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by Aqueous
3007 days ago
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I'm also a software engineer, and I never turned philosophy into a job - it was just a major for me in college. Nevertheless it's interesting that we are both drawn to Kant, as his seemed to be the only suitable reply to the radical skepticism you're left with near the end of Descartes' Meditations (Even Descartes' disproof of his own skepticism is inadequate compared to Kant.) To this date Kant's response to Cartesian and Humean skepticism is the only one I find remotely compelling. It also lines up with my intuition that the form of subjective experience has properties which make subjective experience itself not entirely discoverable by analyzing first principles - those conditions being space and time, concepts that cannot be derived analytically but must be known prior to experience. And in that sense space and time have objective reality in a sense, as conditions of our perception. Our experience must already conform to the conditions of space and time in order for us to have it at all - which means that some reality exists, even though it has no knowable character independently of our perception. I don't know why Kant has not experienced a resurgence, as his philosophy seems more and more relevant the more scientific theories like quantum mechanics are developed - theories which intimately tie up experience and objective reality and which, like Kant, both declare the knowledge of things-in-themselves, independent of perception, impossible and at the same time affirm that things-in-themselves exist. This is something no philosophy, with the possible exception of Kant's, has ever been able to conclusively demonstrate. |
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