- Dec 17, 2018
Philosophy is not about being right. It is about having arguments for one’s claims.
The way philosophic karma works, if one does not have arguments then one is destined to be wrong about one’s claim – as is Paul.
- Alan
From: hegel@yahoogroups.com <hegel@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Monday, December 17, 2018 6:24 AM
To: hegel@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [hegel] perceptionNonetheless Paul is right, I find, re Hegel's forthright criticism of "the Critical Philosophy", even though he shows acceptance of Kant's thoughts/conclusions where he feels he can, e.g. at the end of LPR III?
Stephen Theron.
From: hegel@yahoogroups.com <hegel@yahoogroups.com> on behalf of 'Alan Ponikvar' ponikvaraj@... [hegel] <hegel@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: 14 December 2018 07:02
To: hegel@yahoogroups.com
Subject: RE: [hegel] perceptionThis is amusing.
Once again, Paul attempts to establish a claim by trashing anyone who might think otherwise, asserting that his own view is obvious and baked into Hegel’s very own words.
Look! Just read! What could be any more obvious?
So, once again, it is back to basics.
My mantra is that propositions do not interpret themselves.
One has to offer arguments a bit stronger than the claim that everything is exceedingly obvious and the only reason the claim is contested is because … and this is where the polemics about Marxists and other such rascals are employed.
This line of argument is juvenile. In the world of serious scholarship, no one would ever dare to argue in this way. In fact, no undergraduate student I have ever encountered has ever attempted to argue this way either in class or in a paper.
If you ever wish to be taken seriously, then you will have to stop acting out in this way. You will have to get used to making arguments that by their very nature can and will be contested..
Nothing important in philosophy is determined by howling to the moon about what is obvious. You need to calm down and get down to the serious business of defending what is unavoidably, because by nature, contentious.
In the world of serious scholarship, everything that you claim in your post to be obvious is contested. Is Hegel doing metaphysics? Some say yes. Most say no.
But this is not a popularity contest. We do not count the votes. What we do is assess the arguments.
Is this one quip about god before the creation relevant to what follows? If so, how so? If so, why is there no further mention of this?
You should know that this one flash of divine light is only grabbed on to by those such as yourself desperate to find god where he most decidedly goes missing which is in the Logic.
Someday it might dawn on you that philosophy is all about asking prescient questions and offering compelling arguments.
I know you have been at this for decades. But in many ways your posts reveal you to be new to the field being unfamiliar with the ways of philosophy.
- Alan
From: hegel@yahoogroups.com <hegel@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Thursday, December 13, 2018 11:38 PM
To: hegel@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [hegel] perceptionSrivats,
Both Kant and Hegel used the terms, "Noumena" and "Phenomena" in the traditional, scholastic sense. It is like the term "Speculative Philosophy," which they both used in the traditional, scholastic sense.
You are right to suppose that Hegel takes direct aim at Kant's rejection of Speculative Philosophy (Metaphysics) by calling it "Impossible" (to quote Kant directly).
Hegel aims to show that Kant was correct in many points, but on this point, Kant was sorely mistaken. Hegel calls Kant's conclusions here, "barbarous," not once, but several times in his work.
Nor is there any doubt about what Hegel means by Metaphysics -- as Alan mistakenly claims. Alan, like most moderns, doesn't know what the term means by Metaphysics (as John rightly notes) and so Alan projects his modernist ignorance onto Hegel. So obvious.
One must only read Hegel's Preface to his Science of Logic (1812) to see in blatant terms that Hegel is animate about salvaging Metaphysics from the mess that Kant made of it. Hegel is firm and even blunt in his criticism of Kant and the Kantians -- specifically on this central topic of Metaphysics.
The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) aims to show that by a careful study of PHENOMENA that NOUMENA can finally be known. That is the purport of Hegel's PhG (1807). It is identical to the purport of his SL (1812) where Hegel says:
"This realm is Truth as it is without veil and in its own Absolute Nature.
It can therefore be said that this content is the exposition of God as
God is in God's eternal essence before the creation of Nature and a
finite mind." (Hegel, 1812, Science of Logic, para. 53)
It is nothing less than ludicrous to claim that these words mean anything else than they state.
It is ludicrous to deny the obvious purport of these words -- simply because modernism joins Marx and Lenin in refusing to admit their painfully plain meaning.
Hegel means to revive Metaphysics from the head-blow dealt by Kant. That is exceedingly obvious.
All best,
--Paul
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On Thursday, December 13, 2018, 8:28:53 PM CST, R Srivatsan r.srivats@... [hegel] <hegel@yahoogroups.com> wrote:
This is something that has puzzled me as a student of Hegel for a while -- puzzled/illuminated perhaps?
Kant's qualification of the limits of pure reason exclude the metaphysical -- i.e., reason must be applied satisfactorily only to phenomena which we acquire through the manifold of sense perception, or to conceptualizations that build on these phenomena -- Concepts without intuition are blind and intuitions without concepts are empty.. One cannot apply logic correctly to something that is not based on a phenomenon.
The term phenomenology is the study of phenomena (I don't know if Kant used this term, but it takes on a specific meaning after him certainly).
So what does Hegel mean when he titles his work Phenomenology of Spirit? And then prefaces his book (at the end of his writing it) as a Science of Cognition?
There seems to be a specific, instantly polemical, incisiveness to the Kantian oxymoron of Hegel's title... If one has to do a phenomenology of spirit, one has to study spirit as phenomenon, through methods and constraints that obey and go beyond the regulatory limitations set by Kant. In so doing, it becomes a science of cognition. Thus, the title is not an empty oxymoron. It names a project that goes beyond the Kantian boundary of validity as set in the CPR (at least as far as I can see it). In this sense it takes the incorrectness of the antinomy and of the dialectic and demonstrates how these failures are in fact the way spirit moves forward as examinable in a phenomenology.
To that extent, the Phenomenology is a metaphysics transformed in such a way that it is able to challenge the Kantian understanding of reason, while accepting the Kantian critique of traditional metaphysics and his strictures on a reason that was applied to a naive notion of metaphysics.
Rather than establish a normative regulation of what thought should be like if it is to be reasonable, as Kant did, the Science of Cognition examines how thought functions in actuality. Kant understood thought-in-itself as he set forth a regulatory apparatus using it all the time. Hegel seek to comprehend thought-for-itself as the process through which it is Spirit that determines everything including the Kantian project.
Srivats
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