If you have seen this screenshot, find it for you. We are at the 11th session now of the Circle of Revenge. I'm going to pass the microphone to the instructor. Thanks, Theo. Thanks, everyone. So we are going to continue our discussion on threefold synthesis and you know how to the discussion of synthesis, Kant tries to bring together two fundamental topics,
Critique of Pure Reason, Consciousness and Unity of Consciousness and Unity of Conception or Unity of Concepts or Concepts as Principles of Unity. So basically concepts and consciousness ultimately hang together via this schema that Kant sets out to elaborate the so-called threefold synthesis. So we will continue with this, whatever time is left we will get into imagination and schemata.
So I have talked about already about the threefold synthesis, what are these three synthesis are. So I'm just going to skip some of the rudimentaries without understanding that hopefully you have watched the previous session. Any question before I move forward? I have a question unrelated to the synthesis a little bit. Just about, I think it was last week that you mentioned that we're not thinking of the transcendental operative subject as specifically human or even more specific as homo sapien, but we're
thinking about it as a design for a dispersive intelligent entity. as if it were like a blueprint for what the conditions or the rules were that would be required for us or for a being to have discursive intelligent capabilities yes um and i'm just having i guess there's two two parts of the question is one do you think that Kant himself would have viewed the apperceptive subject that way um when it seems like uh humanism was, enlightenment humanism was at its height right around his time, and it seemed like it would have been very possible for him to think of
the transcendental perception subject simply as being a human being in sort of a maybe naive categorical way. Yes. Yes, I think it's, the whole thing is that, of course, we need to be careful ascribing this to Kant, but simply understanding it as a consequence of the Kantian, of the direction initiated by Kant, or at least, you know, tracing it back to enlightenment, in the sense that no, Kant wouldn't just say that we are just blueprints, but humans, as biologically conceived, are the ultimate problem categorical instantiation of the so-called human, human, generic human.
So the Homo sapiens is really already the instantiation of that. But of course, once you take Kant's own judgments about the local and contingent characteristics of the kind of thinking and acting creatures that we are, then we should also take this whole idea that human cannot be, you know, simply be understood in terms of a local and contingent set of characteristics. And that's, of course, that brings the question of biology.
Hence, the category of the human as a subject in a Kantian sense, or an agent capable of thinking and acting is, of course, that already puts it in a kind of, not in the opposite direction, but nevertheless, as a diverging orientation from what you might call to be the current instantiation, the existing instantiation, the Homo sapiens. So no, I don't think that Kant probably would say that even talking about this is not good because precisely we are really Homo sapiens, biological instantiation is already the apotheosis
of the category human. taking Kant's own philosophy onward, I would say that you can show that even though Kant's conservatism would prohibit him from saying that, unless there are, in fact, you know, chunks of information and judgment in his work that lead us to this belief that if there was such a thing as Kantian plus or an augmented Kant or an augmented enlightenment to put it more generally yes that would ultimately lead to this kind of position right I I guess one of the things that I've been
stewing over is just the fact that he he's lying this out as these are the conditions for us to have intelligence for us to think for us to know and these are conditions that are shared amongst transcendental perceptive subjects yes and then he and he even says like well there may be other entities which experience differently but there's no point even talking about that yes no that's I said that he might say that there is no point but I would say that this is one of those cases that you can tell Kant that there is in fact a point talking about that. Precisely because how you have characterized the whole idea that the limits of our empirical cognitions are set by the limits of the transcendental faculties.
And in so far as already Kant, you remember in those earlier chapters where Kant says that of Of course, other people can, there would be other intelligences that might have different kinds of a spatiotemporal, you know, basically faculties. So insofar as already the limits of the empirical description or object constitutions are set by the limits of a transcendental constitution. and so far as the transcendental constitution has its limits in the specific particular types of transcendental structures exclusive to this or that type of intelligence, of our perceptive intelligence,
this already completely annuls any form of basically implicit as-if argument that Kant already tries to show that it is not as-if. What is this as-if argument? It's an implicit. Of course, Kant doesn't want to say it's as-if. It's the whole idea that the kind of transcendental structures we occupy with understanding that they might be actually contingent and locally constituted, meaning that they are not universal. So Kant tries to show as if these transcendental structures were universal, then how could we really talk about objects or subjectivity or consciousness?
But this is only an as-if argument, as if precisely because the premises of this very universality, Kantian universalism in this regard, are really local and contingent particularities of subjectification. And hence, what does this mean really to start to think about broadening the scope of this universal subject, universal transcendental subject, without ever pigeonholing it to one specific tie of transcendental structures that ultimately would lead to the limitations of empirical description or object constitution? That answers my question.
Any more? Any? Okay, let's just start then. So I mentioned that, you know, a little bit about this, usually it's become customary to, for philosophers to attack Kant's account of threefold synthesis as forward in a deduction, what you might call say kind of a reactionary or if not reactionary mystical
philosophically naive you know basically theory of mental faculties but we talked about that this is not the case if you know we are generous enough to read Kant in the broadest scope that he sets even in a deduction, it can be shown that this is not what you might call an outmoded psychological theory of mental faculties, but it is in fact a quite complex transcendental theory of mental faculties, of transcendental psychology in the sense that this framework doesn't suggest by any means that we are dealing with a certain
kind of faculties in which the input of one is the output of another, so on and so forth, or these mental faculties can easily be distinguished from one another precisely because they are are isolable. We talk about these that, you know, that this is really not the case. And one of the main issues that complicates threefold account of synthesis in Kant and shows that it is not by any means simply an enumeration of mental faculties or that it is a kind of psychological account of the cognitive subject, but it is more or less a kind of phenomenological
analysis, a logical phenomenological analysis of necessary aspects and conditions for perception in general. And this very issue that complicates the so-called naive psychological theory of mental faculties is nothing but the faculty of imagination as an intermediating faculty that comes between sensory intuition and understanding. So we talked about these now
we talked about imagination according to Kant is the capacity to represent an object even without its presence in intuition be So, then on Kant's account, the parts of the red book over and above what I see of it are present in my perceptual experience as imagined. It's important to be clear that being present as imagined does not suggest being presented
as imagined. Since that I am aware of my experience as such, that is to say I'm aware of it simply as a unitary experience of seeing a book. The philosophically useful distinctions of reason that we are in the process of drawing, that is, are not distinctions that can be, so to speak, introspectively read off from our perceptual experiences merely by suitably directing our attention to them. This is part of what Kant had in mind when he called imagination a blind, although indispensable function of the soul without which we would have no cognition at all but of which we are seldom even
conscious a 75 b uh 103. so in this sense imagination uh turns out to be an essential aspect of perception per se. Now as Kant remarks himself, this is from A120, no psychologist has yet thought that the imagination is a necessary ingredient of perception itself. This is so partly because this faculty was limited to reproduction and partly because it was believed that the senses do not merely afford us impressions but also put them together
and produce the images of objects for which without doubt something more than the receptivity of impression is required namely a function for the synthesis of them now this function is what Kant calls as we mentioned last session the sentences of apprehension in intuition which is the first of the three sentences the other two as we mentioned and briefly looked at them are the sentences of reproduction in the the imagination and the synthesis of recognition in the concept.
So shortly, synthesis of reproduction and synthesis of recognition. So imagination, therefore, is responsible for two tasks in Kant's threefold synthesis framework. On one level it functions to pull together a synchronic manifold of sensations into what Kant calls an image and Sellars calls an image model. Read this particular...
It's called The Role of Imagination in Kant's Theory of Experience, starting page 454 in uh sellers in the space of reasons does it have the diagram christian because this this has some actually very helpful diagrams the
one that's yes yes yes yes. Do you want me to screen share? No no no I saw it no no not yet. So this is this is called image build B-I-L-D. It must therefore antecedently take up the the impressions into its activity, i.e. apprehend them, A120, hence the synthesis of apprehension. On the second level, the second task of imagination is quite relevant to the kind of picture that
Hume already had in mind our eyes cannot turn in their sockets without varying our perceptions it's from the human nature to secure anything like a stable image so we also need to be able to pull together the sensory manifold the day chronically and so somehow to carry over its earlier elements or citing Kant, it is however clear that even this apprehension of the manifold alone would bring forth no image and no connection of the impressions where they're not a subjective ground for calling back a representation from which the mind has passed on to another,
to the succeeding ones, i.e. a reproductive faculty of imagination. So the second, so this is the kind of a, this is called the synthesis of reproduction, that's why it's called synthesis of reproduction. Now, this, the first two synthesis, you know, the synthesis of operation, the synthesis of reproduction, are essentially what we call the figurative synthesis. And Of course, there is much to be learned from how these things are being done from a cognitive science perspective by looking into predictive processing paradigm that we talked briefly
talked about, deep learning, so on and so forth. But our concern here is not so much about the details of how these forms of imagination or jobs of imagination are being done, but rather more about their nature. What exactly are they responsible for? So a good example that I mentioned nevertheless it's still good to bring it back because it simplifies. We talked about drawing a line example segment by segment. As you move your pen every part needs to apprehended synchronically.
of these parts needs to be synchronically apprehended as part of a whole, a line mainly. This is the first synthesis, synthesis of apprehension. As we move the pen creates more segments of this line, all of these segments are apprehended as to be synchronous parts belonging to the same whole a line without which we can't even you know create a line but this already we talked a little bit that
Kantian, this Kantian example can also be misleading or not that it is misleading, it actually reveals something about even the first synthesis. That's in order for you to create a line, to construct a line as you are drawing it, you need to also have the concept of a line. With understanding that this concept of the line is not simply an image model. No amount of images of a continuous line would result in something like the concept of a line. Hence if we are going
to apprehend all of these segments that we are drawing as synchronous parts of of a line, we should also have a concept of a line, which means that the concept of a line is even implicit at this level, at the level of first synthesis, synthesis of apprehension. So this was the first of the figurative synthesis, is the synthesis of reproduction in imagination. This whole idea is that, so the first one tries to pull together these segments that you are drawing together as parts of the concept of a whole, the concept of a continuous line. The second synthesis tries to put together these segments as you are creating them, these
representations as you are creating them as representations that carry over and retain certain elements of the previous representations or previous segments so imagine that you are drawing a line first it's like one centimeter long then two centimeter long then it's three centimeters long then it has a little bit of a curve so these instantiation in these now this now that now the other one and the length is growing but it also might get curvature these instantiations that carry over the elements that was already there but nevertheless
add something new to what it was already there is the faculty is that synthesis of reproduction so it is temporal because you need when you remember from the inner sense discussion you need to have a temporal orderliness in order for you to be capable of moving from one representation to another representation that not only retains some elements of the first representation but you can put these stood together as part of the same temporal orderliness by virtue that the first representation
has been temporally carried over to the second. Is it clear? So the distinction between the first synthesis and the second synthesis, which we call them figurative synthesis. drawing the line. What is synchronic? These segments of the lines that you are drawing are part of this whole line, the first synthesis, synthesis of apprehension, the second synthesis, synthesis of reproduction. Elements between representations belong to temporal orderliness. The later representations retain the elements of preceding representations.
And elements of preceding representations are carried over to succeeding representations temporally. Hence that's why that drawing a continuous line is a really good example because if you don't have this then your line won't be continuous then there won't be such a continuous line you can't really synthesize it integrate it or it is it any question before I move forward your microphone is off
okay can you hear me now yes yes yes okay so i think this might be diluting cant a little bit but it just i mean like i keep wanting to say that it seems like something like even if you're drawing the line in your mind it seems like there would have to be something like some of sight or vision even if it's not something you're seeing externally and then also memory I'm just like how does memory how it seems like time the way you're describing the way can't describe it would account for memory But it seems like this would be somehow something he's neglecting No, no, the memory is It's not so much about One particular sense as if you are seeing it. Yes. I mean yes, it is about sensing
It's about sensing like, you know, you need to see it as you are moving it But this seeing, as you might say, ought to be coupled with the function of memory. Memory not in the naïve sense that memory as it stores data or stores representation, no. In the absolutely contemporary sense of constructive memory in cognitive science. the kind of memory that you need to have. The whole idea that when we are, you know, what is really constructive memory? It's the idea that, you know, I had an impression
of some event, like for example, whenever I touch, when I am inside this room, I see this kind of you know lights you know the temperature is like that I know that if for example I do something given this condition it leads to such a consequence now imagine that I come again back to the same situation memory here doesn't function simply to recall what I have done in the past. It updates your actions and perceptions according to the parameters of the situation. Precisely because your actions and perceptions are under new parameters.
Temperature might have changed, lighting might have changed, this and that situation might have changed. So situational memory is always constructive. And really this whole idea of synthesis of reproduction without a constructive memory is absolutely impossible it would be just a a mystical function of the soul yes and there is there is no really a kantian equivalent for it inner sense tries to somehow answers for this but you see it's really hard to answer to talk about these things without memory. You kind of have to go outside a camp to really address these issues.
Yes, and it's not the idea that memory does not emulate or simulate a sense of time. No, memory does not do that. But what memory does is precisely because it creates a continuity between representations upon which time consciousness of perception can be built. this whole idea that how what is it what does it mean to really retain some impressions some elements of some impressions and carry over some elements from preceding representations to succeeding representations what does guarantee such a movement really that's really memory but
that doesn't really mean that it is already uh time conscious that something that has memory of this kind can be said to be time conscious. No, because time consciousness requires something more than memory. But nevertheless this constructed memory should be there for you to in fact have something like synthesis of reproduction. Without synthesis of reproduction you might say that there would no, and I need to really think about this, this is not something Kant, this is my own claim, that without synthesis
of reproduction. There is no such a thing between a subject and the world. Subject cannot differentiate itself from the world. Why? Precisely because in order for the subject to be subject, it should be the perceptive subject of knowing that my past experiences and my present experiences, future experiences are mine and mine alone as distinguished from a world history so the history of my experiences are my experiences as distinguished from world experiences if you don't have synthesis of reproduction you don't have history of subjective experience as distinguished
from world history and hence there is no such a thing as distinguishing yourself from the world per se there isn't a sense in which these syntheses in the are more or less foundational that's sort of what you're saying that uh within the first synthesis first synthesis the third synthesis has to be active and there's some sense in which we can't extract them from each other easily and yes we say that the first is somehow foundational for the other the synthesis to come
You see, that's one of the things that, this is one of those cases that brings us to this topic that when we need, if we are really trying to be generous, we need to also read this idea of level hierarchy very subtly. In the sense that not all hierarchies are top-down or bottom-up. But there are such a thing as mesoscale or mid-level hierarchies. And here we are really dealing with a level hierarchies. Yes, the entire idea of transcendental turn is a top-down hierarchy, because if you don't have a priori, you don't have anything else. But nevertheless, the way how things work are mid-level, in the sense that even when
you think that synthesis of apprehension is fundamental to the second and the third, we just noticed that it requires something for you, for example, like the concept of the line, in order to pull synchronically all the parts. So you see that it always, this is the whole idea that it's like a mid-level, the so-called mid-level ontologies or mid-level hierarchies, is the idea that, yes, there is some level of functioning, but this level of functioning needs to be very distinguished according to what kind of function, we are distinguishing this hierarchy. At the level of pooling together the impressions, yes. Intuitions, yes, it's the most fundamental.
But at the level of synthesizing, no, it is not fundamental. All of them are equally fundamental. One second. Or maybe let's have just a very, since that's most majority of us are delighted by sickness, let's have a very quick rest and then come back. Sounds good. Let's take five minutes, okay? Yes, yes.
Can you tell me if I can get white glass? White. White. I have white. Yes. Great. Let me tell you. These are regular for 350. Is there a hundred seconds? Sorry. Sorry. No problem. Any question before moving forward?
What is so understanding what the givens are in some way? I can't understand. Arton can elaborate yes If you just want to type in the sidebar, that's fine too, and I can read it out for
Okay, I will just go on once Artem types his question, then we'll get back to that. So as I mentioned that in A deduction and B deduction, the list is a little bit different. first senses of apprehension, senses of reproductions are actually are introduced
as something called defigurative synthesis of the manifold of sensible intuition which can't pitch it against and contrast it against the intellectual synthesis or synthesis intellectualists Namely, a synthesis that doesn't require imagination and, you know, is carried out merely through understanding. So the synthesis of the first two synthesis, synthesis of apprehension and reproductions
are what you might call to be organizing organizing faculties and so far as they're organizing one was synchronic it in one involves synchronic unification like that was a synthesis of apprehension like synchronically pooled together these segments of the line as parts of this line as a whole, and the other one required a diachronic unification in the sense that you had to retain some elements of previous representations to build on them.
Insofar as they are both organizing or unifying activities, that means that there are not, synthesis are not merely functions of pure sensibility, they are not passive, they actively involve in unification and organization. And Kant says on this front, the manifold of representations can be given in an intuition that is merely sensible i.e. nothing but receptivity yet the combination of and by combination he simply mean conjunction of a manifold in general can never come to us to use the senses for it is
spontaneity of the power of representation b129 so As I mentioned, that's if the whole idea of transcendental project, more specifically transcendental psychology and transcendental logic, always involve at one pole understanding and at the other pole sensibility, then imagination,
as I have mentioned previously, is the missing link of all these branches of transcendental frameworks. Precisely because imagination is this kind of bridge, intermediating faculty that has some alliances with understanding and that some alliances with sensibility. as Rosenberg says, has one foot in each camp.
Again coming back to Kant as a kind of confirmation of this interpretation, he says, now since all of our intuition is sensible, the imagination on account of the subjective condition under which alone it can give a corresponding intuition to the concepts of understanding belongs to sensibility. But in so far as its synthesis is still an exercise of spontaneity, the imagination is to this extent a faculty for determining the sensibility a priori,
and its synthesis of intuitions, in accordance with the categories, must be the transcendental synthesis of imagination, which is an effect of the understanding on sensibility and its first application. to objects of intuition that is possible for us, i.e. to sensations. B, 151 to 2. So let me read Artem's question.
You remember Artem that this, I mean the, of course I mean this, your question is far broader that we can you know put all of it into you know the answer can't be just one answer to this question but remember that the germ of this distinction between the subject and the world was really idea of time or temporality of experience the significance of which was simply the idea that from analogically speaking the experiences that I have had
belong to me no the me that a perceptive unity to which I ascribe such experiences is distinguished from the world precisely because it is capable of distinguishing between those which are mind those encounters which are done in the presence of an object and those which are no longer require the presence of an object put it very very simply it
it really requires a distinction between an object being mind independent an object that requires the presence of an object that was the core of the inner sense inner sense and we come back to this again in the eschemata So inner sense really, inner sense is a germ of this distinction so far as it tries, it is for the first time that analogically speaking the subject can see a history of its own experiences.
As distinguished from a mind independent world history. but nevertheless instantiated by it. Now I said that the answer to this question cannot be simple and that's what does it exactly mean for us to have a history of experiential history, a unified experiential history and what does it mean for us to have a world history a conception of world history and insofar as the distinction between the two as encapsulated concept of time consciousness subject represents
ultimately the distinction between subject and the world so without so let put it this way i mean you can let's you i think the best ways to think about it and then hopefully either at the end of this session or the next session when we are talking about the schema top we are getting back to this that what is exactly in time consciousness and a distinction between a unified experiential history and a conceived world history uh once you distinguish them from one another that allow something like me as a subject being distinguished from the world.
So what is exactly in time consciousness, in a time conscious experience that allows this distinction to happen? The answer is already in the question. I mean, not the entirety of it, but where you can start with it. The whole idea is to differentiate between an experiential history, a time of experience, and the time of the world. Between those encounters, which requires the presence of objects, those encounters which don't on one side, and both
of these encounters being with objects that are quite independent of mind or own experiential history. So this whole idea of mind-independency also plays a role in the idea of time consciousness, in the constitution of object, and that's actually one of the points of critique put forward by John Findlay. So without answering your question, you know, in its entirety, I can say for now is that it's time consciousness. Time consciousness as the unit of experience is what differentiates a subject from the world and what are the characteristics of time consciousness?
Retaining of representations but also the capacity that all these representations that are being retained can be said to be experiences or I thoughts of the same subject of the same I hence the synthetic unity of our perception unity of our perception and time consciousness are indistinguishable remember that cryptic thing that Kant said when he was talking about the inner sense and the question of time. This is the ground from which everything else moves forward.
There is a reason for it. Without time, there is no such thing as distinction between subject and the world. But of course, we know that what Kant means by time is not time as some kind of metaphysical called reality he simply means the transcendental idea ideality of X of experience temporality of course this brings back at a more fundamental level what Chagis was referring to that is it such a such a thing possible to have a distinction between subject and the world without memory in so far as time consciousness
is grounded upon memory It also gets into issues of like unity and conceptual unity. We would assume like especially with respect to I don't know something like some feedback loop between the third synthesis and the first where the concepts that are positive and the critical conceptual image models which are constructed are um are constructed within the the unity of intuition of the intuition of the after receptive subject
yes yeah yeah yeah absolutely but the thing is that i think you would say okay maybe i shouldn't say that this is something that i'm still trying to answer myself myself we know that kent explicitly has said as has somehow given a very fundamental status to um to the question of time uh qua transcendental ideality of experience temporality uh even more fundamental than the than that of the concept for the unity of our perception now this is this opens a whole can of worms here
why because there can be again according to Kant's own account other creatures with different structures of memory with different organizing temporalities or they may not have temporality in any remote sense that we understand And there is nothing that makes this talking about such things unintelligible. In fact, the more you look into contemporary physics, the more you look into AI, the more you look into neuroscience, you see that there is such a thing, that this whole idea of temporality is not that it's not unreal.
Yes, Kant already had said it's unreal, meaning it's transcendentally ideal, but its transcendental ideality is not universal. It's simply the product of such and such local and contingent constitution to which we are somehow tethered. So if that's the case, then a lot of things start to change. I don't want to talk about this right now because that just goes completely off topic. But let's continue this and then I will come back to the sense and ultimately the distinction
between subject and the world as encapsulated in the idea of the distinction between having a experiential history, a unified experiential history and having a world history or simply idea of time consciousness. Also, I just saw that Theo was saying that intuition is not cognitive faculty or rather a faculty of understanding. It's crash cognitive. No, well, now that we are getting into the main of unsubtlety here, because are we talking when we are talking about intuition, are we talking about the intuit-eds or the intuit-ings?
You remember? if we are talking about the intuitings it is a mental act it's a cognitive act right right but it's not a faculty of the understanding that's I misspoke with cognitive but it's the faculty of intuition which is a cognitive faculty but it's not the understanding yes now So, in B deduction, Ken talks about imagination as a spontaneity.
He sometimes talks about this as productive imagination, in contrast to reproductive imagination that we have been talking about so far. Whose synthesis is subject solely to empirical laws, namely those of association, and therefore contributes nothing to the explanation of the possibility of cognition, a priori, B.152. Now, productive imagination, now, okay, now things are getting a little bit confusing here. So there is such a thing as a productive imagination in Kant and there is such a thing as a reproductive imagination. Reproductive imagination, which
is a kind of a more rudimentary function of imagination, is subject to empirical laws, namely those of association as Kan says, and contribute nothing to the explanation of the possibility of cognition of a prior. It just, you know, performs a unifying organizing lower function. So this is one, and there is another productive imagination. Productive imagination is simply understanding operating under the guise of imagination now the confusing thing is that productive imagination
also has a reproductive function so you have one reproductive imagination and one productive imagination your productive imagination which is understanding under the guise of imagination also have a reproductive function without which no image and no connection of impressions would be possible You see, this reproductivity, the reproductive function of productive imagination is not
a reproductive function at a lower level, but one that is associated with the pure concepts of understanding. Imagine it like synthesis of apprehension. We had also there two kinds of function, one just simply pulling together synchronic parts of your line segments as being part of the concept of a line as a whole. That association, that reproduction according to the concept of line, was a different reproductive or apprehending function. Here also you have the same thing,
reproducing according to the concept of a line as a whole. Hence you have a reproduction whose alliance is ultimately its understanding and this is the kind of reproductive function that is solely that solely belongs to productive imagination namely understanding under the guise of imagination i wish i had a pen here to draw you something but again if this is getting too confusing so when we are talking about these syntheses for at least the figurative synthesis the first and
the second synthesis if we always when you are talking about apprehension or reproduction this apprehension reproduction can be carried out the functions of these can be carried out on two levels One on a rudimentary level of intuition and sensible intuition, and the other on the level of understanding. So, talking about imagination, we said that we have, at the very least, reproductive imagination and productive imagination. So, reproductive imagination, we completely rule it out as rudimentary.
that Kant already said that's part of the empirical laws and pertains with association and so on and so forth. But productive imagination, which Kant understands as the function of understanding under a new guise which is an imagination, can do two things at the same time, either production or reproduction and in fact not either or it does both actually both at the same time the kind of reproduction that productive imagination is responsible
for is a reproduction on a higher level namely not on the level of sensible intuition but on the level of understanding and pure concepts. You need to have the concept of the line in order to retain these impressions according to this concept. So the reproductive function that is happening at the level of productive imagination is
reproduction in accordance with the concept of the line, with a concept that is happening at the level of understanding, at the level of productive imagination. And it is not, this concept cannot be found at the level of mere sensible intuition. So that's like having a downward reproduction from concepts towards sense. Is that a crude way of understanding it? No, reproduction always goes actually upward.
But the productive imagination, when you say it's reproductive of concepts, is that what you're saying? Yes. So it's a, so I meant like it's a... Reproduction according to a concept. So it's the whole idea that reproduction is always lower level than production, but it's a kind of a higher level reproduction. It's a kind of reproduction that does not merely happen at the level of sensible intuition. It does, but in accordance with a concept. So you have this line segments that their length was increasing. Their length are increasing temporally in accordance with the concept of a line.
The principle of their unification is accordance with the concept of a line. The concept of the line is at the top level. so reproduction always goes upward from the in sensible intuition to the concepts but here you have a reproduction and again it becomes very fuzzy in terms of the levels precisely because you have both the concept of the line and the function of reproduction I haven't seen anyone really, even Rosenberg or Sellars or anyone who has actually talked
about this more carefully. It seems that Sellars goes to a certain length, but when it comes to this whole idea that productive imagination also has a reproductive function they don't really talk much about what exactly this reproductive function is and how we can understand with regard to reproductive imagination as contrasted from productive imagination I'm talking about the fucked up subtlety here in Kant.
Yeah, it's like, I mean, trying to get some clarity here without relying too heavily on Kantian terminology, which is always like sort of hard to understand. But like it kind of, could we think of this as what you're describing as how number is the schema of quantity but then there's also a concept of number yes so there's this duality to number that it's a schema of quantity that you understand and experience but then there's also the concept itself of number yes and actually you you make you i i i hope that this was intentional you use the word duality i would say that all of these in these complex kinds of faculties like reproductive function of productive imagination rather than
reproductive function of reproductive imagination actually can be understood very more precisely in terms of the concept of duality. Does any of you know what dualities are in modern sense, in modern mathematical logical sense? So dualities are not dualism, you have something like dualisms like mind-body dualism but there are also something called dualities like nominon and phenomenon theory and object language and world or mind and world it's the idea that dualities I mean I'm not going to give you a kind of you know
rundown of what the exact definition is in in the mathematical logic but very very intuitively with a good you know amounts of uh vulgar reduction you might think of them as mirror images that are required for the projection of one another So duality means that you need to have an interaction between the constituted dualities in order to have any of them, any of these mirror images. Like when you have a mirror image, if you don't have the mirror, which is the point
of interaction between these two then you don't have either of them so this is it so this is the concept of duality and i think as uh you know shagis was saying number concept of number and the quantitative uh you know numeric progression can be thought about dualities here a reproductive function of the productive imagination can also be taught in terms of dualities in fact the entire this is something that i talk a little bit about very very little about in the manuscript in fact the entire transcendental framework can be understood in terms of dualities understanding and sensibility
and then once you are in the business of dualities the kind of you know I would say that the kind of bows and arrows that contemporary logics and mathematics provides you allow you to really formulate some of these questions more accurately but also venture into territories with regard to the possible interconnections or interactions between understanding and sensibility you know mind and the world that Kant couldn't simply by virtue of you know not having such tools yeah I mean I absolutely agree
with Pete on this front that you know research I think as computational Kantianism where the concept of dualities are taken as most serious elements dualities are everywhere particularly in Kant Dualisms, as in contrast with dualities, they usually, but not always, mutually exclude one another, like mind-body dualism as a metaphysical form of dualism.
you are in the territory of body you are not in territory of mind when you are not in the territory when you are in territory of mind you are not in territory of body the world is required interaction and i have to be honest with you after i have read some good interpretations of descartes because descartes you know descartes is like this escape of the fucking transcendental cultists like us. Anyone who wants to fuck with, you know, inception of modern philosophy, beat the shit out of Descartes. You know, accuse him of this as being, you know, hard body, body-mind dualist. I think I have read some really fantastic commentaries.
I will try to share them with you next session or put them on the Google classroom. that it shows that such a venture is absolutely misguided because this is not what Descartes says really. You know, it's really actually, once you really start to look at these in a progression of modern philosophy, you see more and more, there's so many of these things that we look at as simply given cliches are not anything but cliches. They need to be completely purged if you are in the business of doing this business seriously.
So Kant, returning back to the dual function of imagination, Kant elucidates this dual function, apprehension and reproduction, as I have mentioned in drawing a line in thought, which is cited in A02. In the first instance drawing is Kant generic term for the activity or operation of producing a representation of something in a space.
This is what usually Kant means by drawing a line in thought, representation in the space. although as he moves forward drawing acquires ever more broader connotations so let me read you this part from kent he says in b 137 8 it says in order to cognize something in a space example a line I must draw it and thus
synthetically bring about a determinate combination of the given sensory manifold we cannot think of a line and this is another quote citation B 154 we cannot think of a line without drawing it in thought we cannot think of a circle without describing it by tracing out its shape we cannot represent the three dimensions of a space without placing three lines perpendicular to each other at the same point. So when we are drawing something in a space,
we always draw something that's something bit by bit. Which means that ultimately what we draw can be decomposed into parts like a line. At each stage all I need to do is to hold together so to speak as a single hold all of these bits and bits bits by bits that I draw together i need to hold it together so to speak as a single intuitable item pulling them synchronically and what was the name of such a function such a mood of drawing
yes synthesis of apprehension Now, in order for me to extend the line bit by bit, I should be able to retain the result of the earlier stages of the process and carry them over into the later stages and we said that that's called the synthesis of reproduction Kant says now it is obvious that if I draw a line in thought or think of the time from one
noon to the next or even one to represent a certain number to myself I must necessarily first grasp one of these manifold representations after another in my thoughts but if I were always to lose the preceding representations the first parts of the line the preceding parts of the time or the successively represented units from my thoughts and not to reproduce them when I proceed with the following ones, the no-hole representation, and none of the previously mentioned thoughts, not even the purest and most fundamental representations of space and time, could ever arise.
And this is nothing really new. This is something that we have been repeating over and over since the beginning of this course. What you need is not just a sequence of impressions, but the impression of the sequence. A sequence of representation and a representation of sequence. apprehension and reproduction. Is it clear? I know that we are a little getting...
It's not that none of these are clear. It's just that the wealth of subtleties and connections can easily lead to us to at some points of what the fuck is going on here? Can we have some break? I think one of the reasons that people can't read, I mean, if when you talk to philosophy graduates, no matter whether they are a master or PhD, everyone of course knows what the critical pure reason is, but hardly anyone has read it. But this is the whole point, precisely because people think it's a difficult book. It's absolutely not a difficult book. What makes it difficult is not that it is difficult. Heidegger is difficult. Hegel is difficult.
But Kant is a really, really generous, subtle thinker. He defines everything as he moves forward. What makes it difficult is the wealth of connections and how things at some point, so you start, it's like this, it's kind of like tree of life. So the tree model, it gets to start with two branches. It was so simple. It's time and space. And then those start to make their own branches. And then other make their branches. And at some point, all these branches come together in a twisted way. Now that becomes really twisted. This is really the perfect model of reading Kant
as opposed to Hegel, which I think that Hegel is really difficult. and he is absolutely not generous to the reader, whereas Kant is. You know, I call Kant usually conservative, but I think that the way that he tweets a reader, a philosopher, is fundamentally different than that of Hegel. He's quite on the side of, you know, a person who takes his readers very seriously, very systematically. So with the understanding that essentially the first synthesis and the second synthesis
senses of apprehension, senses of reproduction, can be understood in terms of the distinction, but also the necessary conjunction of a sequence of representations and representation of a sequence, we can understand, we can reformulate the difference between the first synthesis and the second synthesis, in terms of the second synthesis, is really ultimately the first synthesis. So the synthesis of reproduction is nothing but synthesis of apprehension, except with one important new element.
And what would that element be? remember i just compared the difference between these in these two sentences as a difference between yes temporality or time yes you need time to move from a sequence of representations to a representation of a sequence you need the element of time or quatemporality to move from synthesis of apprehension to synthesis of reproduction.
And this is what Kant says from A102. The synthesis of apprehension is therefore inseparably combined with the synthesis of reproduction. Now what Kant suggests here about the space and time is worth emphasizing. If you recall in transcendental aesthetic, space and time were given as two unitary and indissoluble forms of intuition, of outer and inner sense. Both space and time can also be represented as objects which contain manifolds or of points
or instances, or what Kant calls formal intuitions. And then they need a function for their synthesis. Now the understanding, which is productive imagination, is implicated in the most fundamental representation of space and time, i.e. even in pure mathematical chronometric and geometric representation. Now what Kant realized was that even when we have integrated time into our picture of perception, there is still something absolutely essentially missing in this account. Crucially,
I must also be able to recognize what's going on at each later stage as a continuation emphasis of something that I have been continuously up to a single ongoing activity that I was also engaged in the earlier stages or I am not drawing a line as Kant says without consciousness that which we think is the same as what we thought a moment before, all reproduction in the series of representations would be in vain. For it would be a new representation in our current state
which would not belong at all to the act through which it had been gradually generated and its manifold would never constitute a whole. If in counting I forget that the units that now hover before my senses were successively added to each other by me, then I would not cognize the generation of the multitude through the successive addition of one to the other. And consequently I would not cognize the number. A-103.
You can think of this as keeping a tally in which each added stroke is a unit. When I reach, for example, four strokes, my earlier accomplishment, three strokes, two strokes and one stroke must as it were still be in the picture. Unless I represent myself, myself, as arrived at these four strokes by way of one stroke
two stroke and three stroke the integration of which required the and the element of temporality or time i would not count as counting so what would be this extra element in addition to the component that Theo has already mentioned, time. What is this component that needs to be added for me to count as, for me to qualify as counting these strokes, moving from one stroke to two strokes to three strokes to ultimately four
strokes. No, we know that time was the component, but in addition to time or temporality, what else do I need to move from one stroke to four strokes with the stuff that I just said that You know, remember that Kant was saying, if in counting I forget that the units that now hover before my senses were successively added to each other by me, then I would not cognize the generation of the multitude through the successive addition of one to the other,
and consequently I would not cognize the number. Unity of what? Okay, Tio and Chagi are very, very close. I mean, I've already given the answer, but I think they need to be a little bit more clear about this. I mean, like, when I say unity, it seems like unity is also the process of creating homogenous units. No, not unity of concept.
There is something more fundamental than unity of the concept. The discursive combination of the concepts into a unified... What does allow us to go for making such a discursive unification? Theo made, yes, one consciousness, absolutely. the unity of our perception what Kant calls self-consciousness remember Kant says here if in continuing I forget that the units that now hover
before my senses were successively added to each other by me this by me is the unity of self-consciousness if I don't have the unity of this perception then there is no way even if I have the component of temporality or time that I can ever move from one stroke to four strokes so ultimately what can solve is that we need to get self-consciousness into the picture what we need to add to the contributions of the imagination is what
can calls transcendental a perception a 107 I need I require and this is not as as a matter of empirical law but as a matter of conditions of possibility i require consciousness of myself as having begun to draw a stroke and then extending it further bit by bit by adding more strokes in an orderly way or as having begun to draw a line bit by bits.
This is the consciousness of myself as active, that is to say as thinking in time. It is different from consciousness of myself as was previously the case, a de facto consciousness, namely a passive, receptive or simply affected consciousness. A consciousness that is simply under the whim of sense impressions.
I was just going to ask, at this point, it's not as if he's arrived at some substantial entity, but this is a formal necessity for him, right? Yes, it's a formal condition. Absolutely, it's a formal condition. You see, I in Kant is by no means a substantive and formal condition. It's absolutely... I, when you see, and that's...
When you see, you read these continental philosophers from, I don't know, like in its vein, from Bataille, you know, the ridicule I, you know. No, I is a formal condition. There is nothing more impersonal, in fact, than I. It's just the eye doesn't know it. That's the point. I don't know that my eye is really impersonal. That is just a formal condition. This is, you know, getting into what's in comparison to dark delus,
you might say to be a dark can't. There is such a thing as an eye. Eye is a formal condition. The consequences. of this premise are yet to be explored by us, the existing subjects. Okay, I need you to give me five seconds or a minute and I will come back. Sorry, I have to go for one minute. Sorry. That's okay.
Thank you. It is this one consciousness that unifies the manifold that has been successively intuited and then also reproduced into one representation. This consciousness may often only be weak so that we connect it with the generation of the representation
only in the effect, but not in the act itself, i.e. immediately. But regardless of these differences, one consciousness must always be found, even if it lacks conspicuous clarity and without the concepts and with them cognition of objects would be entirely impossible. So sensibility itself, space and time is already part of this unity. the sensibility itself is already part of this conceptual unity because there is only one space and one time okay no i don't think that is correct really you need to explain this
okay so it says he says that space and time themselves which might have been assumed prior to any synthesis are on the contrary the result of a transcendental synthesis of imagination that is an effect of understanding on sensibility. Yes. This doesn't say exactly that there are only one space and time. Kant doesn't want to make such a metaphysical, even if we take space and time as transcendentally ideal, doesn't want to make such a claim because it doesn't really serve anything for him that is useful. What he wants to say is that...
What's like he retains that Newtonian notion of there being one space in time but not that it's a like a like it is actually something but that there is one space and one time for the subject not something like outside that we all agree upon as yes yes there is a one okay okay i would say that uh kant would would have said would have okay would have emphasized less about the oneness of this space and time for the subject as he would have overemphasized that that there is an spatiotemporal constraint for the subject in order for it to be conscious
of itself and the conscious and having one consciousness of the manifold now that's that's I think that doesn't really make it Newtonian by any means. I don't think so many people have have attached Kant with Newton. Yes, Kant's metaphysics of time is quite Newtonian, but Kant's understanding of temporality, which is really understanding of philosophy of time, is not by any means Newtonian. Kant in fact is far ahead of any physicist so as Hegel and of course Plato as and Parmenides as the princes of ultimate philosophies of time they are ahead of any
physicist and or scientist or philosopher of time until the time of Boltzmann and then that's when things get far more complicated. But yes, I don't think it's really essentially the idea of how Kant tries to say to establish a connection between that there is one space and time for the subject and there is one consciousness that considers the subjects. I think Kant tries to show that there should be at least one transcendentally ideal conception of a space and time for the subject in order for it to have one consciousness.
You know, I think is notable here is in the aesthetic he mentioned the fact that time is explicitated in outer sense. It's articulating through spatialization, even though not all of time is necessarily spatializable. But space also is spatialized within outer sense, is articulated through outer sense. So I mean, I think that helps to sort of like see that like for Kant, I mean, what is space and what is time is, you know, contingent upon what rules we posit in order to construct outer spatial intuition.
yeah well it's hard to answer the specificity of this question i mean you can see it as as a necessary condition in kantian sense but the specificity of this question i think is very very hard to answer Anyway, before, I mean, these are really difficult questions, questions that need to be thought more carefully. I don't feel comfortable to answer them, you know,
without simply trying to kind of whitewash or, you know, that'll tease their sake here. Okay, you know, let's get back to our story. So, you know, with the last citation that I mentioned from Kant, it also becomes obvious that Kant does not believe that we can suddenly discover a consciousness in ourselves that
has been active and only at introspectively we come across at a later time precisely because consciousness for Kant is not simply empirical consciousness. Yes, I think Kant has a lot in common with today's cognitive science. In the sense that you would say that yes, there is such a thing that Kant wouldn't say that all of consciousness is imprevious to empirical sciences or empirical naturalization. No, Kant wouldn't say something like that.
There are parts of rudimentary faculties or capacities that Kant would have called them to be naturalizable and the perception of a space and like the outer and inner sense. The thing is that in cognitive science today, these outer and inner sense are considered to be consciousness. So people talk about consciousness as soon as they start to see some evidence that might actually exhibit what Kant would have called outer and inner sense or spatiotemporal orderliness,
perspectival orderliness, like as we see in sentiences. But that's not really what Kant calls consciousness. For Kant, consciousness is only consciousness by virtue that is not an empirical datum. For Kant, consciousness is inseparable from the domain of the concept, what it means to use and apply them. So consciousness is not a datum for Kant.
Above all, it is the condition of the possibility of keeping a talent. Roger, are you there? I think we've lost you for a second. Oh, sorry. That's okay. Okay. I was saying that self-consciousness is not a datum, but above all, it is the condition of the possibility of my thinking of myself as drawing a line or keeping a tally when I am taking part in such activities.
So, things like drawing a line in thoughts or keeping a tally, we know that they continue or proceed in an orderly or methodical way. Kant speaks in this connection of the unity of a rule, A 105. Another, again, think about keeping of a tally.
adding a stroke governs the rule of adding a stroke, governs each transition from a stage to a stage. First one stroke, then two strokes, then three strokes, then four strokes. In thinking of what I am doing, when I am keeping a tally, I represent each stage as something that I myself produce by applying the same rule to what I produced in the preceding stage. thereby I necessarily presuppose that the I who writes, who inscribes one stroke equals the I who inscribes two strokes
equals to the I who inscribes three strokes equals to the I who inscribes four strokes. Think of this in relation to what I told you, the I that thinks X, the I that thinks Y, the I that thinks Z equals to the I that thinks, bracket open, X plus Y plus Z, bracket closed. so drawing a line is also a construction carried out
according to a rule what is this kind of rule Kant's answer is the concept of a line as in this Kant's saying as far as its form is concerned a concept is always something general something that serves as a rule A106 in other words we are guided by a rule insofar as we act under a concept I don't consult a concept for a rule as Wittgenstein would have said
or would have warned us it is rather that I represent my activity in terms of the concept that is as drawing a line and that's how I know how to go on it is in so far as I can represent myself as counting by twos I know how to go on 2, 4, 6, 8, 10 It is the rules of plus two that determines what I do and can do next. So the key point for understanding the subjective deduction is that on Kant's account, a consciousness of oneself as passive,
as having perceptions, perceptions also requires this kind of rule-guided or concept-structured activity. In Kant's terms, the objective unity of all empirical consciousness in one consciousness of original perception is a necessary condition even of all possible perception. A, one, two, three. To be perceptually aware of the terminate and treatable items, we need to draw them in thought, which is to instruct them appropriate images from the raw material of the sensory manifold according to the concepts quo rules.
The mere representations of items in a space, that is, presupposes a synthesis of representations across time. Thus, so that's how Kant's third synthesis, the synthesis of recognition in concept, is related to the role of a perceptive self-consciousness in perception. As Kant says, it is this a perception that must be added to the pure imagination in order to make its function intellectual. That's really important a 124 and with the emergence of an indispensable role of four concepts in perception we have finally reached or arrived at can's characterization of experiences arising from
the cooperation of a passive sensibility and active understanding we are now in a position to elaborate the relationship between this earlier doctrine of two sources and the present account of an experience in general and cognition of its object as resting on three subjective sources of cognition, sense, imagination, and perception. For if sense is still adverse to contribution of the receptive sense, then the contribution of the spontaneous understanding must be the threefold synthesis which results from the operation of imagination and a perception.
And so it is. As Kant says, the unity of a perception in relation to the synthesis of imagination is the understanding. A119. So, the understanding in the role of the productive imagination determines the way in which I take of the manifold of sense into an image.
And we know that image in Kantian parlance means a singular representation of an object in a space. As the concept of a line functions as a rule guiding the activity of drawing a line in thought, when I perceive, for example, a thick red book, the concept of a book functions as a rule guiding the activity of constructing the singular representation of an object in space which is my image of the book. Think of all of this in terms of our Lego model building example that we have been looking at in the previous session. Now bracketing temporality, the important details regarding time and a perception yields something like this.
The idea that a concept can determine an image may initially seem implausible, You can think of these kinds of ambiguous figures as we have been talking about as things like Necker's cube or duck rabbit figure. See the figure, you know, thinking of, for example, you can look at a certain image model
as if subsumed under one concept or as if it was subsumed under another concept. The concept of a rabbit or the concept of the duck. Of a duck. So far we have seen only that in so far as a perception secures as essential role for the understanding in perceptual synthesis, appearances, as Kant puts it, that is objects as we encounter them in perception, have a necessary relation to understanding. That is to explore in more detail by way in which a perceptive self-consciousness is related to concepts and the understanding as kant himself reminds us
what time is it we have a little bit more time so remember that when we were talking about Kant's account of concepts, we encountered understanding in the form of a faculty for thinking. Insofar as thinking is cognition through concepts, and concepts are predicates of possible judgments, the understanding was also identified as a faculty for judging and the categories. that is the pure concepts of understanding, first emerge in the guise of forms of judgment. From the present perspective, in contrast,
we can think of the categories as the most general rules for generating perceptual takings, for making something an object of representation, according to Kant in A104. To come at the central point, from a different perspective, what Kant saw was that to think of oneself as, for instance, seeing a big red book is first to think of what one sees, the object of representations, as an item with its own spatiotemporal history, an item in nature, and consequently crucially to think of one's ostensible perceptual encounter with this item as an episode in two histories,
namely its history and one's own history, i.e. to think of oneself as being affected by an item in nature. We can consequently propose that at a certain very high level of generality, every perception has the same form, the form of an encounter between a subject and an object, mind and world. I think present intuition as an object of representation is however schematically to commit oneself to the in principle possibility of filling in both its history as an item in nature that is a lawful system of spatiotemporal items and one's own history as an experiencer of the nature of the nature of the nature of the nature of the nature of the nature of the nature of the nature of the nature of the nature of the nature of the nature of the nature of the nature of the nature of the nature of the nature of the nature of the nature of the nature of the nature of the nature of the nature of the nature of the nature of the nature of the nature of the nature of the nature of the nature of the nature of the nature of the nature of the nature of the nature of the nature of the nature of the nature of the nature of the nature of the nature of the nature of the nature of the nature of the nature of the nature of the nature of the nature of the nature of the nature of the nature of the nature of the nature of the nature of the nature of the nature of the
nature here and now in perceptual encounter with it. That is what Kant means when he writes, there is only one experience in which all perceptions are represented as in thorough going and law-like connection. Just as there is only one space and time in which all forms of appearance and all relation of being and non-being take place. If one speaks of different experiences There are only so many perceptions insofar as they belong to one and the same universal experience. The thoroughgoing and synthetic unity of perceptions is precisely what constitutes the form of experience. And it is nothing other than the synthetic unity of the appearance or presence with concepts.
the form the very form of experience is an identical self persisting through time in relation to a systematic world of a spatiotemporal items that affect it Imagine for example, one of Rosenberg's examples. First in one, now one night, then there is I now too, the tall pine tree, then I now three, this wobbly table.
According to Rosenberg, first I noticed the lovely crescent moon, then the estately pine tree, and now I'm observing the wobbly table beneath it. I represent one, two, three as encounters with objects in nature, the moon, a tree, a table. table and so now think of myself as being in the situation depicted in the cartoon C which is basically seeing this moon, pine tree and wobbly table. Now for me to pull together one, two, and three into a perceptual encounter with a complex
scene, I need, this is from Rosenberg, I need to be able to think them all as my successive perceptions. I must be able, that is, to form something like the representation. I perceive, bracket open one and then two and then three bracket closed for example I see the crescent moon shining on a stately pine tree next to a wobbly table this is an instance of what Kant calls the principle of the necessary unity of perception B135 namely that and this is Kant's remark The manifold representations that are given in a certain way
will all together be my representations if they did not all together belong to one self-consciousness, i.e. as my representations. Even if I am not conscious of them as such, they must yet necessarily be in accord with the condition under which alone they can stand together in a universal self-consciousness because otherwise they would not throughout belong to me. B, one, three, two, two, three. So this is in essence just the proposition that it must be possible for me to think all my representations collectively as mine. And it is in one sense that Kant tells us,
as uninformative as it sounds, it is itself identical and thus an analytical proposition. That is, it is analytic. What Kant saw, however, was that this prima facie on informative analytic proposition is actually the key that unlocks the whole transcendental deduction. For unlike Descartes, he explicitly recognized that it is a different analytic proposition from the principle that it must be possible for me to think each of my representations severally as mine. Or what Kant says, the I think must be able to accompany all my representations,
for otherwise something would be represented in me that could not be thought at all, which is as much as to say that the representation would either be impossible or else at least nothing for B.131 to 2. Questions? so this relationship between the transcendental aperceptive subject and the transcendental object equal to x or the object in general I don't know enough to distinguish those two yet the object in
general versus the transcendental object but that's just a that's Kant reiterating in formal terms what discursivity means right that's yes but you see discursivity in can't also comes in in two varieties one you might say the discursivity of experience that i have one experience after another another one is what you might call to be the discursivity of the principle of unity namely the concept And Kant wants to show that these discursivities are essentially conjoined. They always come hand in hand.
You can't have one without the other. The discursivity of pure experience is the discursivity of concepts. And the discursivity of concepts takes shape or gets manifested in the discursivity of our perceptual experiences. goddamn experience after another. So you say this proposition of being able to have multiple, several experiences together is analytic, but the actual having of these experiences... It's synthetic, yes. What you see, the undergirding, the undergirding principle that allows you to have these several...
If you don't have a transcendental human perception, then there is no way that these I that are attached to these instances of I think X, I think Y, I think Z can be said to be the same I. and hence there is no way that you can synthesize x, y, and z. It has to be analytic. No, you see, that's how things get really kind of difficult. This is something sort of interesting just because it also brings up the necessity of the analytic distinction and the synthetic distinction
as holding them separately in Kant's process. Yes. Which is not a popular position right now, right? Yes, yes. It would be great if you can elaborate on this, because I think this is a position worthwhile to be taking. I don't know Quine's essay well enough to sort of wholeheartedly endorse it, but I know most people... It's not just Quine. Quine and Carnap actually both present the same kind of attack on what you might call
the conventional or vulgar Kantianism in terms of analytic device. I know that you somehow have a minor meltdown so let's have a few questions and then let you go and we'll reconvene talk next session we'll talk about the schema yeah I was just kind of you were just saying you're talking about the two different types the discursivity having experiences one after the other and then also the difference course immediately have the concepts yeah the discursivity of the
concept and I think that's kind of where this unity of the synthesis and analysis lies like in a 106 he says but it can be a rule for intuitions only insofar as it represents in any given appearances the necessary reproduction of their manifold and thereby the synthetic unity in our consciousness of them the concept of body in the perception of something outside us necessitates the representations of extension in there with representations of penetrability shape etc but you can't have all of those simultaneously so they unfold discursively but they're also contained within the concept yes yes yes yeah absolutely it's a one thing is that however however you see you you cannot have the discursivity of experience
without the discursivity of the concept. You can have a grade of that discursivity. Why I'm saying only a grade of it? Because representation of time is not essentially the concept of time. Kant never talks about the concept of time. Representation of a time is not a concept however can things that with representation of time you can have a low grade the of x of perceptual experiences a higher grade version of
it requires absolutely discursivity of concept now the thing is that he I would say that the discursivity of concepts well that maybe that's my brandomian side kicking in I would say that you can have the discursivity of concepts in most cases without the discursivity of experiences Now of course a Szilardzian as opposed to a Brandomian might say that then this is where exactly the the constraint of material inferences come into picture. For you to have the discursivity of the concept of metal you should have some sort of material inferences and these material inferences
are ultimately in basic anchored in your low level differential responsive encounters with items in the world. Like for example, if it oxidized, if this happens to it under this condition, that condition, this condition, so on and so forth. So they wouldn't say that the discursivity of concepts can be talked about independent of the discursivity of experiences. I would say, Brandon, I would say that this is a dangerous path, but also even inside this kind of
a traditional Szilard's and framework, not all of our concepts are experiential concepts. A good example of mathematical concepts, There is no connection between the discursivity of our experience and the discursivity of our mathematical concepts. I don't exactly follow how it would be discursivity if it's simply discursivity of concepts. Discursivity of concepts in the sense that one concept is only defined by its inferential relation with another concept. the concept of a point is defined by the concept of the continuous line, two lines
intersect they create a point Euclid this is discursivity of the concept it does not require any discursivity of experience or material influence it's sort of like in arithmetic you would have or in algebra you'd have pure logic, I mean the entire field of logic mathematics and computation none of these chaining or yoking discursivity of concept to discursivity of experience makes sense you have to have like it's like a multi a unified multiplicity that's a quantity but yes understanding relationship with something else I mean basically if we really didn't have the discursivity of concept as disjointed
from discursivity of experience, then we could never really arrive at something like Copernican, Keplerian, Newtonian, Einsteinian revolution via new forms of geometry. Only in so far as we have invented and discovered new geometrical concepts inside mathematical fields and then try to organize the observed data according to those models made out of those purely geometrical concepts that we have arrived at new worldviews of ourselves in the world and our experience of it. But then couldn't you also say to that that revolution wouldn't be necessary were it not for the discursivity of experience,
which then that verifies those concepts as being more valid. But that you think no this so I think you are getting a little bit sneaky here. Why? Because you are trying to lump together two different distinct forms of priority. Priority of experience and the priority of the concept. All we are trying to say here that there can be such a thing as discursivity of concepts without the discursivity of experience as necessary in itself and as in fact more as
required for expanding the scope of experience as the discursivity of experience itself. So this is one. Two, yes, in terms of when we are talking about, for example, our experience ourselves in the world, obviously we are talking about experience. And hence the discursivity of experience is the more fundamental thing. But remember, and that's really when again, Kant and conservatism shines through, experience if not without a concept. Can you in fact even talk about experience without concept?
And I guess it becomes really clear that now the synthetic a priori is the example of of discursivity of the concept without experience? Without experience, yes, absolutely. I mean this whole idea that if we really take, I think if we really take Galilean revolution seriously and by Galilean revolution I mean the whole idea that nature can be mathematized, is no a priori limit on the mathematization of nature then we should also take the whole idea of synthetic a priori very very seriously and don't put also a priori experiential limits
Do you want to lower your bandwidth just a little bit? That length, because I don't know how to do it. I wasn't that. What is today's session three and session nine, session 10? Oh, we're on 11 right now. Okay. So we have four more sessions. So obviously we can't cover the rest of things. Well, nevertheless, let's cover them, you know, in an acceptable manner. I have talked about imagination, but I haven't really talked about it in details. I have mentioned that Rosenberg essay. I think that would be your homework to really look into the function of imagination.
and see it how imagination function as this kind of complex interplay. It is that article, I think Christian put it in the classroom, it's called Perception versus Inner Sense, a Problem about Direct Awareness by J. F. Rosenberg. It's a really fantastic essay. It's really, absolutely, fundamentally recommended. So read that for the next week. Just start with the new chapter, which is on Eschemata and Principles. And hopefully next week we will cover schemata and the week after the principles.
And after that, one or two sessions, you know, table of axioms and analogies of experience and so on and so forth. And the last session, which would be the third of our make-up sessions, I will just go on and, you know, wrap up the whole things. and you know we just questions and discussions and stuff obviously you know it was it was an experiment so even in the course of 14 well i'm in session 15 sessions you can't really cover the whole of uh you know um critique of pure reason if you really want to be thorough and we haven't been really thorough because we could be very much thorougher than this
Just the audio is 27 hours, yes. I don't know if I could listen to Kant as an audio book. No, thank you very much. I can't. I don't want to read, I don't want to listen to an audio book that has, that talks about the philosopher. I can, you know, a short story is fine, but not a philosopher. listening to Hegel in an audiobook. Who? Hegel. Now that would be truly torturous. That would be torture concrete. Yes. Okay, guys.
I let you go. Ask a number of questions that I still haven't answered. I've been writing sorry. I've been sick last week. I'm going to put them there. I know that there are some stuff cropping up again and again in different ways. I know that I owe an answer to Artem, one to Theo, one to Chagis about the distinction between categorical hypothetic distinctions and the whole idea of the life of thinking as such. I'm going to work on those. Thanks.