Philosophical Notes - Kant

Watching this podcast on Kant.

Kant's categories seem like a primitive version of object-oriented analysis. UML gives a taste of what happens when you extend this idea to describe what actually happens in the real world.

Surfaces and Essences challenge Kant's idea of categories. In S&E, categories are analogies analogies and can get spectacularly arbitrary.

I see a glimmer of how Hegel challenges the idea that we can know anything in the cut-and-dried categories Kant describes.

It would be interesting to compare Kant's ideas with a modern understanding of the brain's workings. For example, space and time are hard-wired in the brain.

Kant represents thought as processing categories - a kind of calculation. In our modern efforts to build a brain, we find this approach is limited (Expert Systems). Lately, we have learned the role of language. Large language models rely on patterns in language--not necessarily structured and logical. Intelligible language can be produced by a machine that has neither experience nor "a priori" understanding and no explicit understanding of categories.

Kant's idea of the "self" is challenged by Buddhism/Mindfulness.

Kant's conclusion of the self as a unity may not align with how thought happens in the human mind. He may also need to include the social aspects of thought. Can we conceive of a single "mind" without society?

Kant's ethics are unconvincing because they necessarily follow from first principles. He's thinking about society as a system. What makes sense is the idea that morality places constraints on the behaviour of beings that have free will.

We also have a problem with morality that is confined to the well-being of humans - failure to recognize our place in nature.

Nietzsche criticises Kant here