we should note was the foundation for an entire school of socialism.
The debate between idealism and materialism is a waste of time. In physics, even is the text says ‘materialism’ the equations say idealism. What is an equation in physics, an entity in an (idealist)sphere of abstractions. The mathematics of physics is a mysterious ‘ideal’ zone of ‘just in time’ innovations with uncanny timing ahead of new physics. The classic example is the mathematics of General Relativity whose mathematical basis long predated Einstein’s use of it.
Who can say anymore what is a true foundation for knowledge. Marx’s choice of economic fundamentalism was notably unsuccessful. And the example of Kantian ethical socialism, ignored by the cadre of second-rate Marxist philosophers, is clear proof that a radical/revolutionary platform can look beyond historical materialism’s poorly founded pseudo-science.
The left would do better with a large framework that can look at and embrace these opposites.
The issue of dialectical materialism is also a thing of the past. It is not a scientific stance and makes a kind of mysticism out of the dialectic.
The left needs to travel light and adopt a larger view where the issue is the history of philosophy as it is, and not the useless debate with Hegel’s idealism, a far cry from Kant’s so-called ‘transcendental idealism’.
The futile obsessions in these debates do not advance socialism so much as alienate needlessly by making dogmas out of now useless positions.

Wellred Books proudly presents the new edition of Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-criticism. In this classic text, Lenin brilliantly explains the fundamental principles of the materialist philosophy of Marxism. He defends them against idealist attacks from the subjective idealism of Machism, a philosophical trend, which at Lenin’s time was becoming very fashionable, even within the workers’ movement.

Source: In Defence of Materialism – Alan Woods