Stephen Hicks, Ph.D.

Was Kant really that skeptical?

Some readers of Explaining Postmodernism object that I over-interpret Kant’s skepticism. Some prefer a gentler, more objectivity-friendly Kant. So while I quote Kant a lot in making the argument that Kant’s philosophy is radically subjectivist and the critical step down the road to postmodernism, not everyone is convinced.

So I am grateful to Quee Nelson for the following fine collection of quotations from various of Kant’s works, all supporting the Kant-as-subjectivist thesis. The quotations are included in the Appendix to Nelson’s (recommended) The Slightest Philosophy.

“It still remains a scandal to philosophy and to human reason in general that the existence of things outside us … must be accepted merely on faith, and that if anyone thinks good to doubt their existence, we are unable to counter his doubts by any satisfactory proof.” Critique of Pure Reason, B519.

“All objects of an experience possible for us are nothing but appearances, i.e., mere representations, which … have outside our thoughts no existence grounded in itself. … The realist … makes these modifications of our sensibility into things subsisting in themselves, and hence makes mere representations into things in themselves.” Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, 13, Note II.

“The senses … never and in no single instance enable us to know things in themselves.” Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, Part I, Book I, Chap. I, sec. II, 55.

“Things in themselves … cannot be objects of experience.” Critique of Pure Reason, A385.

“Matter … is nothing other than a mere form or a certain mode of representation of an unknown object.” Critique of Pure Reason, B45.

“Nothing intuited in space is a thing in itself … what we call outer objects are nothing but representations of our sensibility the form of which is space. The true correlate of sensibility, the thing in itself, is not known, and cannot be known, through these representations; and in experience no question is ever asked regarding it.” Critique of Pure Reason, A370.

“External objects (bodies) are merely appearances, hence also nothing other than a species of my representations.” Critique of Practical Reason, Part I, Book I, Chap. I, sec. II, 54.

“The objects with which we have to do in experience are by no means things in themselves but only appearances.” Critique of Pure Reason, B520.

“Appearances are not things, but rather nothing but representations, and they cannot exist at all outside our minds.” Critique of Pure Reason, B235.

“Phenomena are not things in themselves, and are yet the only thing that can be given to us to know.” Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, Part One, Remark II, 288-289.

“The non-sensible cause of these representations is entirely unknown to us.” Critique of Pure Reason, A494/B522.

“As we have just shown that the senses never and in no manner enable us to know things in themselves, but only their appearances…we conclude that all bodies together with the space in which they are, must be considered nothing but mere representations in us, and exist nowhere but in our thoughts.” Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, Part One, Remark II, 288-289.

“Your object is merely in your brain.” Critique of Pure Reason, A484/B512.

“It is also false that the world (the sum total of all appearances) is a whole existing in itself … appearances in general are nothing outside our representations.” Critique of Pure Reason, A507/B535.

“Since space is a form of that intuition we call outer … we can and must regard the beings in it as real; and the same is true of time. But this space and this time, and with them all appearances, are not in themselves things; they are nothing but representations and cannot exist at all outside our minds.” Critique of Pure Reason, A492/B520.

“The understanding itself is the lawgiver of Nature; save through it, Nature would not exist at all.” Critique of Pure Reason, A126.

“If I remove the thinking subject, the whole corporeal world must at once vanish.” Critique of Pure Reason, A383. [See: Primacy of Consciousness]

“If then, as this critical argument obviously compels us to do, we hold fast to the rule above established, and do not push our questions beyond the limits within which possible experience can present us with its object, we shall never dream of seeking to inform ourselves about the objects of our senses as they are in themselves.” Critique of Pure Reason, A380.

“I had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.” Critique of Pure Reason, Bxxx.

Source: Quee Nelson’s The Slightest Philosophy at Google books. Also available at Amazon.

Related on Kant:
My interpretation of Kant’s epistemology in Chapter Two of Explaining Postmodernism.
Kant on collectivism and war.
Is commerce rendering war obsolete?
Education: Locke versus Kant.
Philosophy’s longest sentences, Part 2.
Kleist: How Kant ruined my life.
On “giving back”.
Kant and modern art.
Is modern art too complicated for us? [with quotations from Kant's Critique of Judgment].
Heine on Kant: The Department of Great Putdowns.

The Enlightenment Vision — updated flowchart

The Enlightenment of the long 18th century was an era of awesome intellectual and cultural transformation.

This Enlightenment Vision flowchart is pitched at a high level of abstraction, showing schematically how the philosophical revolution of the 17th century led to the 18th-century revolutions in science, technology, politics, and economics — which in turn led to the dramatic increases in health, wealth, freedom, and goods in the 19th century.

To put it another way, the chronology shows how the ideas played out as philosophy, then as an intellectual movement, then as activism, then as the working technology of culture.

I first develop the chart for my courses in philosophy and intellectual history and published a version of it in Explaining Postmodernism. It’s posted here as a PDF, as a JPEG image, or as an Excel file, in case you’d like to adapt it for your own purposes.

(Thanks to Brian Schwartz for prompting this update.)

Classic readings for Philosophy of Education

For my Philosophy of Education course lectures on video, readings are now posted from key philosophers to accompany several of the lectures. [All links are to PDFs.]

Idealism: Plato (the Allegory of the Cave from Republic) and Immanuel Kant (from On Education).

Realism: Aristotle (from Politics) and John Locke (from Some Thoughts concerning Education).

Pragmatism: John Dewey (from Democracy and Education).

Behaviorism: B. F. Skinner (from Beyond Freedom and Dignity).

Existentialism: Jean-Paul Sartre (from Existentialism Is a Humanism).

Marxism: Karl Marx (from Theses on Feuerbach and The Holy Family).

Postmodernism: Henry Giroux (from Border Pedagogy as Postmodern Resistance).

In each case, I discuss the readings in my video lectures, but nothing beats also reading the primary sources for oneself.

Philosophical Foundations of Education course

Here is the syllabus and schedule [pdf] for my graduate course this semester.

I’ll be doing a few experiments with the course this time. One is using my online lectures in Philosophy of Education as assignments for class preparation, along with reading from Howard Ozmon’s textbook. I’ll also be asking the students to read and write a critical review of Jerry Kirkpatrick’s Montessori, Dewey, and Capitalism, a fine historically-informed survey of educational theory.

And in the second half of the semester I will be working with Marsha Familaro Enright, who will lead several Socratic discussions on key philosophers of education — including Plato, John Locke, Immanuel Kant, John Dewey, B. F. Skinner, Jean-Paul Sartre, Karl Marx, and Henry Giroux.

Are babies born to dance?

“Babies Are Born to Dance, New Research Shows” is the headline of a recent report in Science Daily: “Researchers have discovered that infants respond to the rhythm and tempo of music and find it more engaging than speech.”

Data like this connect with key issues about mind-body integration. Music seems to be central to every major human capacity — emotion, thought, memory, and physical movement.

* Music and emotion: Music seemingly automatically generates emotional responses.
* Music and thought: We often grope for thoughts and images to capture what music means, and music combined with lyrics intensifies the experience of both.
* Music and memory: We learn and love the ABC song as kids, and the song makes it easy for us to learn and memorize 26 symbols in the proper order. Or: If you were asked to memorize the list of ingredients in the McDonald’s Big Mac, it might be a chore. But put the list to music and it’s easy and fun to memorize, and we remember it with nostalgic pleasure years later. (Or maybe that’s just me.)
* Music and kinetics: Music naturally makes us want to move over bodies — from finger-tapping to head-bobbing to all-out dancing.

All of that has implications for education: If music is so central, so powerful, and so much fun, can we better use music across the curriculum to teach children?

The connection between music and movement reminds me of John Locke’s Some Thoughts concerning Education and the striking fact that he mentions dancing first when outlining his curricular choices. (Here is my discussion of John Locke on education.)

Introduction to Philosophy: syllabus and schedule

Here is the Syllabus and Schedule [pdf] for my Introduction to Philosophy course this Fall 2010 semester. It’s also posted in the Courses section of this site.

And here is a collection of past posts relevant to this semester’s course:

Before Philosophy: Homer’s world

Why does philosophy begin with Thales?
Philosophy begins: Thales’ revolution

Socrates’ two bad arguments for not escaping
Quotations from Apology and Crito on reason and character

Who is the real father of modern philosophy? [Descartes versus Bacon]

Freud and original sin
The best footnote ever [on micturation]

Why C. S. Lewis gives me the creeps
Freud and original sin [with a comparison of Lewis's and Freud's views on human nature]

Ayn Rand [at The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy]
Roark and Keating: First meetings
Toohey’s five strategies of altruism
Gordon Prescott: Heidegger’s disciple?

John Locke on education

Stephen Hicks discusses John Locke’s views on education, with excerpts from Locke’s Some Thoughts concerning Education. This is from Part 8 of his Philosophy of Education course.

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John and John on liberal psychology

Locke and Mill, that is.

Locke on freedom of choice for students: “great care is to be taken, that [education] be never made as a business to him, nor he look on it as a task. We naturally, as I said, even from our cradles, love liberty, and have therefore an aversion to many things, for no other reason, but because they are enjoin’d us. I have always had a fancy, that learning might be made a play and recreation to children; and that they might be brought to desire to be taught, if it were proposed to them as a thing of honour, credit, delight, and recreation …” (Some Thoughts concerning Education, Section 148)

And now Mill on freedom of movement: “Many a person remains in the same town, street, or house from January to December, without a wish or thought tending towards removal, who, if confined to that same place by the mandate of authority, would find the imprisonment absolutely intolerable.” (Principles of Political Economy, p. 213)