TPF : Kant and Modern Physics -- foundation of knowledge

[Gnomon]

Kant and Modern Physics
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussi ... ent/909606

I'll argue this way (and Kant is no way responsible for my errors). Kant's was about knowledge. His gold standard for knowledge was science - then as now understood to be the science of nature. "But," he asked himself, "how does that work? what grounds it?" — tim wood

Excellent observation. Both Plato & Aristotle were doing Science in 500BC, but walking the tightrope without a net of technology-enhanced empirical evidence. And both saw a necessary distinction between physical Nature (Real) and metaphysical Theories (Ideal). So, Kant was merely updating that ancient science, with almost 1800 years of empirical & theoretical knowledge. Descartes' Discourse on Method had already boiled it down to the basics : the Observer, the "I" whose existence cannot be doubted, is the foundation of all other knowledge.

Therefore, Kant grounded his science in the distinction between Observer (noumena) and Nature (phenomena). These categories are equivalent to the Ideal vs Real dichotomy of the early scientist/philosophers, who made no professional distinction between Scientist & Philosopher. But they did ground their knowledge in both physical (phusis) & psychological (meta-physical) forms of information.


He noted that one theory was that nature was all "out there." But how if it's all out there can we move beyond mere observation - this being Hume's question? Alternatively, it's all a creation of the mind - but how then do we know anything of what we call nature? His resolution was through a synthesis of the two. — tim wood

Kant's Transcendental distinction was between "out there" empirical things and "in here" mental ideas about things. Hence, our knowledge of Nature consists of sensory appearances (haecceity), and rationally-inferred essences (quiddities). So, we don't know those ideal essences directly, but only by inferences from observations. And Hume had already noted a problem with Induction of general principles from limited observations of instances. As you noted, Kant proposed a synthesis of Ideal essences and Real appearances : the unobservable ding an sich, which we must accept as an unobtainable Ideal that we only approximate in our ideas & theories.


Transcendental idealism is the view that objects in space are “outer” in the empirical sense but not in the transcendental sense. Things in themselves are transcendentally “outer” but appearances are not.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant ... -idealism/

The Problem of Induction :
Hume asks on what grounds we come to our beliefs about the unobserved on the basis of inductive inferences.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/induction-problem/

PS___ I'm not an expert on these quirky questions. So my remarks are only an attempt to clarify my own understanding of the knowledge problem : how do we verify what we know?