I've been watching so many videos on hegel because I'm interested in learning more about Slavoj Zizek and his work. When I first found out about him i realized pretty fast that I had to learn waay more before I could just jump into the deep end like that but this was the first video I've seen where it finally clicked. Thanks a lot.
This is the clearest most direct holistic presentation regarding the Kant/Hegel dynamic have ever seen in a youtube video. I've read Hegel's Phenomenology, Science of Logic, Encyclopedia, plus Philosophy of Right, Philosophy of History lectures and without question whether logic, nature, geist, the evolution of thought, Hegel is superlative. Having read Critique of Pure Reason 3 times, I do appreciate (minus Phenomena Noumena split) Kant's Catagories of Judgment. But we can see absolute knowing (Leibniz/Newton simultaneous discovery of calculus) and other amazing inventions and paradigm shifts where we go beyond mere sense data and directly know a phenomenon outside the obvious. Anyway, you did a great job very directly summing up the major differences between these two great minds.
Solid talk. The escape from Descartes project is counter cultural with its elevation of physical knowledge over other ways of encountering the world. Epistemology pushed Ethics and Aesthetics off the Philosophy Department agenda until Rorty fought back and challenged Representalism. Still, epistemology triumphs on as the handmaiden of STEM studies in academia. Hegel and the Continental tradition languish in English speaking countries to this day
I think Richard took the knowledge as tool analogy a tad too far here. It is not that the act of observing (or 'using knowledge') modifies the observed for Kant, it is that the conditions of possibility for observation for us at all involves our own spontaneous structuring of what we intuit into a unity through the sensibility and understanding; that is, we do not merely passively receive objects, but we 'add' to it, structure it through sensibility and understanding to make it cognizable to us.
