Hello. How are you?

You can read the About page to start forming a very rough idea of who I am. In brief, I am a student of philosophy. This blog is being started in order to get my eyes away from books and my thoughts out from wherever they reside when they lack expression or discussion. Questions are welcome on this blog. In fact, I hope to ask many of them throughout the rest of my life. I have just come off of my final finals week as an undergraduate, so my writing skills have been well exercised lately. As far as responses to questions, I’d like to see assertions, elaborations, digressions, challenges, and more questions. I am somewhat skeptical of answers. Answers are generally acceptable as long as context is provided.

First Question: What particular philosophical issue are you currently studying?

 First Response: I am currently studying the Prefaces and Introduction to Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. These texts announce Kant’s philosophical project. He says, “The proper problem of pure reason, then, is contained in the question, ‘How are synthetical judgments a priori possible?’” (CoPR, Int, VI) What does this mean? Kant is concerned with investigating pure reason, e.g., reason apart from sensible experience. This is like trying to find out how a mind is put together before it is affected by experience. What is the structure of reason apart from experience?  A priori means “apart from experience in the world.” Kant wants to find out what makes certain judgments of reason possible. However, these aren’t just any old judgments. Synthetical judgments are, for Kant, judgments where the subject term, a concept, is linked in a logical proposition of identity–e.g. X is Y– to a predicate term that is a different concept. Usually, synthetic judgments are made on the basis of experience. For example, we say “The computer is in the room”–a judgment linking two different concepts–by actually having an experience of the computer being in the room. The alternative would be an analytic judgment. In an analytic judgment, the predicate concept is already contained in the subject concept. The analytic proposition is basically just an explication of the subject concept. Therefore, you do not need to go to experience to figure it out. However, in a synthetic judgment, since the predicate concept is not already contained as a part in subject concept, some type of intuition is needed in order to ground the linking of the the two different concepts. The Kantian problem, then, is to find out if and how it is possible to link entirely different concepts apart from an appeal to our experience in the world.

 I hope this is informative and/or a decent refesher. If you have any questions or corrections, let me know. My overall aim is to write posts similar to this with the hope of generating discussion. I will try to post at least once per day or as often as possible.