Picturing Kant: A Graphic First Critique for Beginners

Welcome to Part One of our two-part special event for the Kant 300!

Kant’s Problem

Kant defends the mathematically deterministic world of physics by arguing that its essential features arise necessarily from innate forms of intuition and rules of understanding through combinatory acts of imagination. Knowing is active: it constructs the unity of nature by combining appearances in certain mandatory ways. What is mandated is that sensible awareness provide objects that conform to the structure of ostensive judgment: “This (S) is P.” Sensibility alone provides no such objects, so the imagination compensates by combining passing point-data into “pure” referents for the subject-position, predicate-position, and copula. The result is a cognitive encounter with a generic physical object whose characteristics—magnitude, substance, property, quality, and causality—are abstracted as the Kantian categories. Each characteristic is a product of “sensible synthesis” that has been “determined” by a “function of unity” in judgment. Understanding the possibility of such determination by judgment is the chief difficulty for any rehabilitative reconstruction of Kant’s theory.

How, exactly, is this to be understood?

Our Two-Part Solution

Part I: Rudiments of Synthesis

Our presenter this time will be our own David Sternman. He will be staging a totally revised version of the presentation that was cut short last time. It’s a special edition, featuring an extra seven minutes inside the ship. It’s new title is: Picturing Kant: A Graphic First Critique for Beginners. He has described it as “shoving hundreds of pages into a comic book format.”

This event will take us through the rudiments of Kant’s theory in a clear and simple format. Dave has practiced and honed his delivery in front of three live audiences in order to perfect it. This is his noble attempt to emulate our spiritual mentors, the Immortal Bards of BBC2.

Part II: Unveiling the Machinery

Next time, the long-standing mystery of how Kant’s pure concepts actually work in detail will be solved in a massively preparation-intensive event titled, Schematizing Kant: A Novel Approach for Intuitive Understanding.

Our Guest Expert for Part II describes himself as a “misunderstood comic” who was suckered into philosophy at Duke by Rick Roderick, Anthony Appiah, and Fredric Jameson. He later earned his PhD in philosophy from the University of Texas, where he also taught classes for the Plan II Honors Program. He is creator of the BoxPress Tinderbox export system, editor of the Tibetan-Sanskrit-English Dictionary, and author of the first mathematically rigorous account of Kant’s theory of a priori cognition. He has transformed his dissertation into the entertaining pedagogical initiation process described above just for this event.