This man, Robert Paul Wolff is a human treasure. I am in my 60th year now; spent my life in industrial steel fabrication, and now using youtube to expand my academic background a bit, and understand something more of the world, and the history of thought. A little philosophy seems like a nice thing to have some exposure to, so why not watch a little college on TV, right? WHOA - - man this gets so deep, it's frightening! But what a JEWEL of a man to spend time with; digging in and picking it apart. I expect the depth of this material will be beyond my ability to fully comprehend, but Dr. Wolff's storytelling approach, his humor, his humility, and his humanity makes his class a JOY to witness. Thank you, professor, for your gift to the world.
"Seated behind a little desk, (he) spoke in a conversational tone, in a low voice, and very rarely indulged in gesture, but he enlivened his discourse with humour and abundant illustrations. His aim was to teach his students to think for themselves." No, not Prof Wolff. This is Somerset Maugham on Kant.
Quran says: “Allah:there is no deity worthy of worship except he”:The Neccessary life/consciousness,sustainer of life/consciousness.” Wire like neuronal structures that conduct electricity via ions/neurotransmitters in the CNS/PNS possess no attribute of thinking/life and yet that has “randomly” led to life. Consciousness/thinking is an innate idea(“Fitra”)that is distinct from carbon skeleton and yet the materialist scientist believes that chemistry turned into biology via “god of randomness”/”Emergent property”/”law of nature”. Consciousness can only stem from Necessary Consciousness (Allah-one/indivisible/loving/self-sufficient perfection.
My god what a ride. His knowledge of philosophy combined with his storytelling prowess almost made me feel like I was watching a techno enlightenment thriller.
RPW was the professor in my first college philosophy course, I took as many classes as I could with him until I graduated (only took five years 😉) and he never disappointed. Spawned my life long interest in philosophy .
When I was an undergraduate I once took a graduate course with Bob Wolff on Hume's Treatise. He enjoyed telling stories as much then (in 1988) as he did still in 2016. I recall also that among his favorite words at the time were "fatuous," "maudlin," and "jejune," and my vocabulary increased exponentially during that time. It was a great course, and I went on to get a doctorate in philosophy and become a philosophy professor. It's a wonderful thing that his talks here on Kant's first Critique are available publicly.
Exciting lecture. I loved the mix of philosophy and backstories. I'm taking a course on the Critique in State University of Campinas, here in Brazil, and the lectures here are also stimulating. And the book is marvelous, though sometimes Kant's prose is infuriating. I'm having a blast this semester!
Simply phenomenal... How have I barely found these? Exactly 1 year after they've been uploaded as well. Another great lecture series on Kant is the one by Dan Robinson.
Wow! I've just come across this for the first time today while looking for thoughts on Kant, and I'm hooked. What a talented, intelligent individual with fantastic storytelling. The world needs more people like this.
I have to say, for some reason I love Profesor Wolff's little stories. I find them interesting and also sweet. They make him such an interesting lecturer to listen. I hope someday I will have the experience and prestige to be able to do something similar with my own students.
What a magnificent, COOL professor. He knows Kant, Marx, Lead Belly and Lords of the Ring plus God knows what else. He is an icon. Instructors like this are hard to come by. I am looking forward to watching the rest of his lectures.
Thank you for making this series available on youtube. I'm not a student of Philosophy or ever was but i always wanted to read this marvelous book, and now i can follow along with Robert's insights. Once again thank you and keep it up.
THANK YOU Dr. Wolff for taking the time to teach this course. I am a chemist but I love Kant. And you, sir, are an engaging, very interesting, masterful lecturer. It is a privilege to listen to you. I look forward to watching your next lecture, but first I need to complete the reading assignment you gave. By the way, I was able to purchase a hard cover copy of your book printed in 1957 in mint condition which I look forward to reading as well.
no Kant is not the greatest philosopher .he dies not hold a candle to Plato but i will sa that Dr. Wolf i’d the greatest teacher i aspire i ate his passion in teaching Kant
Amazing lecture, when I get my grubby mits on a copy of The Critique of PR & your book I'll definitely go through this. Your explanations are very cohesive & probably can't be found elsewhere on the internet.
I don't know shit about philosophy. I opened this on a whim as it was written in a facebook comment. I doubt id make it to the end, but let's see how far I go
The framing is terrible, the sound is poor, there's a fan running the whole time...and it is pure gold, worth ten dollars a minute. I'm watching a lecture, doing the reading, then watching the lecture a second time. Fantastic stuff, just fantastic.
31:00 You mention you used to use the example of people with Jaundice seeing the world colored yellow until you learned how Jaundice really worked. Well, in all likelihood you got that notion from reading Rene Descartes who wrote the exact same misconception regarding Jaundice in part 4 of his Discourse on Method.
My god was definitely not a Marxist. Kant had thus formulated the main problem of constitutionalism, “The constitution of a state is eventually based on the morals of its citizens, which, in its turns, is based on the goodness of this constitution.” A devout Christian, Kant's idea is the foundation for the the Constitution of the United States Libertarian in its political philosophy, and advocates a limited role for government in domestic and foreign affairs as well as a strong protection of civil liberties. Civil and political rights are a class of rights that protect individuals' freedom from infringement by governments, social organizations, and private individuals. They ensure one's entitlement to participate in the civil and political life of society and the state without discrimination or repression
I put this on as something to listen to while playing a game and then it was more interesting than the game. Thank you so much for letting us listen for free.
Someone needs to tell him to edit the parable of the butcher and the philosopher. Half of the parable are made up of pointless adjectives (gleaming tools newly sharpened, freshly pressed chinos, slices and cross slices). Like: The droning and repetitive use of unnecessary adjectives only serve to clumsily prod the viewer, seated patiently with hopeful ears, to greatly tire of the clumsy prose and only serves to stir the embers of annoyance.
Oh boy, literally started my reading of the critique last week. Hopefully I'll be able to follow along without getting too distracted by other books (as is my perpetual problem)
My deepest gratitude for uploading this and for Wolff's incredible mind. He makes this lecture so enjoyable and piques my interest to further investigate Kant. I only wish for everyone to experience such an engaged and intelligent professor.
Newton is a reality to empiric world, Leibniz is reality not only Newton but also beyond him :the part of reality the empirism can"t reach, the external world, two parts of the total.
Obviously this man is a treasure, but actually repeating the question from the student for the recording? Absolutely brilliant and far too often omitted.
He's a funny dude! And incredibly knowledgeable... I've got the book and some others from him... It is freaking hard to comprehend.... But Robert explains things very well... We're fortunate to have him... And for free!!
##Hume's Skepticism: - Causality: We observe sequences of events but never the actual causal connections. - Induction: Assuming the future resembles the past lacks a rational basis. - Self: We find no continuous "self" but rather a collection of individual perceptions. ##Beattie's Challenge: Beattie posited that foundational beliefs, like causality, are instinctive. Challenging them, as Hume did, went against common sense. ## Kant's Exposure to Hume: Beattie's critique of Hume, once translated to German, introduced Kant to Hume's ideas, influencing Kant's philosophy. ## Kant's Response in "Critique of Pure Reason": - Differentiated between a priori (knowledge before experience) and a posteriori (knowledge from experience). - Introduced phenomena (how things appear) vs. noumena (things in themselves). We perceive the world through innate categories, like causality. ## Second Edition's Challenge: Kant's revised "Critique" had significant changes, potentially obscuring the essence of his original arguments. It's beneficial to consult both editions
That’s so mentally energising! It’s my first time listening to the professor but I could tell he is an absolute asset for academia. Thank you, Professor
This is an excellent and thorough presentation of Kant and the Categorical Imperative. It would be my hope that every Biden voter would review the series in order to further validate the wisdom of the leap of faith they took with their vote for Biden and to validate their rejection of all things Reagan/Trump Conservative as integral to the January 6 conspiracy as legacy of William F. Buckley's marketing strategy for the 1960 agenda of the John Birch Society. In terms of the practical effect the Categorical Imperative has on contemporary inquiry, the Myers Briggs Type Inventory derives directly from its cognitive structures and represents the nature of the human personality as a paradox composed of the synthesis of the rational, the irrational and behavior. It is reliable instrumentation for any program of individuation on the basis that the unexamined life isn't worth living. The thing I don't understand about Wolff, as representative of formal academic contemporary inquiry is his antipathy towards Hegel. He claims, perhaps ironically, of being a Marxist, but you can't be a Marxist and not embrace Hegel as not only historic method but as the basis of action research, moving forward. The issue isn't to employ Hegel to understand Marx but that Marx employed Hegel to anticipate history. Let me put it this way: in the final analysis, Vietnam came down to a contest between Marxism and the Harvard MBA program and Marxism won, primarily because the godless commie cocksuckers in Hanoi understood Hegel and the Harvard Business School ignores Hegel. A consequence is that we have had 40 years of class warfare originating in the deliberate decadence of the Supply-Side policies of Reaganomics which people like Scott Adams has determined to be the ideological hill to die on defending. The problem with Marxism is that nobody at the time understood chaos or even recognize it existed as an essential to any organically heathy economic ecology. Chaos requires the 4th Law of Logic that paradox cannot be reduced to faithfully render a portrait of any slice of any zeitgeist as a dynamically active society. I have read Kant, Hegel and Marx, but I have never studied them in the manner Wolff presents them in this series, which is a thing of beauty. This is why you get a liberal arts education, to be around minds suck as these. However, because I have had a working relationship with the Holy Spirit since 1953, I intuitively embraced the Categorical Imperative as exactly the epistemology of a universal nature. Don't get bogged down in the details of Kant and Hegel: you don't need to understand voltage and amperes to use electricity. The Army Ranger School employs Hegel to teach small unit leadership and experiential learning and role play to enrich the cognitive skills of the individual expression of the Categorical Imperative. In particular, the dynamical modeling of Paul Krugman's "Peddling Prosperity" is Hegelian is aspect and will allow America to jettison the decadent burden of all things Reaganomics and restore the pre-Reagan constitutional capitalism that pulled the world out of the global disaster of two industrial wars. And the MBTI is a tool for the individual to Become All You Can Be as a work in process. But the most important thing is to understand the wisdom in your leap of faith in voting for Biden as we complete the paradigm shift from the global Military-Industrial Complex to the Starship Capitalism that Apollo 11 made possible, Werner von Braun described and Affirmative Action nearly achieved when Reagan was elected and the crypto-Nazis of Reaganomics began to dismantle Affirmative Action and tne New Deal. The thing is, Harvard still doesn't understand its role in the defeat of the Republic of Vietnam and its connection to Robert McNamara, If we actually lapse into an avoidable recession at this moment, it will because everybody will try to employ the Harvard MBA program business model to fix the problem it created. Dilbert must die to save the world.
It would be better without the political slights. Lost me there. When I hear "liberal" nonsense, it just calls into question the validity of anything the lecturer has to say.
tanto os empiristas como os espiritualistas estão em debate para saber quem esta certo. Trata de uma disputa aparente, não real. pois os dois estã certos. A unidade é constituida pelas duas partes: uma estudada pela filosofia analitica e outra pela filosofia sintetica. Antiga filosofia sabia que uma delas não é a unidade nem a outra: uma dispersa, a outra agrupa, mas não é possivel serem experimentada ao mesmo tempo.
Fantastic timing, I just got a copy of the Critique last week and was planning on digging in during the rest of the year. Love the lecture, very clear setup for the analysis so far and the professor's stories are an absolute treat :). Please keep it up!
@@natnar6181 Working (quite often struggling) through that book was unironically one of the most satisfying intellectual experiences of my life. It took me several months, but Kant's elaborate arguments and laborious system-building feel like mental mountain climbing - tough while you're on the slopes, but there's nothing quite like getting a glimpse of the top. If you haven't tackled it yourself, I recommend using these lectures as an accompaniment - professor Wolff very clearly illuminates some obscure passages. I also complemented it with Sebastian Gardner's Routledge Guide to the Critique, which I can heartily recommend in addition. Professor Wolff doesn't go through the entire book in these lectures, so I just looked for whatever outside help was available. Far from a luxury with Kant's work.
@@Tinydude10 wow thank you for the reply 5 years later! I am going to buy a copy in a few weeks after my birthday, big 17! i hope to use this is like part of a “read books” type thing when applying for philosophy at university next year! I will use these lectures then if you recommend them and have a look at the other resource you mentioned! if i struggle too much i can always shelve it for as long as i want, i’m keeping that mentality to keep me motivated to finally read and finish it. Thanks again for the reply :)
@@natnar6181 You're brave to tackle this at 17, I don't think I would've stuck with it at that age! As you mentioned though, you can always return to it later if it proves too much to swallow on the first go. The mere experience of digging into the text is a worthwhile effort in itself, I think. Just a heads-up though, the Critique is notoriously difficult, and Kant basically assumes a broad knowledge of the philosophy which preceded him. I don't know what your background is, but I personally prepared for my reading by studying some of the philosophers Kant interacts with. As professor Wolff explains, Kant's effort was in part an attempt at reconciling two major schools of philosophy which were at something of an impasse: continental rationalism (made famous by the likes of Leibniz, Descartes and Spinoza) and British empiricism (represented by David Hume, John Locke and George Berkeley, among others). If you're serious about philosophy and want to really grasp what you're reading, definitely make sure you have at least a rudimentary understanding of their ideas (Leibniz and Hume in particular). Again, I don't know what your educational background is, but there are plenty of great introductory guides available on all of them. You'll also likely find the works of the likes of Hume and Descartes quite a bit easier to stomach than Kant. I'm happy to give you some more recommendations if you're interested, as you can probably tell I just love talking about this stuff :).
@@Tinydude10 I have Hume's "An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding", which i was planning to finish reading before i read the critique as i understand it as a key empiricist text? I have little other knowledge on epistemology (from my understanding thats what these thinkers, as well as the critique?, fall under) and was wondering would it be beneficial for me to read a rationalist text as well. As you explained the critique involves both empiricism and rationalism. I am not familiar with rationalists or Leibniz particularly as you specified, are there any essential books on that side of the thinking i should read? Thank you so much again for these replies this all has me very excited to potentially study philosophy at a higher academic level =)
Kant was great; however, greater than Spinoza, Plato, Aristotle, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger I don't know if one can say outright who's the greatest ever, so much has yet to be seen, but I'm a Physics student, and not even a Philosophy major, let alone a professor or graduate student, so perhaps I'm too cautious and naive to know and subsequently think different.
##main differences between the A and B editions ###Introduction Changes: 1.New Preface in B: More concise, clarifies main points. 2. Modifications on Space & Time: In B edition, Kant delves deeper into how space and time relate to external experiences and mathematics. ### Revisions and Expansions: 1. Transcendental Deduction: B edition has a restructured version, often seen as clearer but possibly less rigorous. 2. Clarifications: The B edition has various additions for clarity and to address criticisms. ### Discarded and Rewritten Sections: 1. Paralogisms: Completely rewritten in B edition, focusing on the nature of the soul. 2. Antinomies: The B edition reformulates especially the third and fourth Antinomies. ### Criticisms of B Edition Additions: 1. Emphasis on "I think": B edition might lean more towards subjective idealism, potentially misrepresenting the A edition's objective idealist stance. 2. Transcendental Deduction Changes: While clearer in the B edition, some argue it may lose some of the original's philosophical depth. In essence, while the B edition offers clarity in some areas, it also brings forth new interpretations and shifts in Kant's thinking.
The origin of the erroneous jaundice example can be traced to Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western a civilization, chapter X ‘Protagoras.’ S/O Dr. Wolff
All of this context is so eye opening. I tried many times to read Schopenhauer and he would always talk about this 'thing in itself' and it turns out he just meant independent reality. I guess I was wrong to think I can just pick up a philosophy book and read it on its own without context like a novel.
I dont get the accolade for this series of videos. It's essentially a string of mildly amusing anecdotes, with some philosophy sprinked in between as an afterthought.
I remember when his book on mental activity first came out. I read it every day for weeks. It was amazing and thrilling. Now I can see him on YT. Thank You!!
0:25 Norman Kemp Smith translation of Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant. A scanned copy be found of the internet archive: archive.org/details/immanuelkantscri032379mbp/page/n9/mode/2up
@33:35 “...Spinoza if you were lucky...”. So true. The sublimation of aggression mentioned in passing in this lecture is perhaps one of the reasons why Spinoza refused a position at the University of Heidelberg. Ironic that he would decline a position in the university to preserve his freedom of thought. Nowadays, we definitely do not suffer from this...
Importance of Kant in philosophy was his assertation of Transendental Idealism through which he introduces aprioric knowledge and synthetic knowledge as the bases of his epistomology. Aprioric knowledge similar to Aristoteles consists of 9 categories some of which are space, time, quality, quantity, motion or inertness as mentioned as the shared ideas in the lecture. Synthetic knowledge is the knowledge that we learn such as physics, mathematics and other disciplines. A right triangle with its mathematical relations, for example, does not exist in mind apriorically. We acquire this knowledge by reasoning. On the contrary, the concept that two unparallel lines intersect each other in space is an axiomatic, therefore an aprioric knowledge. Kant proclaims that the real knowledge must be the synthetic knowledge which proves itself experimentally.
Thanks professor for this wonderful series of lectures, I listened to them about 5 years ago. And here despite sharing my gratitude and wonder at your energy and enthusiasm toward Kant’s philosophy, its a bit strange from a philosophy professor to say(i dont like Hegel), its utterly bizarre philosophical attitude particularly after listening to your wonderful analogy between the butcher and the analytic philosopher in contest, owing to the fact that most of the analytic philosophers(perhaps great exception is Brandom) share their despise or hate into Hegel, I most certainly hope that you are not one of those. Perhaps in your case its a more a matter of Hegel and his stench critique of Kantian philosophy.. with all that been said, I am still grateful to have your lectures available on youtube. I hope you also tackle the point of departure between Hegel and Kant and how Hegel been able to surpass some of Kantian notion, guess its too late for you though as Hegel by itself require at least a half or quarter of century and so even if you are keen to read him you would be bothered by what he said about your beloved Kant(not condescending here).....anyway, I hope the admin of this channel somehow send my response to you so as you can read it!!!! Best wishes
