Sunday, September 18, 2022

Kant vocabulary equivalence project

I propose to take the vocabulary from the Critique of Pure Reason and apply a few transformations to it.

  1. Whatever is thought by the pure understanding without contradiction, regardless of whether it is given a determinate object in any intuition, may in a certain sense be called “the object of understanding”, insofar as understanding may be spoken of as an act, of which we are the subject and the thought is the object.
  2. Since it is “the object of understanding”, whatever can be thought without contradiction may likewise be called “knowledge”. To think a concept is to understand it and know it, and the words may be said interchangeably.
  3. Since they are the object of understanding or knowledge, all thoughts that may be thought without contradiction may be said to be “forms”, and the set of all such thoughts to compose an “intelligible world”, in yet a third sense of this term from the two senses given by Kant. (B311–312)
  4. The term “exist” is also given a new sense: for a form to “exist” is for it to belong to the set of forms, so that the forms have always existed, since the set of non-self-contradictory possible thoughts has always been the same set. To avoid confusion, the forms may be said to “exist as realities” or to “exist intelligibly” or simply “to be”, while the determinate objects of sensible intuitions may be said to “exist as appearances” or simply “to appear”.
  5. Since there are no intellectual intuitions, and things-in-themselves are never thought about as determinate objects, we may ignore the unhelpful sense of the word “knowledge” in which they are said to not be known, and say instead that they are known in the sense given here, as forms; meaning by this, again, only that they are thought about, although indeterminately.

With these translations, I believe that all Platonic theses may be understood in a Kantian sense without doing violence to either philosopher.

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