The Great Philosophers EP08 ⟩ “Geoffrey Warnock on Kant”

For the Kant 300, we are excited to announce a two-part Kant-Ereignis designed to elevate your understanding of Kant’s model of experience in the Critique of Pure Reason to a level that surpasses that of most PhDs and even Kant scholars.

This is your chance to finally and thoroughly grok one of philosophy's most profound and allegedly difficult works and emerge with a clear, verifiable, and enjoyable, and best of all accurate grasp of Kant's model of experience.

Part I: Laying the Groundwork (Thursday, Feb 22)

In our preparatory episode tomorrow, we will:

1. Watch the engaging conversation between Bryan Magee and Geoffrey Warnock.
2. Review Kant's goals and assumptions.
3. Define those elusive Kantian terms that are often uttered but rarely understood, such as sensation, appearance, concept, image, logical form, category, schema, judgment, power of judgment, inference, reason, and apperception.
4. Prepare for the groundbreaking revelation coming in Part II by understanding how synthesis works in our experience, the different types of combination, and the role of self-consciousness.

Part II: The Big Kant Reveal with a Guest Expert (Thursday, March 07)

In our second episode, we will be joined by a Kant scholar who will present a groundbreaking and ultra-simple model that makes Kant's theory of physical-objective formal constructivism not only lucid and intelligible but also verifiable in your own experience. We will:

1. Explore the true number and nature of Kant's categories, their derivation from logical forms of judgment, and the nature of transcendental logic.
2. Explore what the “transcendental ideality” of space and time really mean and entail.
3. Check out a new physicalist defense of "weak transcendental idealism" that nobody could possibly find objectionable.
4. Build up the full and accurate model of Kant’s model of cognition part by part, systematically, with each part fondled and surrendered to, so that it both controls you and also disengages the autopilot and puts synthesis on manual override. You will then be the causal agent that drives the synthesis yourself.
5. Test the Kantian meaning-making machine by performing fun and shocking thought experiments and meditation-like exercises that will let you catch yourself in the act of converting a flat screen of sense-pixels into very convincing hallucinations of three-dimensional physical objects—so that you can test drive and verify Kant's system firsthand, probably for the first time.
6. Suddenly, every part of the Transcendental Analytic—the knowledge, self-consciousness, and world-building meat of the First Critique—will snap into place, the machine will run, and you’ll understand what Kant meant, and that we was in fact right. Best of all, you’ll be a Kant expert for the rest of your life, and because the machine is so simple and clearly mapped, you’ll be able to re-enter the trance instantly at will, until dementia wipes your memories, and by that time it won’t matter that you can’t remember and experience the Kantian lens, because your ego will only be five seconds long.

So hop aboard and enjoy this unparalleled opportunity to grasp the essence of Kant's world-making theory in a way that is both accessible and profound.

If you've ever been intrigued by the internal workings of an engine, you'll find that comprehending Kant's system can be just as clear and fascinating. Most discussions about Kant's system are either misleading or superficial, but we aim to change that by providing a solid foundation and a revelatory exploration of his ideas.

Don't miss this chance to achieve live-experiential comprehension of Kant's system and to understand your understanding in just the way he intended. Join us for a psychedelic and life-changing journey into the true heart of transcendental idealism and Kantian epistemic-ontological constructivism.

METHOD

Please watch the episode before the event. We will then replay a few short clips during the event for debate and discussion. A new high-def/pro-audio version of this episode can be found here:

• Bryan Magee: The Great Philosophers EP 08 ⟩ Geoffrey Warnock on Kant (HD)

Summaries, notes, transcripts, timelines, tables, mind-blowing tangential observations, and downloadable PDFs (seek the Magee Book Vault) of the episodes we cover can be found here:

• THORR (The High Ontology Reading Room)

Topics Covered in 15 Episodes

• Plato, Aristotle, Medieval Philosophy, Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz, Locke and Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Hegel and Marx, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger and Modern Existentialism, The American Pragmatists, Frege, Russell and Modern Logic, Wittgenstein.

View all of our coming episodes here.