Immanuel Kant's Philosophy - Bryan Magee & Geoffrey Warnock (1987) 

Yes, this is a reupload. I wanted a version with higher audio quality. I’ll still leave the previous video up as unlisted, so as to not break any external links with it. Sorry about any inconvenience!

I love the style of these discussions. There’s no music, no noise at all, no sound, just too old guys having a very high-level discussion. If this was on nowadays, I’d make tea and set time aside every week for this and it would be my special time.

Yes. Yes. Oh. Yes. Yes.

I wish TV today was like this. We have declined greatly.

Bryan Magee is a national treasure. Thank you, Philosophy Overdose. His program was/is amazing.

" I am reminded of a great German philosopher, Immanuel Kant. He is a specimen of those people who are absolutely in the mind. He lived according to mind so totally that people used to set their watches, whenever they saw Immanuel Kant going to the university. Never - it may rain, it may rain fire, it may rain cats and dogs, it may be utterly cold, snow falling … Whatever the situation, Kant will reach the university at exactly the same time all the year round, even on holidays. Such a fixed, almost mechanical … He would go on holiday at exactly the same time, remain in the university library, which was specially kept open for him, because otherwise what would he do there the whole day? And he was a very prominent, well-known philosopher, and he would leave the university at exactly the same time every day. One day it happened … It had rained and there was too much mud on the way - one of his shoes got stuck in the mud. He did not stop to take the shoe out because that would make him reach the university a few seconds later, and that was impossible. He left the shoe there. He just arrived with one shoe. The students could not believe it. Somebody asked, “What happened to the other shoe?” He said, “It got stuck in the mud, so I left it there, knowing perfectly well nobody is going to steal one shoe. When I return in the evening, then I will pick it up. But I could not have been late.” A woman proposed to him: “I want to be married to you” - a beautiful young woman. Perhaps no woman has ever received such an answer, before or after Immanuel Kant. Either you say, “Yes,” or you say, “No. Excuse me.” Immanuel Kant said, “I will have to do a great deal of research.” The woman asked, “About what?” He said, “I will have to look in all the marriage manuals, all the books concerning marriage, and find out all the pros and cons - whether to marry or not to marry.” The woman could not imagine that this kind of answer had ever been given to any woman before. Even no is acceptable, even yes, although you are getting into a misery, but it is acceptable. But this kind of indifferent attitude towards the woman - he did not say a single sweet word to her. He did not say anything about her beauty, his whole concern was his mind. He had to convince his mind whether or not marriage is logically the right thing. It took him three years. It was really a long search. Day and night he was working on it, and he had found three hundred reasons against marriage and three hundred reasons for marriage. So the problem even after three years was the same. One friend suggested out of compassion, “You wasted three years on this stupid research. In three years you would have experienced all these six hundred, without any research. You should have just said yes to that woman. There was no need to do so much hard work. Three years would have given you all the pros and cons - existentially, experientially.” But Kant said, “I am in a fix. Both are equal, parallel, balanced. There is no way to choose.” The friend suggested, “Of the pros you have forgotten one thing: that whenever there is a chance, it is better to say yes and go through the experience. That is one thing more in favor of the pros. The cons cannot give you any experience, and only experience has any validity.” He understood, it was intellectually right. He immediately went to the woman’s house, knocked on her door. Her old father opened the door and said, “Young man, you are too late. You took too long in your research. My girl is married and has two children.” That was the last thing that was ever heard about his marriage. From then on no woman ever asked him, and he was not the kind of man to ask anybody. He remained unmarried."

This is incredible coverage of the great Kant. One thing about Kant’s moral theory that bears reiteration: If you don’t adopt principles of moral action, then you are bound not only to violate the categorical imperative, but also to fall prey to your own ever changing whims and impulses. Hence, “moral conduct” in Kant’s terms is meant to place the individual person in the driver’s seat so that she may deliberately shape her own life. It’s a beautiful vision of morality, not just a technical argument penned by a long gone German philosopher.

I’ve watched a lot of philosophy videos on youtube and this is the best. Very exciting actually.

another Xmas for contemplation. here after going through Magee’s excellent book, confessions of a philosopher, in my home town, near Dardanelles..21 December, Thursday, 2023..

Immanuel Kant is like the Einstein of philosophy. Immense and almost meteoric impact. Funnily enough... Einstein was deeply immersed in reading Kant when he was 13.

These are so very helpful, thank you for posting. Magee's questions and clarifications provide scaffolding for clear understanding.

I could listen to Bryan Magee all day.

Came for the Kant, stuck around for Sir Geoffrey Warnock's Molly Bloom impression

I know I am being a dumb yank but I will never cease being entertained by how Magee pronounces the word "philosophy."

I assume this was a television program. I'd be interested if these types of discussions still take place on TV.

A wonderful discussion inspiring the listeners!

Absolutely superb!

Superb discussion.

I am an observer, a philosopher only to my grandkids. That established, it seems both Heisenberg's scientific results and Godel's mathematical proofs generally lend credence to the philosophy of Kant.

Thanks for your content. Appreciate it.

Listening to philosophy is very liberating. Philosophy is virtuous because from which I can live a virtuous life. I dare to say this because I am religious philosophical.

Great video!

Excellent

Yees? Yes. Yeeess, yes. Yes

like to know what Bertrand Russel said on him. I LOVE HILOSOPHY though equally interested in Jiddu Krishnamurthi. Thank you so much for imparting knowledge.

How we have learned to speak so importantly about the void.

He looks like a Kant scholar

I have barely heard of the name Kant, let alone learning about and from him. Thus I was constantly using the [The blind men and the elephant] story to refer to the fact that we cannot know what we are not equipped to know .. Why is this not brought up in this long discussion .. Was there something in this fable not consistent with Kant's thoughts ?

Made me laugh made me smile

Thanks, wonderful discussion...! Anyone who has ever taken a heroic dose of magic mushrooms understands exactly what Kant is referring to when he says; true reality can not be known by reason. We have been conditioned since the beginning of language, that everything around us can be perfectly described by reason. Man created language, logic and reason in attempts to describe and understand worldly matters and communicate with one another. But you run into problems thinking that the true nature of reality is able to be apprehended by this means. There are psychedelics which if taken in a sufficient dosage, break down barriers which we have imprisoned ourselves with through millennia of conditioning our organism in the way in which we've done. We possess a faculty of 'knowing', through these psychedelics, which cannot even be translated into language, yet reality appears to us in a way that is undeniably real.

As I read Kant 40 years ago I stopped at the part of the transcendental aesthetics of space and time. The numinous object intrigued me. I geeked out and built a special photo stroboscope and after long building used it on moving subjects .It had 8 separate flash bulbs and I colored each differently with the result that i could edit each color separately. My original wonder at Kants aesthetics was what would god see if he could see the thing in itsself. The conclusion is that if he could then his eye would surround the object and it would be internal to him. My strobes only hintvat a possible 8 aspects of the subject but they transform the image. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-RLktSElDnPg.htmlsi=JWeHSgBpZEe8UTvz

I ❤ bryan magee but this gentleman was amazing. I wish he was allowed to carry on about synthetic apriori, the world in itself and the observer. Magee for heaven sakes let him speak, he is amazing.

I'm a Lesbian tractor. A blue one.

is this the guy from bladerunner?

Macgee explains things far more clearly than the expert philosopher, and this is another example. Macgee's explicative apparatus, we could say, matches the sensory apparatus of the average subject far better than the complicative apparatus of the specialist philosopher!

The body has no life of itself. Thought has no life of itself. By themselves, they are inert. They are activated by life. Life is the only Being. What is life? What is consciousness? When activated by life, thought creates the idea "I", a simulacrum of Being. Because thought is limited, the simulacrum, the representation, is limited, insufficient. Consciousness, which is life, cannot be measured - it is infinite, unknowable. Because life is infinite, the simulacrum, by reflection, wants to be complete too. So, it goes after power, position, fortune, and all the rest of it, never reaching completeness. In this ambition, it creates division, competition, wars and destruction. In this movement of becoming, the simulacrum has continuity, with all its miseries. Do I depend on thought to be alive and conscious? Who or what am I? Can I measure who or what I am? With which instrument? Am I not the unknowable, the infinite, the timeless?

42:46 ..get the sense that Schopenhauer was similarly systemic in general conception..

Immanuel Kant was an enlightenment enthusiast and realized very clearly that freedom of conscience and expression would play a central role in the political system that was emerging to oppose monarchical absolutism. The censorship of books and other publications and the criminalization of opinions or political preferences considered dangerous or seditious (crime of lese majeste) horrified Kant. And unlike many philosophers of the same time he was able to articulate this in a sufficiently open and intelligible way without worrying too much about reactions from the Prussian authorities. The fact that he lived and wrote his books in a peripheral city in Prussia and did not demonstrate revolutionary ambitions seems to have guaranteed Kant greater freedom than a philosopher would have had in Paris or even London in the same period. As we live in democracies in which politics absorbs and resolves publicly debated disagreements with broad freedom of the press and expression, our countries are, in a way, legitimate offspring of Kant's philosophy. But unfortunately, and this needs to be emphasized here, the intense spread of Fake News is destroying both the possibility of distinct groups of people sharing common factual truths and the belief that the space in which politics is created must be protected and expanded. The algorithms of antisocial networks are intrinsically mortal enemies of Kant's philosophy.

Walt Disney, and Immanuel Kant...

The brilliant Bryan Magee clearly knew more about Kant's philosophy than the "expert" he was interviewing. I wish the late Bryan Magee himself had just talked about Kant ... or better yet, had written a book on Kant.

24:43 …presume that means that Kant was a ‘psycho-formal’ determinist (=material?) and not a speculative philosopher…

Here we have the world’s first mention of a „well founded presupposition“. 😂

34:34 ‘..act only on that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it be a universal law…’ OR…the promise to Adam, the Noachian dispensation, 613 positive and negative commandments, the Ten Commandments, ecclesiastical lore/tradition, prophetic utterances, the establishment of Nations,… (would observe that the word ‘imperative’ possesses verbal force - it is active/consists in activism - but the qualifying word ‘categorical’ is an adjective - and would suggest on this basis that the formation ‘categorical imperative’ is invalid and may account for the blurred line in his philosophical descendent Marx between scientific enquiry (if that is what it was) and political activism.)

Warnock - excellent . He sticks to reason , and keeps his own beliefs nicely apart . He is of course a follower of Kant . But what l really like about him is he has 0 showboating and as l say he sticks to reason . Usually somewhere along the line the personality of the one who discusses enters the frame but not l feel with this one ,he enjoys keeping himself apart from everything ,and he is very intelligent . His gaze is like an eagle's gaze ,sharp and penetrating . Kant you must try to understand from the point of view of freewill , does it exist or does it not ? Kant says freewill does not exist its all part of a great law ,which determines everything . But within this great law there is still room for the exception to the rule .lets call it GOD's gift to Man . Even though the law of reality strikes everyone equally so the same GOD because GOD is GOD , the exception exists allowing for the gift to exist . As they say the exception makes The Rule 💚

Interestingly, Russell did not consider Kant the greatest of modern philosophers.

Culture is an operating program, incorrect program incorrect answers.

intresting the use of the word "aquainted" with...knowledge?!

I. Kant

There is even a gossip that Kant is not even a human being but an alien. 😂

I want to read the original but I Kant read German. 😞

Very interesting discussion. However they make a very stupa point towards the end in discussing why Kant wrote in German and that this was a great barrier to understanding him. Not if you read German ! Why don’t you put the effort in to learn another language - develop another sensory tool as Kant might say , in german of course !

The carpet is so bad, it must refute all that is said

Kant cannot cant

I've never seen a dude so in need of a mustache

38:19 Yes! neoliberal atheist prelates - nay current popes (2024) - embrace secular neo-Kantian rationalism with its inherent and ultimate fractions (LBQT +++++++) and in doing so abandon the religious unity and mysterium of Sacramental communion - that is unless you are Pope Benedict who ran away from the demons inhabiting such a world - and who had - incidentally - written a Ph.D thesis ‘Refuting Kantian conclusions’!❤

Immanuel Kant....but Genghis Khan

Hmmmmm ..... much like religion, I do quite enjoy philosophy however ; Much like religious professionals, most academic professionals might be well-described as academic historians far-from critical to resolving society’s current/future difficulties. Too bad too, because it would seem both have quite the potential to, quite strange. Oh of course, any constructive criticism of my own constructive criticism is quite welcome.

Professor, your ideas are complicated, people won't understand you...

What is Is and what is not is not, Kants understanding is we see the world with our limited senses we give them names but we have no understanding what it really is, and what we cannot perceive isn’t worth knowing because we have no understanding of the unknown,but something didn’t come from nothing, miraculous events happen daily how do we explain them away we can’t according to kant this is the unknown, the bible talks of God and explains creation and Jesus is God eternally begotten of the father who is God through the Holy Spirit who is God a triune god , Kants only explanation is everything is an illusion, everything could have been created 5 minutes ago and we see an illusion of a billion years of history, but something had to create the illusion, we can’t really understand anything really the sciences are theories and a theory is an assumption not a fact, except for one fact how did something come from nothing.

Kant didn’t deny God because without God there’s no soul , no god,no devil,no heaven, no Hell,therefore sin and morals are a concept of the mind an illusion it’s all unknowable, but still the question remains how did something come from nothing.

He was a real pissant, who was very rarely stable. As for Heidegger ..... Sorry. I made a bit of a Kant of myself there.

He could if he tried.

Do nothing until it's become "good".Pure Kantizmus😂.

Thank God ethics is dead in politics and law , and money has been injected as the new god.

All this Kant “what is is” seems like Bill Clinton babble 😂. Bring me back to Nietzsche.