Alexis Leggett: Transcendental Idealism: External Reading 3

Kant at the Bar: Transcendental Idealism in Daily Life

article by Patrick Cannon

http://philosophynow.org/issues/95/Kant_at_the_Bar_Transcendental_Idealism_in_Daily_Life

This is another interesting article I found through the online magazine Philosophy Now.  Unfortunately, I am only able to read a few of their articles as you must subscribe to see have full access, but the few articles I have read have been extremely relevant to the course.  I highly recommend this site to anyone wanting to further explore concepts related to our course.  This article discusses the well-known German philosopher, Immanual Kant's philosophies.  More primarily, two questions from his book, The Critique of Pure Reason, ‘Is appearance a reasonable reflection of reality?,’ and. ‘Can we know what things are like beyond their appearance to us, that is, in and of themselves?.  Cannon makes a refers this question to a bar scene which he describes.  He relates these questions to the action of handing over your ID in order to obtain a beer.  It is not up to only our appearance to tell the bartender that we are 21, but we must provide state issued identification.  So in this case the answer to the first question would be no, and Kant tends to argue no as the answer to many of his own questions.  Personally, I agree and disagree with Kant.  I agree in that some situations we must known more information than is merely given by appearance to fully understand a subject.  Hence the saying, don't judge a book by its cover.  I disagree in Kant in that I believe that when viewing something aesthetically we do not necessarily need to know anything other than what we see with our eyes.  In response to this article I do ask myself, "Is it detrimental to art and other aesthetically pleasing natural scenes in everyday life to pick them apart and demand more reasoning and information of the subject?  If we do this I feel as if we may take for granted simplistic, but strong natural scenes such as a sunset.  If we watch the sunset and dive into the sciences of it, don't we veer from appreciating the pure beauty of it?