with the freedom needed for morality (we considered as noumena). В
11. Kant asserts that "concepts without intuitions are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind. "[A51 = B75] What does he mean by this? Give some examples of "empty" concepts and how they have been illegitimately employed by other philosophers. Are there possible legitimate uses for any empty concepts?
В
Our cognition for Kant arises from two fundamental sources in the mind, the reception of representations (the receptivity of impressions) and the faculty for cognizing the object by means of these representations (spontaneity of concepts): through the former the object is given to us, through the latter it is thought in relation of that representation (Receptivity-sensibility and spontaneity-of-cognition-understanding). Intuition is the way by which we are affected by objects. Understanding is the faculty for thinking of objects. Without sensibility we have no object, and without understanding none is thought. That is why thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind. The understanding is not capable of intuiting anything and the senses are not capable of thinking anything.
The concept of a walking fish is empty (unless we actually see something like this), like a concept of an angel (if we did not see him/her ourselves or dismiss the testimonies of others, who would be witnesses). The concept of God, even manifested in human forms of alternative forms described in thousands of books of many nations (if not all of them) is an empty concept, because Kant did not see those manifestations himself, and all miraculous reports are labeled as simpleminded people's delusions, or those of perpetrators, and cannot be considered as sensible. The possibility of totality representing itself in a limited form to conform with the limitations of human understanding is not considered by Kant as a philosophical issue. The regular empirical criterion is too strong. Hume's future can easily be under no obligation to mimic the past , but God should be definitely under obligation to manifest Himself to everybody and anytime, to have the right even to be considered as also an empirical reality. The soul too is not the object of intuition if it is considered only as transcendentally thinkable. The pure intuition of self without sense perception of any kind as well as thinking of any kind cannot be legitimate, because Kant does not experience anything of the kind and neither his colleagues do. I think that creates a problem (of illusory and legitimate concepts) which has to be dealt with in future. May be the concepts Kant considered as paralogisms are not really that. May be human intuition can reach farther than Kant expected. May be the Greek word empireia (observation) can be legitimately used not just in the realm of physical senses. But the detailed discussion on that is not the subject of this paper and should be treated separately, in a book with a name like Transcending the Ordinary Limitations of Observable (including the possibility and logic of pure intuition of truth) .
В
12. "The rainbow in a sunny shower may be called a mere appearance ... "(A45 = B63,). Explain very carefully what Kant is saying here, and what he means by "mere appearance". Does Kant think that "Roses are red, violets are blue" is false?
В
To answer this question we have to consider a preceding В§ (B62), because in (A45/B63) Kant attempts to illustrate his objection to the Leibnizian-Wolfian philosophy concerning the nature and origin of our cognitions. He thinks that the distinction between sensibility and the intellect is not merely logical, but transcendental, does not concern merely the form of distinctness or indistinctness, but the origin and content. Through sensibility we do not cognize things in themselves merely indistinctly, but rather not at all. Without our subjective constitution, the represented object can not be encountered, for it is just this subjective constitution that determines its form as appearance.
In the beginning of A45 Kant describes the origin of the illusion occurring when we try to apply our ordinary distinction between sense in general and contingent appearances of this sense to the essentially transcendent sphere of noumena and to the immanent phenomena. That is how our transcendental distinction gets "lost, and we believe ourselves to cognize things in themselves, though we have nothing to do with anything except appearances (in the world of sense), even in the deepest research into its objects ". So it is by mistake "we would certainly call a rainbow a mere appearance in a sun-shower, but would call this rain the thing in itself ". It would be correct only if we understood "the latter con...
